Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of the Cervical Retaining Ligaments During Subplatysmal Facelift Dissection and its Implications

Background: The cervical retaining ligaments anchor the platysma and soft tissues of the neck to the deep cervical fascia and deeper skeletal structures. The cervical retaining ligaments tether the platysma and prohibit free mobilization and redraping of the platysma muscle in rhytidectomy. This ligament system has previously been described in the literature only qualitatively. Objectives: To define the anatomic dimensions of the cervical retaining ligaments and their relation to the platysma muscle in order to better understand the cervical retaining ligament system and how it limits motion of the platysma during rhytidectomy. Methods: Extended deep plane rhytidectomy was performed on 20 fresh cadaveric hemifaces. The extent cervical retaining ligaments were dissected and measured. The anterior extent (width) of the cervical ligament were recorded at three anatomic points on each hemiface: (1) at the level of the inferior border of the mandible; (2) at the top of the thyroid cartilage at the thyroid notch; and (3) at the level of the cricoid. Results: The average width of the cervical retaining ligaments in the neck was 15.3 mm. The width significantly decreased as they became more inferiorly positioned from the top of the neck at the anatomic measurement points, measuring 17.1 mm, 16.1 mm, and 12.6 mm (P < 0.05). Conclusions: The cervical retaining ligaments are the support mechanisms of the platysma muscle in the neck. While previously described in only a qualitative manner, this study quantifies the anterior extent of these ligaments and how they invest the lateral platysma muscle. As these ligaments tether the platysma for an average of 1.5 cm, lateral platysma elevation of this distance during rhytidectomy surgery can improve platysmal redraping during rhytidectomy and potentially improve neck rejuvenation.
Membrane-mediated interactions between circular particles in the strongly curved regime

Particles binding to a fluid lipid membrane can induce bilayer deformations, for instance when these particles are curved. Since the energy of two overlapping warp fields depends on the mutual distance between the two particles creating them, they will experience forces mediated by the curvature of the membrane. If the deformations are sufficiently weak, the associated differential equations for the membrane shape are linear, and the resulting interactions are understood very well; but very little is known for stronger curvature imprint, owing to the highly nonlinear nature of the problem. Here we numerically calculate the magnitude of such membrane-mediated interactions in the case of two axisymmetric particles over a wide range of curvature imprints, deep into the nonlinear regime. We show that over an intermediate distance range the sign of the force reverses beyond a sufficiently strong deformation. These findings are quantitatively confirmed by a simple analytical close-distance expansion. The sign flip can be traced to a change in magnitude between the two principal curvatures midway between the two particles, which can only occur at sufficient particle tilt, a condition which is by construction ruled out in the linearized description. We also show these large perturbation results to agree with coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and suggest that a favorable comparison is indeed more likely to hold in the strongly deformed regime.
Young Children’s Acute Stress After a Burn Injury: Disentangling the Role of Injury Severity and Parental Acute Stress

Objective Although injury severity and parental stress are strong predictors of posttraumatic adjustment in young children after burns, little is known about the interplay of these variables. This study aimed at clarifying mediation processes between injury severity and mother's, father's, and young child's acute stress. Methods Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships between injury severity and parental and child acute stress. Parents of 138 burn-injured children (ages 1-4 years) completed standardized questionnaires on average 19 days postinjury. Results Sixteen children (11.7%) met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, preschool criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (excluding time criterion). The model revealed a significant mediation of maternal acute stress, with the effect of injury severity on a child's acute stress mediated by maternal acute stress. Paternal acute stress failed to serve as a mediating variable. Conclusions Our findings confirm mothers' crucial role in the posttraumatic adjustment of young children. Clinically, mothers' acute stress should be monitored.
Fluorescence applications using the Typhoon Variable Mode Imager

Typhoon Variable Mode Imager combines multicolor fluorescence, chemiluminescence and filmless autoradiography in one system. For fluorescence applications, Typhoon employs powerful excitation sources and efficient optics to detect a wide range of fluorochromes at sub-femtomolar levels. In addition, Typhoon provides a wide linear dynamic range of five orders of magnitude. The system enables efficient imaging for a variety of sample formats, including free gels, glass gel sandwiches, blots, microplates, and slides. In combination with ImageQuantTM Solutions analysis software, Typhoon is a powerful tool for a wide range of fluorescence applications (2, 3, 4).
Biochemical Properties and Neuroprotective Effects of Compounds in Various Species of Berries

Several species of berries, such as blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) and lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea L.), have attracted much scientific attention in recent years, especially due to their reported antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Berries, as with other types of plants, have developed metabolic mechanisms to survive various environmental stresses, some of which involve reactive oxygen species. In addition, the fruits and leaves of berries have high amounts of polyphenols, such as flavonoids, which act as potent antioxidants. These compounds could potentially be beneficial for brain aging and neurodegenerative disorders. There are now several studies documenting the beneficial effects of various berries in cell models of neurotoxicity as well as in vivo models of neurodegenerative disease. In the current review, we discuss the metabolic strategies that plants and animals have developed in order to combat reactive oxygen species. We then discuss issues of bioavailability of various compounds in mammals and provide a synopsis of studies demonstrating the neuroprotective ability of berries and polyphenols. We also summarize findings from our own research group. For example, we have detected various polyphenols in samples of blueberries and lingonberries and have found that the leaves have a much higher antioxidant capacity than the fruits. Extracts from these species have also demonstrated neuroprotective effects in cellular models of toxicity and inflammation, which are being further pursued in animal models.
Discovery and characterization of small molecule Rac1 inhibitors

Aberrant activation of Rho GTPase Rac1 has been observed in various tumor types, including pancreatic cancer. Rac1 activates multiple signaling pathways that lead to uncontrolled proliferation, invasion and metastasis. Thus, inhibition of Rac1 activity is a viable therapeutic strategy for proliferative disorders such as cancer. Here we identified small molecule inhibitors that target the nucleotide-binding site of Rac1 through in silico screening. Follow up in vitro studies demonstrated that two compounds blocked active Rac1 from binding to its effector PAK1. Fluorescence polarization studies indicate that these compounds target the nucleotide-binding site of Rac1. In cells, both compounds blocked Rac1 binding to its effector PAK1 following EGF-induced Rac1 activation in a dose-dependent manner, while showing no inhibition of the closely related Cdc42 and RhoA activity. Furthermore, functional studies indicate that both compounds reduced cell proliferation and migration in a dose-dependent manner in multiple pancreatic cancer cell lines. Additionally, the two compounds suppressed the clonogenic survival of pancreatic cancer cells, while they had no effect on the survival of normal pancreatic ductal cells. These compounds do not share the core structure of the known Rac1 inhibitors and could serve as additional lead compounds to target pancreatic cancers with high Rac1 activity.
Individual behavior and social influence in online social systems

The capacity to collect and analyze the actions of individuals in online social systems at minute-by-minute time granularity offers new perspectives on collective human behavior research. Macroscopic analysis of massive datasets raises interesting observations of patterns in online social processes. But working at a large scale has its own limitations, since it typically doesn't allow for interpretations on a microscopic level. We examine how different types of individual behavior affect the decisions of friends in a network. We begin with the problem of detecting social influence in a social system. Then we investigate the causality between individual behavior and social influence by observing the diffusion of an innovation among social peers. Are more active users more influential? Are more credible users more influential? Bridging this gap and finding points where the macroscopic and microscopic worlds converge contributes to better interpretations of the mechanisms of spreading of ideas and behaviors in networks and offer design opportunities for online social systems.
TSCSet: A Crowdsourced Time-Sync Comment Dataset for Exploration of User Experience Improvement

Time-Sync Comment (TSC) is a type of crowdsourced user review embedded in online video websites, which provides better real-time user interaction than traditional user comment type. Various TSC-related problems and approaches have been studied to improve user experience by taking advantage of special characteristics of TSCs such as strong time reliance. However, there are three major drawbacks to these TSC researches. First, they did not explicitly show advantage of TSC features over the traditional features in terms of users' experience. Second, the experiments were conducted on some inconsistent TSC datasets crawled from different source, which makes the effectiveness of their methods less convincing. Third, the methods were manually evaluated by a limited number of so-called "experts" in these experiments, so it is hard for other researchers to obtain the data labels and reproduce the results. In order to overcome these drawbacks, this paper aims to explore the usefulness of TSC data for for the improvement of user experience online by exploiting the TSC pattern inside a new dataset. Specifically, we present a larger-scale TSC dataset with four-level structures and rich self-labeled attributes and formally define a group of TSC-related research problems based on this dataset. The problems are solved by adapted state-of-the-art methods and evaluated through crowdsourced labels in the dataset. The result can be regarded as a baseline for further research.
Meta-Analyses of the Effects of Standardized Handoff Protocols on Patient, Provider, and Organizational Outcomes

Objective: The overall purpose was to understand the effects of handoff protocols using meta-analytic approaches. Background: Standardized protocols have been required by the Joint Commission, but meta-analytic integration of handoff protocol research has not been conducted. Method: The primary outcomes investigated were handoff information passed during transitions of care, patient outcomes, provider outcomes, and organizational outcomes. Sources included Medline, SAGE, Embase, PsycINFO, and PubMed, searched from the earliest date available through March 30th, 2015. Initially 4,556 articles were identified, with 4,520 removed. This process left a final set of 36 articles, all which included pre-/postintervention designs implemented in live clinical/hospital settings. We also conducted a moderation analysis based on the number of items contained in each protocol to understand if the length of a protocol led to systematic changes in effect sizes of the outcome variables. Results: Meta-analyses were conducted on 34,527 pre- and 30,072 postintervention data points. Results indicate positive effects on all four outcomes: handoff information (g = .71, 95% confidence interval [CI] [.63, .79]), patient outcomes (g = .53, 95% CI [.41, .65]), provider outcomes (g = .51, 95% CI [.41, .60]), and organizational outcomes (g = .29, 95% CI [.23, .35]). We found protocols to be effective, but there is significant publication bias and heterogeneity in the literature. Due to publication bias, we further searched the gray literature through greylit.org and found another 347 articles, although none were relevant to this research. Our moderation analysis demonstrates that for handoff information, protocols using 12 or more items led to a significantly higher proportion of information passed compared with protocols using 11 or fewer items. Further, there were numerous negative outcomes found throughout this meta-analysis, with trends demonstrating that protocols can increase the time for handover and the rate of errors of omission. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that handoff protocols tend to improve results on multiple levels, including handoff information passed and patient, provider, and organizational outcomes. These findings come with the caveat that publication bias exists in the literature on handoffs. Instances where protocols can lead to negative outcomes are also discussed. Application: Significant effects were found for protocols across provider types, regardless of expertise or area of clinical focus. It also appears that more thorough protocols lead to more information being passed, especially when those protocols consist of 12 or more items. Given these findings, publication bias is an apparent feature of this literature base. Recommendations to reduce the apparent publication bias in the field include changing the way articles are screened and published.
The association between alcohol consumption and left ventricular diastolic function and geometry change in general Korean population

Aims The adverse effect of heavy alcohol intake on cardiovascular disease is well established. However, there is only limited information about the risk of subclinical left ventricular (LV) abnormality according to alcohol consumption. Thus, this study was to investigate the association between alcohol consumption and LV functional and structural abnormality. Methods and results Study participants were 49 714 Korean adults received echocardiogram as an item of health check-up program. They were stratified into 6 groups according to alcohol consumption; non (life time never drinker), occasional (<1 g/day), light (1-15 g/day), moderate (15-30 g/day), heavy (30-60 g/day), and very heavy (>60 g/day) drinker. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to assess the odd ratios (ORs) for LV hypertrophy (LVH), increased relative wall thickness (RWT) and impaired LV diastolic (LVD) function with a reference of non-drinker. Additionally, the adjusted mean values of echocardiographic parameters were evaluated to assess LV diastolic function and structure. In logistic regression analysis, very heavy alcohol drinker had the highest adjusted ORs for LVH, increased RWT and impaired LVD function in all participants and male subgroup (P < 0.05). The dose dependent relationship was found between alcohol consumption and impaired LVD function in all participants and gender subgroups. There was no specific pattern of relationship to suggest the favourable effect of light alcohol drinking on heart. Conclusion Increased alcohol intake had the adverse effect on LV function and structure. However, potential favourable effect of light alcohol intake was not observed. Prospective studies are required to investigate long-term effect of alcohol consumption on subclinical LV change.
An ultra-low power consumption 1-V, 10-bit succesive approximation ADC

An ultra-low power consumption 10-bit rail-to-rail input range successive-approximation Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) for sensor network applications is presented. It is designed in a standard 0.13 mum CMOS process technology. The converter consists of a capacitor-based digital-to-analog converter, a two-stage voltage comparator, formed by a pre-amplifier and a dynamic-latch, a passive sample-and-hold circuit, a current reference generator and digital circuitry for switching and control. Post-layout simulations show that the ADC consumes less than 2 muW at a conversion rate of 100 kS/s from a 1 V voltage supply. Proper operation is achieved down to a supply voltage of 0.8 V.
Determinants of Reduced Genetic Capacity for Butyrate Synthesis by the Gut Microbiome in Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis

Background and Aims Alterations in short chain fatty acid metabolism, particularly butyrate, have been reported in inflammatory bowel disease, but results have been conflicting because of small study numbers and failure to distinguish disease type, activity or other variables such as diet. We performed a comparative assessment of the capacity of the microbiota for butyrate synthesis, by quantifying butyryl-CoA:acetate CoA-transferase [BCoAT] gene content in stool from patients with Crohn's disease [CD; n = 71], ulcerative colitis [UC; n = 58] and controls [n = 75], and determined whether it was related to active vs inactive inflammation, microbial diversity, and composition and/or dietary habits. Methods BCoAT gene content was quantified by quantitative polymerase chain reaction [qPCR]. Disease activity was assessed clinically and faecal calprotectin concentration measured. Microbial composition was determined by sequencing 16S rRNA gene. Dietary data were collected using an established food frequency questionnaire. Results Reduced butyrate-synthetic capacity was found in patients with active and inactive CD [p < 0.001 and p < 0.01, respectively], but only in active UC [p < 0.05]. In CD, low BCoAT gene content was associated with ileal location, stenotic behaviour, increased inflammation, lower microbial diversity, greater microbiota compositional change, and decreased butyrogenic taxa. Reduced BCoAT gene content in patients with CD was linked with a different regimen characterised by lower dietary fibre. Conclusions Reduced butyrate-synthetic capacity of the microbiota is more evident in CD than UC and may relate to reduced fibre intake. The results suggest that simple replacement of butyrate per se may be therapeutically inadequate, whereas manipulation of microbial synthesis, perhaps by dietary means, may be more appropriate.
A Survey of Wireless Sensor Network Abstraction for Application Development

Wireless sensor network (WSN) application development is not an easy task due to its resource constrained nature and vast feature rich application space. Several abstractions are harnessed to ease out the difficult WSN application development. In this paper, three levels of abstractions are classified from the existing literature: node, network, and infrastructure abstractions. Since the node and network abstractions are already a well-studied area, the infrastructure abstraction is surveyed in detail to complete knowledge. Technology interoperability, service discovery, metadata support, and processing support are found as basic requirements for infrastructure abstraction. Problematic security and quality of service topics are discussed and the open research questions of ontology, service discovery, distributed processing, and performance metrics are defined. Finally, a distributed middleware design is presented as a possible solution for the key open research question: how to utilize capabilities of the abstracted technologies.
Mold and dampness exposure and allergic outcomes from birth to adolescence: data from the BAMSE cohort

Exposure to moldy or damp indoor environments is associated with allergic disease in young children, but it is unclear whether the effects persist to adolescence. Our objective was to assess whether exposure to mold or dampness during infancy increases the risk of asthma, rhinitis, or IgE sensitization in children followed from birth to 16 years of age.
Genes and gene clusters related to genotype and drought-induced variation in saccharification potential, lignin content and wood anatomical traits in Populus nigra†

Abstract Wood is a renewable resource that can be employed for the production of second generation biofuels by enzymatic saccharification and subsequent fermentation. Knowledge on how the saccharification potential is affected by genotype-related variation of wood traits and drought is scarce. Here, we used three Populus nigra L. genotypes from habitats differing in water availability to (i) investigate the relationships between wood anatomy, lignin content and saccharification and (ii) identify genes and co-expressed gene clusters related to genotype and drought-induced variation in wood traits and saccharification potential. The three poplar genotypes differed in wood anatomy, lignin content and saccharification potential. Drought resulted in reduced cambial activity, decreased vessel and fiber lumina, and increased the saccharification potential. The saccharification potential was unrelated to lignin content as well as to most wood anatomical traits. RNA sequencing of the developing xylem revealed that 1.5% of the analyzed genes were differentially expressed in response to drought, while 67% differed among the genotypes. Weighted gene correlation network analysis identified modules of co-expressed genes correlated with saccharification potential. These modules were enriched in gene ontology terms related to cell wall polysaccharide biosynthesis and modification and vesicle transport, but not to lignin biosynthesis. Among the most strongly saccharification-correlated genes, those with regulatory functions, especially kinases, were prominent. We further identified transcription factors whose transcript abundances differed among genotypes, and which were co-regulated with genes for biosynthesis and modifications of hemicelluloses and pectin. Overall, our study suggests that the regulation of pectin and hemicellulose metabolism is a promising target for improving wood quality of second generation bioenergy crops. The causal relationship of the identified genes and pathways with saccharification potential needs to be validated in further experiments.