Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Current Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences Protein Delivery : Is Iontophoresis a Feasible Option ?

Biotechnology is now contributing almost one third of new drugs, and the trend is expected to be similar based on the number of molecules in different clinical trials. Most of these protein based pharmaceuticals are delivered by injections, which are painful and carries a risk of infection. Alternative delivery routes/techniques are being investigated and transdermal iontophoresis is one of them. This article is an attempt to evaluate recent development and the possibilities with it.
Positive and Negative Sequence Control Strategies to Maximize the Voltage Support in Resistive–Inductive Grids During Grid Faults

Grid faults are one of the most severe perturbations in power systems. During these extreme disturbances, the reliability of the grid is compromised and the risk of a power outage is increased. To prevent this issue, distributed generation inverters can help the grid by supporting the grid voltages. Voltage support mainly depends on two constraints: the amount of injected current and the grid impedance. This paper proposes a voltage support control scheme that joins these two features. Hence, the control strategy injects the maximum rated current of the inverter. Thus, the inverter takes advantage of the distributed capacities and operates safely during voltage sags. Also, the controller selects the appropriate power references depending on the resistive–inductive grid impedance. Therefore, the grid can be better supported since the voltage at the point of common coupling is improved. Several voltage objectives, which cannot be achieved together, are developed and discussed in detail. These objectives are threefold: to maximize the positive sequence voltage; to minimize the negative sequence voltage; and to maximize the difference between positive and negative sequence voltages. A mathematical optimal solution is obtained for each objective function. This solution is characterized by a safe peak current injection, and by the optimization of the voltage profile in any type of grid connection. Therefore, the proposed control scheme includes advanced features for voltage support during voltage sags, which are applicable to different power facilities in different types of networks. Due to system limitations, a suboptimal solution is also considered, analyzed, and discussed for each of the optimization problems. Experimental results are presented to validate the theoretical solutions.
Semantic image content filtering via edge-preserving scale-aware filter

In this paper, we highlight a new filtering concept and methodology, called the semantic image content filtering (SICF), which aims to remove insignificant small details from the image while preserving its main structure. Such image content separation is not possible to achieve by using any conventional linear filter as it is essentially designed to perform frequency separation. To realize an effective SICF, a novel image filtering algorithm, called the edge-preserving scale-aware filter (ESF), is proposed in this paper. Our proposed ESF yields a significant improvement over a recently-developed scale-aware filter, called the rolling guidance filter (RGF). The key success of our ESF lies in the developed adaptive relative total variation filter (ARTVF), which replaces the RGF's Gaussian filter for generating a much improved initial guidance image. Extensive simulation results obtained from various test images have clearly demonstrated that the proposed ESF outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on conducting SICF task. That is, the semantically-important large-scale image structure has been better preserved, while the insignificant small details have been removed more effectively.
Autistic Traits and Brain Activation during Face-to-Face Conversations in Typically Developed Adults

Background Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviours. The severity of these characteristics is posited to lie on a continuum that extends into the general population. Brain substrates underlying ASD have been investigated through functional neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, fMRI has methodological constraints for studying brain mechanisms during social interactions (for example, noise, lying on a gantry during the procedure, etc.). In this study, we investigated whether variations in autism spectrum traits are associated with changes in patterns of brain activation in typically developed adults. We used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a recently developed functional neuroimaging technique that uses near-infrared light, to monitor brain activation in a natural setting that is suitable for studying brain functions during social interactions. Methodology We monitored regional cerebral blood volume changes using a 52-channel NIRS apparatus over the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and superior temporal sulcus (STS), 2 areas implicated in social cognition and the pathology of ASD, in 28 typically developed participants (14 male and 14 female) during face-to-face conversations. This task was designed to resemble a realistic social situation. We examined the correlations of these changes with autistic traits assessed using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Principal Findings Both the PFC and STS were significantly activated during face-to-face conversations. AQ scores were negatively correlated with regional cerebral blood volume increases in the left STS during face-to-face conversations, especially in males. Conclusions Our results demonstrate successful monitoring of brain function during realistic social interactions by NIRS as well as lesser brain activation in the left STS during face-to-face conversations in typically developed participants with higher levels of autistic traits.
An algorithm towards QoS improvement of cognitive mobile users

Limited spectrum availability problem has become prevalent in the recent years. As solution, opportunistic spectrum access by the Cognitive Radio (CR) users is proposed. Networks supporting the CR users are called Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN). Introduction of CR users improves channel utilization (CU). However, channel allocation to the CR users without degradation of the Quality of Service (QoS) of the Primary Users (PU) is a significant problem. In this work, a Cognitive Channel Allocation Algorithm is proposed for a CRN where two homogeneous buffers have been considered. Continuous Time Markov Chain is used to model the system. It is observed that introduction of buffers improve the QoS of both handoff calls and new calls of the CR users. Improvement of over 12% in CU and about 40% in the call blocking probability has been observed which ensures satisfactory QoS of the CR users.
Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Failure to Adapt to Glucose Shortage and Rapidly Use Intracellular Energy Reserves Through Glycolysis Explains Poor Cell Survival After Implantation

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) hold considerable promise in tissue engineering (TE). However, their poor survival when exogenously administered limits their therapeutic potential. Previous studies from our group demonstrated that lack of glucose (glc) (but not of oxygen) is fatal to human MSCs because it serves as a pro‐survival and pro‐angiogenic molecule for human MSCs (hMSCs) upon transplantation. However, which energy‐providing pathways MSCs use to metabolize glc upon transplantation? Are there alternative energetic nutrients to replace glc? And most importantly, do hMSCs possess significant intracellular glc reserves for ensuring their survival upon transplantation? These remain open questions at the forefront of TE based‐therapies. In this study, we established for the first time that the in vivo environment experienced by hMSCs is best reflected by near‐anoxia (0.1% O2) rather than hypoxia (1%–5% O2) in vitro. Under these near‐anoxia conditions, hMSCs rely almost exclusively on glc through anerobic glycolysis for ATP production and are unable to use either exogenous glutamine, serine, or pyruvate as energy substrates. Most importantly, hMSCs are unable to adapt their metabolism to the lack of exogenous glc, possess a very limited internal stock of glc and virtually no ATP reserves. This lack of downregulation of energy turnover as a function of exogenous glc level results in a rapid depletion of hMSC energy reserves that explains their poor survival rate. These new insights prompt for the development of glc‐releasing scaffolds to overcome this roadblock plaguing the field of TE based‐therapies. Stem Cells 2018;36:363–376
The immunocytokine NHS-IL12 as a potential cancer therapeutic

Targeted delivery of IL-12 might turn this cytokine into a safer, more effective cancer therapeutic. Here we describe a novel immunocytokine, NHS-IL12, consisting of two molecules of IL-12 fused to a tumor necrosis-targeting human IgG1 (NHS76). The addition of the human IgG1 moiety resulted in a longer plasma half-life of NHS-IL12 than recombinant IL-12, and a selective targeting to murine tumors in vivo. Data from both in vitro assays using human PBMCs and in vivo primate studies showed that IFN-gamma production by immune cells is attenuated following treatment with the immunocytokine, suggesting an improved toxicity profile than seen with recombinant IL-12 alone. NHS-IL12 was superior to recombinant IL-12 when evaluated as an anti-tumor agent in three murine tumor models. Mechanistic studies utilizing immune cell subset-depleting antibodies, flow cytometric methods, and in vitro cytotoxicity and ELISA assays all indicated that the anti-tumor effects of NHS-IL12 were primarily CD8+ T cell-dependent and likely IL-12-mediated. Combining NHS-IL12 treatment with a cancer vaccine, radiation, or chemotherapy resulted in greater anti-tumor effects than each individual therapy alone. These preclinical findings provide a rationale for the clinical testing of this immunocytokine, both as a single agent and in combination with vaccines, radiation and chemotherapy.
CITED2 Restrains Proinflammatory Macrophage Activation and Response

ABSTRACT Macrophages are strategically distributed in mammalian tissues and play an essential role in priming the immune response. However, macrophages need to constantly strike a balance between activation and inhibition states to avoid a futile inflammatory reaction. Here, we identify the CBP/p300-interacting transactivator with glutamic acid/aspartic acid-rich carboxyl-terminal domain 2 (CITED2) as a potent repressor of macrophage proinflammatory activation. Gain- and loss-of-function studies revealed that CITED2 is required for optimal peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ) activation and attendant select anti-inflammatory gene expression in macrophages. More importantly, deficiency of CITED2 resulted in significant attenuation of rosiglitazone-induced PPARγ activity, PPARγ recruitment to target gene promoters, and anti-inflammatory target gene expression in macrophages. Interestingly, deficiency of Cited2 strikingly heightened proinflammatory gene expression through stabilization of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 alpha (HIF1α) protein in macrophages. Further, overexpression of Egln3 or inhibition of HIF1α in Cited2-deficient macrophages completely reversed elevated proinflammatory cytokine/chemokine gene expression. Importantly, mice bearing a myeloid cell-specific deletion of Cited2 were highly susceptible to endotoxin-induced sepsis symptomatology and mortality. Collectively, our observations identify CITED2 as a novel negative regulator of macrophage proinflammatory activation that protects the host from inflammatory insults.
Movement and distribution of young bull sharks Carcharhinus leucas in a variable estuarine environment

The space utilization and distribution of young (<2 yr old) bull sharks Carcharhinus leucas within a 27 km stretch of the Caloosahatchee River estuary in Southwest Florida was examined using an array of acoustic monitors to define influences of environmental variables. A total of 56 young sharks from 3 cohorts (2003, 2004, 2005) were fitted with acoustic tags and monitored for up to 460 d. Sharks did not remain within the estuary continuously, but on average approximately one third were present at any one time from each cohort. Salinity and freshwater inflow showed greatest influence on shark distribution, with temperature appearing to play a limited role. Although individuals occurred in salinities from 0.1 to 34, electivity analysis indicated that they generally avoided areas with salinity <7 and had an affinity for areas with salinities from 7 to at least 20. There were significant relationships between the mean location of a cohort within the estuary and salinity, with sharks occurring further up river when the river was more saline. These relationships were more pronounced for the youngest sharks, and strength of the relationship decreased with age. Since bull sharks are euryhaline, these results suggest that they may select environmental conditions via movement, possibly to reduce energetic costs associated with osmoregulation.
Endothelial mineralocorticoid receptor ablation does not alter blood pressure, kidney function or renal vessel contractility

Aldosterone blockade confers substantial cardiovascular and renal protection. The effects of aldosterone on mineralocorticoid receptors (MR) expressed in endothelial cells (EC) within the renal vasculature have not been delineated. We hypothesized that lack of MR in EC may be protective in renal vasculature and examined this by ablating the Nr3c2 gene in endothelial cells (EC-MR) in mice. Blood pressure, heart rate and PAH clearance were measured using indwelling catheters in conscious mice. The role of the MR in EC on contraction and relaxation was investigated in the renal artery and in perfused afferent arterioles. Urinary sodium excretion was determined by use of metabolic cages. EC-MR transgenics had markedly decreased MR expression in isolated aortic endothelial cells as compared to littermates (WT). Blood pressure and effective renal plasma flow at baseline and following AngII infusion was similar between groups. No differences in contraction and relaxation were observed between WT and EC-MR KO in isolated renal arteries during baseline or following 2 or 4 weeks of AngII infusion. The constriction or dilatations of afferent arterioles between genotypes were not different. No changes were found between the groups with respect to urinary excretion of sodium after 4 weeks of AngII infusion, or in urinary albumin excretion and kidney morphology. In conclusion, deletion of the EC-MR does not confer protection towards the development of hypertension, endothelial dysfunction of renal arteries or renal function following prolonged AngII-infusion.
Tensor non-local low-rank regularization for recovering compressed hyperspectral images

Sparsity-based methods have been widely used in hyperspectral imagery compression recovery (HSI-CR). However, most of the available HSI-CR methods work on vector space by vectorizing hyperspectral cubes in spatial and spectral domain, which will destroy spatial and spectral correlation and result in spatial and spectral information distortion in the recovery. At the same time, vectorization also make HSI's intrinsic structure sparsity cannot be utilized adequately. In this paper, a tensor non-local low-rank regularization (TNLR) approach is proposed to exploit essential structured sparsity and explore its advantages for CR of hyperspectral imagery. Specifically, a tensor nuclear norm penalty function is utilized as tensor low-rank regularization term to describe the spatial-and-spectral correlation hidden in HSI. To further improve the computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a fast implementation algorithm is developed by using the alternative direction multiplier method (ADMM) technique. Experimental results are shown that the proposed TNLR-CR algorithm can significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art CR techniques for hyperspectral image recovery.
Virtual reality content streaming: Viewport-dependent projection and tile-based techniques

Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) requires spherical panoramic contents with high-spatial and temporal fidelity to immerse the viewers into the captured scene. Hereby, VR contents are extremely bandwidth intensive and impose technical challenges for the design of a VR streaming system. A bandwidth-efficient VR streaming system can be achieved using the viewport-aware adaptation techniques, in which part of the sphere within the viewer's field of view is presented at higher quality. In this paper, two recently emerged viewport-adaptive streaming methods so-called tile-based method and truncated square pyramid (TSP) projection, a well-studied viewport-dependent projection, are compared using a proposed quality assessment methodology. The comparison is made in terms of storage and streaming bitrate performances. The simulation results indicate that the tile-based approach has slightly lower streaming performance, while offering a significant storage and encoding time saving at the server side, compared to TSP-based streaming.
Face recognition by facial attribute assisted network

We propose the Facial Attribute Assistant Network (FAAN) for face recognition in the wild. The FAAN is developed to imitate some general human description of a face using facial attributes, such as gender, ethnicity, hair color and with or without eyeglasses. Given a face as the input, the FAAN renders an identity descriptor (I-descriptor) and an attribute descriptor (A-descriptor) in the output. These descriptors are exploited with the Minimum Distance Subset scheme, proposed in this study, for handling image-set based recognition. When searching for a match in a gallery set, only the subjects with similar attributes as of the probe, measured by the A-descriptors, are selected for matching by comparing the I-descriptors. The FAAN is built on the Residual Network (ResNet), which is first trained for face identification and then fine tuned for attribute identification. This study shows that attributes can effectively reduce the search space and make the search more efficient and accurate. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the FAAN demonstrates a competitive performance on the MPIE and IJB-A benchmarks.
Traumatic intracranial injury in intoxicated patients with minor head trauma.

OBJECTIVES Studies focusing on minor head injury in intoxicated patients report disparate prevalences of intracranial injury. It is unclear if the typical factors associated with intracranial injury in published clinical decision rules for computerized tomography (CT) acquisition are helpful in differentiating patients with and without intracranial injuries, as intoxication may obscure particular features of intracranial injury such as headache and mimic other signs of head injury such as altered mental status. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of intracranial injury following minor head injury (Glasgow Coma Scale [GCS] score ≥14) in intoxicated patients and to assess the performance of established clinical decision rules in this population. METHODS This was a prospective cohort study of consecutive intoxicated adults presenting to the emergency department (ED) following minor head injury. Historical and physical examination features included those from the Canadian CT Head Rule, National Emergency X-Radiography Utilization Study (NEXUS), and New Orleans Criteria. All patients underwent head CT. RESULTS A total of 283 patients were enrolled, with a median age of 40 years (interquartile range [IQR] = 28 to 48 years) and median alcohol concentration of 195 mmol/L (IQR = 154 to 256 mmol/L). A total of 238 of 283 (84%) were male, and 225 (80%) had GCS scores of 15. Clinically important injuries (injuries requiring admission to the hospital or neurosurgical follow-up) were identified in 23 patients (8%; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 5% to 12%); one required neurosurgical intervention (0.4%, 95% CI = 0% to 2%). Loss of consciousness and headache were associated with clinically important intracranial injury on CT. The Canadian CT Head Rule had a sensitivity of 70% (95% CI = 47% to 87%) and NEXUS criteria had a sensitivity of 83% (95% CI = 61% to 95%) for clinically important injury in intoxicated patients. CONCLUSIONS In this study, the prevalence of clinically important injury in intoxicated patients with minor head injury was significant. While the presence of the common features associated with intracranial injury in nonintoxicated patients should raise clinical suspicion for intracranial injury in intoxicated patients, the Canadian CT Head Rule and NEXUS criteria do not have adequate sensitivity to be applied in intoxicated patients with minor head injury.
Genotyping Multidrug-Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis from Primary Sputum and Decontaminated Sediment with an Integrated Microfluidic Amplification Microarray Test

ABSTRACT There is a growing awareness that molecular diagnostics for detect-to-treat applications will soon need a highly multiplexed mutation detection and identification capability. In this study, we converted an open-amplicon microarray hybridization test for multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis into an entirely closed-amplicon consumable (an amplification microarray) and evaluated its performance with matched sputum and sediment extracts. Reproducible genotyping (the limit of detection) was achieved with ∼25 M. tuberculosis genomes (100 fg of M. tuberculosis DNA) per reaction; the estimated shelf life of the test was at least 18 months when it was stored at 4°C. The test detected M. tuberculosis in 99.1% of sputum extracts and 100% of sediment extracts and showed 100% concordance with the results of real-time PCR. The levels of concordance between M. tuberculosis and resistance-associated gene detection were 99.1% and 98.4% for sputum and sediment extracts, respectively. Genotyping results were 100% concordant between sputum and sediment extracts. Relative to the results of culture-based drug susceptibility testing, the test was 97.1% specific and 75.0% sensitive for the detection of rifampin resistance in both sputum and sediment extracts. The specificity for the detection of isoniazid (INH) resistance was 98.4% and 96.8% for sputum and sediment extracts, respectively, and the sensitivity for the detection of INH resistance was 63.6%. The amplification microarray reported the correct genotype for all discordant phenotype/genotype results. On the basis of these data, primary sputum may be considered a preferred specimen for the test. The amplification microarray design, shelf life, and analytical performance metrics are well aligned with consensus product profiles for next-generation drug-resistant M. tuberculosis diagnostics and represent a significant ease-of-use advantage over other hybridization-based tests for diagnosing MDR tuberculosis.
How to Teach Regulatory Compliant Data Warehouse Engineering?

The steady increase of regulatory reporting requirements for banks increases the demand for compliant data warehouse and reporting systems. Data warehouse designers are forced to work in interdisciplinary teams consisting of accountants and legal experts in order to meet the regulatory requirements. In this paper, we present a teaching concept that simulates a realistic data warehouse development scenario in financial service industries. By applying this teaching concept, students learn how to design compliant data warehouse systems. Implicitly students experience the challenges of interdisciplinary data warehouse engineering teams and conceptual (reference) modeling. The didactical concept, which is based on learning levels, sensitizes students for the usefulness and applicability of conceptual (reference) modeling and was positively evaluated in two elective courses.