Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Angiotensin II Induces Hypertrophy, not Hyperplasia, of Cultured Rat Aortic Smooth Muscle Cells

We have explored the hypothesis that contractile agonists are important regulators of smooth muscle cell growth by examining the effects of one potent contractile agonist, angiotensin II (AII), on both cell proliferation and cellular hypertrophy. AII neither stimulated proliferation of cells made quiescent in a defined serum-free media nor augmented cell proliferation induced by serum or platelet-derived growth factor. However, AII did induce cellular hypertrophy of postconfluent quiescent cultures following 4 days of treatment, increasing smooth muscle cell protein content by 20% as compared with vehicle-treated controls. AII-induced hypertrophy was maximal at 1 μM, had an ED50 of 5 nM, and was blocked by the specific AII receptor antagonist Sar1, Ile8 AII. The cellular hypertrophy was due to an increase in protein synthesis, which was elevated within 6–9 hours following AII treatment, while no changes in protein degradation were apparent. AII was even more effective in inducing hypertrophy of subconfluent cultures, causing a 38% increase in protein content after 4 days of treatment (1 μM) and showing a maximal response at concentrations as low as 0.1 nM. Interestingly, in subconfluent cultures, AII treatment (1 μM, 4 days) was associated with a 50% increase in the fraction of cells with 4C DNA content with the virtual absence of cells in S-phase of the cell cycle, consistent with either arrest of cells in the G2 phase of the cell cycle or development of tetraploidy. These studies show that AII is a potent hypertrophic agent but has no detectable mitogenic activity in cultured rat aortic smooth muscle cells and describe an in vitro model that should be extremely valuable in exploring the cellular controls of smooth muscle cell hypertrophy.
Benchmarking as a tool of continuous quality improvement in postoperative pain management

Background and objective: Quality of acute pain management is far from being satisfactory. These deficits are not caused by the complexity of the medical problem but by difficulties in organization and hospital structures, sand procedures. Continuous quality improvement is a recommended tool to overcome such difficulties and to increase quality in the long run. This study reports the implementation of benchmarking‐based continuous quality improvement to improve postoperative pain management at a university hospital. Methods: A specialised pain nurse interviewed patients of three surgical departments on the first day after surgery, and continuously assessed process and outcome quality parameters. A multidisciplinary team of anaesthetists, surgeons, nurses and pharmacists implemented a regular procedure of data analysing and internal benchmarking. Results and suggested improvements were fed back to the healthcare teams. Results: From 1998 to 2002, 6756 patients were assessed. Average pain on ambulation and maximal pain were 3.7 ± 2.4 and 5.0 ± 2.5 (mean ± SD) on a 11‐point numeric rating scale. Pain intensity at rest was 1.9 ± 1.8. Over time, pain intensity on ambulation decreased (P = 0.022) whereas maximal pain and pain at rest remained unchanged. There was an increase in the number of patients who received non‐opioid analgesia (P < 0.001). Conclusions: A continuous quality improvement process could be established and is now successfully used in clinical routine. Cornerstones of this project were frequent assessments of process and outcome parameters, regular benchmarking and implementation of feedback mechanisms. Changes in organization of medical management and multidisciplinary teamwork seem to be more important than medical or technical aspects.
Quantitative computerized color vision testing in diabetic retinopathy: A possible screening tool?

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of a computerized color vision testing (Arden color contrast test) as a screening test for detection of diabetic macular edema (DME). Materials and Methods: A consecutive, prospective case series of 83 eyes of 42 diabetic patients with and without macular edema was enrolled. Macular edema was assessed clinically by stereoscopic grading and by central retinal thickness measurement with optical coherence tomography (OCT). Additionally, a computerized chromatest for the protan- and tritan-axis was performed. Analysis of test characteristics included receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and calculated sensitivity and specificity. Results: Sixty-one eyes had clinically significant macular edema (CSME). OCT yielded an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.92. Color vision testing yielded an AUC of 0.82 for the tritan- and 0.80 for the protan-axis. Using a cut off of 199 microns OCT resulted in a 100% sensitivity at 39% specificity. With a cut-off of 4.85, color testing yielded a sensitivity of 100% at a specificity of 8% on the tritan-axis, respectively. Considering OCT instead of clinical examination as a reference standard resulted in a comparable high sensitivity, but low specificity for color vision testing. Disturbance of the tritan axis was more pronounced than for the protan axis in present macular edema and also better correlated (r = 0.46) with retinal thickness measured with OCT. Conclusions: Computerized, quantitative color testing using the chromatest allows detection of diabetic maculopathy with high sensitivity. However, only a low specificity exists for retinal macular edema, as in diabetic retinopathy (DR) frequently abnormalities of the tritan axis exist before any retinal thickening occurs.
Anthropometry of the head and face

The second edition of this reference provides an update on the best methods for the measurement of the surfaces of the head and neck. The newest techniques are explained and the latest normative data on age-related changes in measurements (i.e., population norms) are completely examined in nearly 20 chapters and six appendices. Topics covered include sources of error in anthropometry and anthroposcopy; age-related changes in selected measurements of the craniofacial complex; anthropometry of minor defects in the craniofacial complex; anthropometry in craniomaxillofacial surgery, genetics, and aesthetic surgery of the nose; and anthropometry of the attractive face. Other chapters discuss the reconstruction of a photograph of a missing child, medical photography in clinical practice, interpolation of growth curves, racial and ethnic morphometric differences in the craniofacial complex, and basic statistical methods in clinical research. Complementing the text throughout are detailed illustrations and highly informative tables.
Robust tracking by selecting object-related candidates with deep features

In this paper, we propose an effective visual tracking method based on candidates selected by deep features and CNSGM. Higher level deep features contain semantic information, which enables the tracker focus more on the target than on the background. A certain convolutional layer contains many neurons. Different neurons response different things in the image. We pick the neuron has larger response on the target to select the object-related candidates for CNSGM, which can reduce the calculation load on local sparse representation in CNSGM to improve tracking speed by around 6 times. Turn out the deep features can also improve the tracking accuracy by choosing the object-related candidates. Experiment results on TB-76 video database proved that the proposed method has better performance in general.
Product retrieval based on semantic similarity of consumer reviews to natural language query

In this paper, we propose a product retrieval method using product reviews. The method calculates the score of a product based on the similarity between a user's request extracted from a natural language query and consumers' opinions extracted from reviews of the product. We also propose the method to generate the thesaurus automatically from consumers' reviews. The thesaurus expresses semantic similarities between opinion expressions. We implemented an accommodation retrieval system and constructed the opinion thesaurus automatically from 652,875 reviews. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.
Predictive Machine Learning Techniques for Breast Cancer Detection

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that incorporate a variety of statistical, probabilistic and optimization techniques that allow computers to “learn” from past examples and to detect hardto-diagnosed patterns from massive , noisy or complex data sets. This features are particularly well-suited to medical applications, especially those that depend on complex proteomic and genomic measurements. Machine learning techniques like support vector machine , Bayesian belief network, Artificial neural network are frequently used in cancer diagnosis and detection. More recently machine learning has been applied to cancer prognosis and prediction. The survey has shown that there are lots of best performing algorithms for the analysis of features of data sets.
Poly(ADP-Ribose) Polymerase Inhibitors Ameliorate Nephropathy of Type 2 Diabetic Leprdb/db Mice

The activation of the poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) plays an important role in the pathophysiology of various diseases associated with oxidative stress. We found increased amounts of poly(ADP) ribosylated proteins in diabetic kidneys of Leprdb/db (BKsJ) mice, suggesting increased PARP activity. Therefore, we examined the effects of two structurally unrelated PARP inhibitors (INO-1001 and PJ-34) on the development of diabetic nephropathy of Leprdb/db (BKsJ) mice, an experimental model of type 2 diabetes. INO-1001 and PJ-34 were administered in the drinking water to Leprdb/db mice. Both INO-1001 and PJ-34 treatment ameliorated diabetes-induced albumin excretion and mesangial expansion, which are hallmarks of diabetic nephropathy. PARP inhibitors decreased diabetes-induced podocyte depletion in vivo and blocked hyperglycemia-induced podocyte apoptosis in vitro. High glucose treatment of podocytes in vitro led to an early increase of poly(ADP) ribosylated modified protein levels. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation appears to be a downstream target of hyperglycemia-induced PARP activation, as PARP inhibitors blocked the hyperglycemia-induced ROS generation in podocytes. INO-1001 and PJ-34 also normalized the hyperglycemia-induced mitochondrial depolarization. PARP blockade by INO-1001 and PJ-34 prevented hyperglycemia-induced nuclear factor-κB (NFκB) activation of podocytes, and it was made evident by the inhibitor of κBα phosphorylation and NFκB p50 nuclear translocation. Our results indicate that hyperglycemia-induced PARP activation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of glomerulopathy associated with type 2 diabetes and could serve as a novel therapeutic target.
Effect Anticipation Affects Perceptual, Cognitive, and Motor Phases of Response Preparation: Evidence from an Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study

The anticipation of action effects is a basic process that can be observed even for key-pressing responses in a stimulus-response paradigm. In Ziessler et al.’s (2012) experiments participants first learned arbitrary effects of key-pressing responses. In the test phase an imperative stimulus determined the response, but participants withheld the response until a Go-stimulus appeared. Reaction times (RTs) were shorter if the Go-stimulus was compatible with the learned response effect. This is strong evidence that effect representations were activated during response planning. Here, we repeated the experiment using event-related potentials (ERPs), and we found that Go-stimulus locked ERPs depended on the compatibility relationship between the Go-stimulus and the response effect. In general, this supports the interpretation of the behavioral data. More specifically, differences in the ERPs between compatible and incompatible Go-stimuli were found for the early perceptual P1 component and the later frontal P2 component. P1 differences were found only in the second half of the experiment and for long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between imperative stimulus and Go-stimulus, i.e., when the effect was fully anticipated and the perceptual system was prepared for the effect-compatible Go-stimulus. P2 amplitudes, likely associated with evaluation and conflict detection, were larger when Go-stimulus and effect were incompatible; presumably, incompatibility increased the difficulty of effect anticipation. Onset of response-locked lateralized readiness potentials (R-LRPs) occurred earlier under incompatible conditions indicating extended motor processing. Together, these results strongly suggest that effect anticipation affects all (i.e., perceptual, cognitive, and motor) phases of response preparation.
Reducing Power Consumption During Online and Offline Testing

Dedicated to my beloved family v Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor Prof. Nur A. Touba for his continuous support and guidance during the course of my PhD. I have always admired his clarity of thought and command over the subject and understanding. The high standards he sets for research are an inspiration for me. I would like to thank Prof. Margarida MacDonald for agreeing to be on my PhD committee and for reviewing my dissertation. I could not have done my PhD without the loving support and help of my husband Sugato Basu. Not only was he a great collaborator to work with, he gave me mental support during the difficult times. His confidence in me helped me believe in myself and I would like to thank him for being there for me always. I would like to thank all my friends at Austin for making my stay in Austin a memorable one. I would especially like to thank Sandip Ray for the long discussions that we had and for giving me the love of a brother. I would like to thank my parents-in-law Samir Basu and Nandita Basu and all my other relatives for their support. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my father Ashok Ghosh, my mother Rajyasri Ghosh and my brother Rajiv Ghosh for their unflinching love and support. They helped me at each and every step in realizing my dream and it is to them that I dedicate this dissertation. My parents' lives are a true source of inspiration for me and I am what I am because of them. This dissertation proposes techniques for power reduction in online and offline circuit testing. Power management is critical in both these domains, since high power dissipation can drive up production cost and even cause errors. The first part of the dissertation focuses on power reduction for online testing with concurrent error detection capabilities, where errors in the operation of the circuit are detected (and possibly corrected) at normal operational run-time. In online testing, power dissipation has lately become a first-order design criterion due to the significant hardware overhead for detecting/correcting errors and ensuring system reliability. Two problems are addressed, namely reducing power in concurrent error detection for (1) error correcting codes for memory checker, and (2) synthesis of parity prediction circuits. vii The next part of the dissertation discusses power …
Phage Displayed Short Peptides against Cells of Candida albicans Demonstrate Presence of Species, Morphology and Region Specific Carbohydrate Epitopes

Candida albicans is a commensal opportunistic pathogen, which can cause superficial infections as well as systemic infections in immuocompromised hosts. Among nosocomial fungal infections, infections by C. albicans are associated with highest mortality rates even though incidence of infections by other related species is on the rise world over. Since C. albicans and other Candida species differ in their susceptibility to antifungal drug treatment, it is crucial to accurately identify the species for effective drug treatment. Most diagnostic tests that differentiate between C. albicans and other Candida species are time consuming, as they necessarily involve laboratory culturing. Others, which employ highly sensitive PCR based technologies often, yield false positives which is equally dangerous since that leads to unnecessary antifungal treatment. This is the first report of phage display technology based identification of short peptide sequences that can distinguish C. albicans from other closely related species. The peptides also show high degree of specificity towards its different morphological forms. Using fluorescence microscopy, we show that the peptides bind on the surface of these cells and obtained clones that could even specifically bind to only specific regions of cells indicating restricted distribution of the epitopes. What was peculiar and interesting was that the epitopes were carbohydrate in nature. This gives insight into the complexity of the carbohydrate composition of fungal cell walls. In an ELISA format these peptides allow specific detection of relatively small numbers of C. albicans cells. Hence, if used in combination, such a test could help accurate diagnosis and allow physicians to initiate appropriate drug therapy on time.
Publication Rates of Undergraduate Social Work Programs in Selected Journals

Abstract Scholarship is receiving an ever-increasing emphasis within social work education, particularly at the undergraduate level. Decisions on recruitment, reappointment, tenure, salary, and promotion often are influenced by publication productivity. The authors extend previous research on publication activity of graduate faculty by reporting the journal article production of undergraduate social work faculty over a 7-year period in seven major social work journals. As expected from earlier studies, relatively few faculty produced a sizable proportion of the articles. However, articles written by only one author were less common than previous research suggested. The majority of articles appeared in three of the journals reviewed: Social Work, Journal of Social Work Education, and Families in Society (formerly Social Casework). The most prolific undergraduate faculty were likely to come from programs located in combined bachelor of social work/master of social work settings in relatively large public un.
Caloric restriction promotes rapid expansion and long-lasting increase of Lactobacillus in the rat fecal microbiota

ABSTRACT Previous studies indicated that caloric restricted diet enables to lower significantly the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. In experimental animal models, life-long lasting caloric restriction (CR) was demonstrated to induce changes of the intestinal microbiota composition, regardless of fat content and/or exercise. To explore the potential impact of short and long-term CR treatment on the gut microbiota, we conducted an analysis of fecal microbiota composition in young and adult Fisher 344 rats treated with a low fat feed under ad libitum (AL) or CR conditions (70%). We report here significant changes of the rat fecal microbiota that arise rapidly in young growing animals after short-term administration of a CR diet. In particular, Lactobacillus increased significantly after 8 weeks of CR treatment and its relative abundance was significantly higher in CR vs AL fed animals after 36 weeks of dietary intervention. Taken together, our data suggest that Lactobacillus intestinal colonization is hampered in AL fed young rats compared to CR fed ones, while health-promoting CR diet intervention enables the expansion of this genus rapidly and persistently up to adulthood.
BART goes multilingual: The UniTN / Essex submission to the CoNLL-2012 Shared Task

This paper describes the UniTN/Essex submission to the CoNLL-2012 Shared Task on the Multilingual Coreference Resolution. We have extended our CoNLL-2011 submission, based on BART, to cover two additional languages, Arabic and Chinese. This paper focuses on adapting BART to new languages, discussing the problems we have encountered and the solutions adopted. In particular, we propose a novel entity-mention detection algorithm that might help identify nominal mentions in an unknown language. We also discuss the impact of basic linguistic information on the overall performance level of our coreference resolution system.
Diffusion-Based Applications for Interactive Medical Image Segmentation

Volume segmentation is an important part of medical diagnostics, and fast solutions which nevertheless can handle large datasets are required. This paper presents a diffusion-based method that can be used for volume smoothing and segmentation purposes, and has been implemented on the GPU in order to achieve interactive performance. We describe the nonlinear isotropic and anisotropic diffusion methods, which – in combination with seeded region growing – are also used for segmentation purposes. The procedures are embedded in a highquality hardware based volume renderer and provide interactive data handling and parameter editing.
Applications of Answer Set Programming

ASP has been applied fruitfully to a wide range of areas in AI and in other fields, both in academia and in industry, thanks to the expressive representation languages of ASP and the continuous improvement of ASP solvers. We present some of these ASP applications, in particular, in knowledge representation and reasoning, robotics, bioinformatics and computational biology as well as some industrial applications. We discuss the challenges addressed by ASP in these applications and emphasize the strengths of ASP as a useful AI paradigm.
Auxiliary anatomical labels for joint segmentation and atlas registration

This paper studies improving joint segmentation and registration by introducing auxiliary labels for anatomy that has similar appearance to the target anatomy while not being part of that target. Such auxiliary labels help avoid false positive labelling of non-target anatomy by resolving ambiguity. A known registration of a segmented atlas can help identify where a target segmentation should lie. Conversely, segmentations of anatomy in two images can help them be better registered. Joint segmentation and registration is then a method that can leverage information from both registration and segmentation to help one another. It has received increasing attention recently in the literature. Often, merely a single organ of interest is labelled in the atlas. In the presense of other anatomical structures with similar appearance, this leads to ambiguity in intensity based segmentation; for example, when segmenting individual bones in CT images where other bones share the same intensity profile. To alleviate this problem, we introduce automatic generation of additional labels in atlas segmentations, by marking similar-appearance non-target anatomy with an auxiliary label. Information from the auxiliary-labeled atlas segmentation is then incorporated by using a novel coherence potential, which penalizes differences between the deformed atlas segmentation and the target segmentation estimate. We validated this on a joint segmentation-registration approach that iteratively alternates between registering an atlas and segmenting the target image to find a final anatomical segmentation. The results show that automatic auxiliary labelling outperforms the same approach using a single label atlasses, for both mandibular bone segmentation in 3D-CT and corpus callosum segmentation in 2D-MRI.