Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conditional disease-free survival after surgical resection of gastrointestinal stromal tumors: a multi-institutional analysis of 502 patients.

IMPORTANCE Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) are the most commonly diagnosed mesenchymal tumors of the gastrointestinal tract. The risk of recurrence following surgical resection of GISTs is typically reported from the date of surgery. However, disease-free survival (DFS) over time is dynamic and changes based on disease-free time already accumulated following surgery. OBJECTIVES To assess the comparative performance of established GIST recurrence risk prognostic scoring systems and to characterize conditional DFS following surgical resection of GISTs. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A retrospective cohort study of 502 patients who underwent surgery for a primary, nonmetastatic GIST between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2012, at 7 major academic cancer centers in the United States and Canada. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Disease-free survival of the patients was classified according to 5 prognostic scoring systems, including the National Institutes of Health criteria, modified National Institutes of Health criteria, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center GIST nomogram, and American Joint Committee on Cancer gastric and nongastric categories. The concordance index (also known as the C statistic or the area under the receiver operating curve) of established GIST recurrence risk prognostic scoring systems. Conditional DFS estimates were calculated. RESULTS Overall 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year DFS following resection of GISTs was 95%, 83%, and 74%, respectively. All the prognostic scoring systems had fair prognostic ability. For all tumor sites, the American Joint Committee on Cancer gastric category demonstrated the best discrimination (C = 0.79). Using conditional DFS, the probability of remaining disease free for an additional 3 years given that a patient was disease free at 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years was 82%, 89%, and 92%, respectively. Patients with the highest initial recurrence risk demonstrated the greatest increase in conditional survival as time elapsed. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Conditional DFS improves over time following resection of GISTs. This is valuable information about long-term prognosis to communicate to patients who are disease free after a period following surgery.
Contemporary midwifery practice: Art, science or both?

Current midwifery practice is regulated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), whose primary role is to safeguard the public through setting standards for education and practice and regulating fitness to practise, conduct and performance through rules and codes (NMC, 2012; 2015a). Practice is informed by evidence-based guidelines developed and implemented by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence based on hierarchies of evidence, with meta-analyses and systematic reviews being identified as the ‘gold standard’. This positivist epistemological approach as developed by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), with scientific evidence at the top of a knowledge hierarchy, fails to acknowledge the ‘art of midwifery’, where a constructivist paradigm of experiential, intuitive and tacit knowledge is used by reflective practitioners to provide high-quality care. As midwifery pre-registration education is now degree-level, is the essence of midwifery practice being ‘with woman’ providing holistic care under .
Development of Safety-Critical Software Systems Using Open Source Software -- A Systematic Map

The popularity of Open Source Software (OSS) has increased the interest in using it in safety critical applications. The aim of this study is to review research carried out on usage of open source code in development of safety-critical software and systems. We conducted a systematic mapping study through searches in library databases and manual identification of articles from open source conferences. We have identified 22 studies about using open source software, mainly in automotive, aerospace, medical and nuclear domains. Moreover, only a few studies present complete safety systems that are released as OSS in full. The most commonly used OSS functionalities are operating systems, imaging, control and data management. Finally most of the integrated OSS have mature code bases and a commit history of more than five years.
Ferric Reducing Ability of Plasma and Lipid Peroxidation in Hemodialysis Patients: Intradialytic Changes

Background and Aims: Patients on maintenance hemodialysis are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Oxidative stress has a negative impact on endothelial functions producing endothelial dysfunction which contributes to cardiovascular risk. FRAP assay has been shown to be a simple cost effective tool for estimating antioxidant capacity. Hence the present study was taken up to evaluate total antioxidant capacity as ferric reducing ability of plasma (FRAP) and malondialdehyde (MDA), in patients during hourly intervals of a single hemodialysis session. During hemodialysis, FRAP is subjected to alterations, due to intradialytic changes in various molecules that contribute FRAP. This study was aimed to assess the utility of FRAP as a measure of the antioxidant capacity during hemodialysis. Methods: Twenty seven patients with end stage renal disease on maintenance hemodialysis were recruited into the study. Time course changes in plasma MDA, FRAP, uric acid, total bilirubin, vitamin C and vitamin E were evaluated. Statistical evaluation of changes in the biochemical parameters during the whole period of dialysis was done using Friedman’s test. Linear regression using generalized estimating equations (GEE) model for repeated measures was applied to study the association between parameters on intradialytic FRAP. Results: Intradialytic increase in plasma MDA (p<0.01), decrease in FRAP (<0.01) and uric acid (p<0.001) levels were found. Uric acid was found to have significant association with FRAP as found by GEE (p<0.001). Conclusions: A single session of hemodialysis contributes substantially to oxidative stress. Decreased intradialytic FRAP levels can be due to a decrease in uric acid levels. Assessment of antioxidant status in hemodialysis patients by FRAP method may not truly represent the actual antioxidant status, as changes in uric acid levels are reflected in FRAP levels. Hence measurement of individual antioxidants would give a better picture of the antioxidant status during hemodialysis.
Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence

AbstractSince the 1970s, historical sociology in the United States has been constituted by a configuration of substantive questions, a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of economic interest and rationalization, and a methodological commitment to comparison. More recently, this configuration has been destabilized along each dimension: the increasing autonomy of comparative-historical methods from specific historical puzzles, the shift from the analysis of covariation to theories of historical process, and new substantive questions through which new kinds of arguments have been elaborated. Although the dominant responses have centered on methodological elaboration and epistemological debate, greater attention to historical process also informs new strategies for defining cases and framing puzzles, thereby highlighting different categories of empirical questions: social caging, group formation, and multiple orders. The most striking shift is from the imagery of systems-and-crises, which highlighted.
Management of Evacuee Surge from a Disaster Area: Solutions to Avoid Non-Emergent, Emergency Department Visits

Abstract Introduction: Many emergency departments (EDs) in the United States experience daily overcrowding, and a rapid influx of evacuees fleeing a disaster area can pose a substantial burden. Some of these evacuees may require ED care. However, others lack an alternative to the ED to address non-emergent medical concerns (prescription refills or outpatient referral). Objective: The objective of this study was to describe a successful multidisciplinary Hurricane Katrina Evacuation Center, explain the services offered, and determine the center's effects on referrals to local EDs. Methods: Data were collected concerning the number of patients utilizing the medical evaluation center and compared to the total number of evacuees to determine the proportion that utilized medical care. The data concerning patients given prescriptions was obtained by the estimation of the two medical directors of the Center, and therefore, is inexact. Results: During the five weeks the center was operational, 631 of 716 evacuees (88%) requested medical evaluation, and >80% of those had prescriptions written. Only four (<1%) patients were transported to local EDs. Conclusion: An evacuee evaluation center provides a convenient non-ED alternative for evacuees to address their non-emergent medical concerns and can be used to ease their transition to a new location.
Probabilistic Relation Induction in Vector Space Embeddings

Word embeddings have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of syntactic and semantic knowledge. However, it is not yet sufficiently well-understood how the relational knowledge that is implicitly encoded in word embeddings can be extracted in a reliable way. In this paper, we propose two probabilistic models to address this issue. The first model is based on the common relations-as-translations view, but is cast in a probabilistic setting. Our second model is based on the much weaker assumption that there is a linear relationship between the vector representations of related words. Compared to existing approaches, our models lead to more accurate predictions, and they are more explicit about what can and cannot be extracted from the word embedding.
Co‐occurrence of depression and delinquency in personality types

Although the co‐occurrence between adolescent depression and delinquency has been well‐studied, the nature of the longitudinal associations is not yet clear. To clarify this we examined whether personality type is a moderator in the longitudinal co‐occurrence of depression and delinquency. A total of 338 young and middle adolescents completed questionnaires about depression, delinquency and personality in 3 yearly waves of the CONflict And Management Of RElationships (CONAMORE). We found that the stable overcontrollers showed the highest mean level on depression and that the stable undercontrollers showed the highest mean level on delinquency. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the longitudinal co‐occurrence between depression and delinquency was best described by means of a stability model, in which personality type membership proved to be an important moderator. The three personality types differed significantly on the rank‐order stability of both depression and delinquency. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Absence of Dystrophin Does Not Affect Myogenesis

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is caused by the absence of the protein dystrophin in the muscle cells. The function of dystrophin is still not clear. For enabling study of the molecular function of dystrophin, we used small in- hibitory RNA (siRNA) for suppressing the expression of the protein in two muscle cell lines and achieved a quantitative knockdown. We applied two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis (2-D DIGE) in this new in vitro model for DMD to investigate if the absence of dystrophin during myogenesis causes any changes in protein expression. We did not ob- serve statistical relevant changes. The result of our study suggests that the absence of dystrophin does not have any effect on myogenesis.
Vocalization and intrusion of r in English

Deletion and insertion of r in some dialects of English (Home[r] left vs. Wanda arrived) have been dealt with by many researchers (McCarthy 1991, 1993; Halle and Idsardi 1997). As pointed out by Halle and Idsardi, there are two non-trivial difficulties in analyzing r-phenomena. One is the arbitrariness of r-intrusion; that is, why only rs, not others, are inserted after a, ⊃, and ∂. The other is the opacity problem resulting from the interaction of schwa insertion and r-deletion. If schwa insertion takes place between a high glide and a coda r, and the coda r is deleted afterwards, the result of applying these rules to the word fear /fijr/ will be [fij∂]. In this form, the schwa insertion rule becomes opaque since there remains no surface environment for this rule. Such an opacity problem has been considered to be problematic in the standard Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) that is surface-oriented. The primary aim of this article is to provide a unified way of resolving the above two problems. To this end, I adopt an alternative view of r-phenomena, in which r-deletion is treated as r-vocalization (weakening) and r-insertion as glide insertion. Based on these assumptions, a new OT analysis is proposed
The BMP Pathway Participates in Human Naive CD4+ T Cell Activation and Homeostasis

Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs) form a group of secreted factors that belongs to the TGF-β superfamily. Among different roles in a number of immune cell types, BMPs are known to regulate T cell development within the thymus, although the role of BMP signaling in human mature T cells remains elusive. In this study, we demonstrate that canonical BMP signaling is necessary during two critical events that regulate the size and function of human naive CD4+ T cell population: activation and homeostasis. Upon stimulation via TCR, naive CD4+ T cells upregulate the expression of BMP ligands triggering canonical BMP signaling in CD25+ cells. Blockade of BMP signaling severely impairs CD4+ T cell proliferation after activation mainly through regulation of IL-2, since the addition of this cytokine recuperates normal T cell expansion after inhibition of BMP signaling. Similarly, activation of canonical BMP pathway is required for both the maintenance of cell survival and the homeostatic proliferation induced by IL-7, a key factor for T cell homeostasis. Moreover, upregulation of two critical receptors for T cell homeostasis, CXCR4 and CCR9, triggered by IL-7 is also abrogated in the absence of BMP signaling. Collectively, we describe important roles of the canonical BMP signaling in human naive CD4+ T cell activation and homeostasis that could be valuable for clinical application.
Kourtzi Cortex Neural Coding of Global Form in the Human Visual

[PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , May 31, 2013; 13 (6): . J Vis Andrea Pavan, Rosilari Bellacosa Marotti and George Mather between orientation and optic flow signals Motion-form interactions beyond the motion integration level: Evidence for interactions [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , January 4, 2013; 13 (1): . J Vis Allison M. McKendrick and Josephine Battista Perceptual learning of contour integration is not compromised in the elderly [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , March , 2013; 23 (3): 629-637. Cereb. Cortex Mark D. Lescroart and Irving Biederman Cortical Representation of Medial Axis Structure [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , December 11, 2013; 33 (50): 19695-19703. J. Neurosci. Jeremy Freeman, David J. Heeger and Elisha P. Merriam Coarse-Scale Biases for Spirals and Orientation in Human Visual Cortex [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February 21, 2014; 14 (2): . J Vis Eric Feczko, Gordon L. Shulman, Steven E. Petersen and John R. Pruett, Jr. visual masking but not adaptation Interactions between concentric form-from-structure and face perception revealed by
Integral sliding mode control for systems with time-varying input and state delays

This paper proposes an integral sliding mode control (ISMC) for a class of linear systems with time-varying state and input delays. An integral sliding surface is firstly constructed. Then, by using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and some specified matrices, a sufficient condition is obtained in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to ensure the sliding mode dynamics to be asymptotically stable. Furthermore, a sliding mode controller law is synthesized to guarantee that the system trajectories can be driven onto the specified sliding surface in a finite time and maintained there for all subsequent time. Finally, an inverted pendulum model is used to illustrate the advantages and effectiveness of the design method.
Development and characterization of pH responsive polymeric nanoparticles of SN-38 for colon cancer

Abstract 7-Ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin (SN-38) is 1000 times more cytotoxic than its prodrug Irinotecan hydrochloride (CPT-11). It is not used therapeutically because of its insolubility in acceptable solvents. The objective of the present study was to prepare chitosan nanoparticles (CsENP) of SN-38 by polyelectrolyte complexation method using the Box-Behnken design. CsENPs were evaluated for mean particle size, drug loading, entrapment efficiency and characterized by TEM, XRD, DSC and FTIR. The actual values represented good agreement with predicted values. Drug release behavior in simulated colonic fluid followed Higuchi kinetics. CsENPs were stable and can be used further for treatment of colon cancer by oral route.
Depth Camera Based on Color-Coded Aperture

In this paper we present a single-lens single-frame passive depth sensor based on conventional imaging system with minor hardware modifications. It is based on colorcoded aperture approach and has high light-efficiency which allows capturing images even with handheld devices with small cameras. The sensor measures depth in millimeters in the whole frame, in contrast to prior-art approaches. Contributions of this paper are: (1) introduction of novel light-efficient coded aperture designs and corresponding algorithm modification, (2) depth sensor calibration procedure and disparity to depth conversion method, (3) a number of color-coded aperture based depth sensor implementations including a DSLR based prototype, a smartphone based prototype and a compact camera based prototype, (4) applications including real-time 3D scene reconstruction and depth based image effects.
Algebraic laws for nondeterminism and concurrency

Since a nondeterministic and concurrent program may, in general, communicate repeatedly with its environment, its meaning cannot be presented naturally as an input/output function (as is often done in the denotational approach to semantics). In this paper, an alternative is put forth. First, a definition is given of what it is for two programs or program parts to be equivalent for all observers; then two program parts are said to be observation congruent if they are, in all program contexts, equivalent. The behavior of a program part, that is, its meaning, is defined to be its observation congruence class. The paper demonstrates, for a sequence of simple languages expressing finite (terminating) behaviors, that in each case observation congruence can be axiomatized algebraically. Moreover, with the addition of recursion and another simple extension, the algebraic language described here becomes a calculus for writing and specifying concurrent programs and for proving their properties.
Supervisory approaches and paradoxes in managing telecommuting implementation

Voluntary telecommuting is an increasingly prevalent flexible work practice, typically offered to assist employees with managing work— family demands. Most organizations with telecommuting policies rely on supervisor discretion regarding policy access and implementation in their department. Although supervisors' approaches have implications for telecommuters and their non-telecommuting co-workers, few studies integrate these stakeholder perspectives. Drawing on surveys and interviews with 90 dyads of supervisors and subordinates, some of whom were telecommuters and some of whom were not, we examine effective managerial approaches regarding telecommuting implementation. First, supervisors should stay in close contact with telecommuters, but this contact should emphasize sharing information rather than close monitoring of work schedules. Telecommuters supervised with an information-sharing approach were more likely to report lower work—family conflict, increased performance, and were more likely to help co-workers. Second, supervisors should encourage telecommuting employees to separate work and family boundaries, which is related to lower work—family conflict. However, supervisors face a paradox as a separation approach can negatively affect workgroup relations: telecommuters who are encouraged to create boundaries between work and family were less likely to extend themselves in crunch times or after hours to help their colleagues. Non-telecommuters' workload and work—family conflict may increase as a result.
THE INFLUENCE OF " BIG FIVE FACTORS" ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL- BEING OF RETIREES IN A LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF ONDO - STATE.

The survey study examined the influence of the big five factors (extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and openness) on psychological well-being of 250 retirees in Akure, Ondo state, Nigeria. The ex-post facto design was employed using structured questionnaires. Finding indicated that the predictor variables jointly predicted psychological well-being of retirees F (5,238) = 4.215, p <. 001. Conscientiousness and openness as stated in the first hypothesis independently predicted psychological well-being of retirees (β = - 0.322, t = - 4.068, p<.001 and β = - 0.210, t = - 3.062, p<.01) respectively. The second hypothesis which tested marital status difference in psychological well-being was confirmed with divorced retirees experienced negative psychological well-being than widow/(er), single and married F (3, 240) = 4.74, p<. 01). Finally, gender difference on dimension of psychological well-being was confirmed with males scoring higher on somatic symptoms than females t (242) = 2.64, p<. 01. These findings were discussed in line with existing literature and recommendations made.
Long-lived and adaptive atomic snapshot and immediate snapshot (extended abstract)

Long-lived and adaptive to point contention implementations of snapshot and immediate snapshot objects in the read/write shared-memory model are presented. In [2] we presented adaptive algorithms for mutual exclusion, collect and snapshot. However, the collect and snapshot algorithms were adaptive only when the number of local primitive operations that a process performs are ignored, i.e., not counted. The number of primitive local steps (operations that do not access the shared memory) in the collect and snapshot operations presented in [2] is <italic>O</italic>(<italic>Nk</italic><supscrpt>3</supscrpt>) and <italic>O</italic>(<italic>Nk</italic><supscrpt>4</supscrpt>) respectively where <italic>N</italic> is the total number of processes in the system and <italic>k</italic> is the encountered contention. Here we developed new techniques that enabled us to achieve fully adaptive implementations in which the step complexity (combined local and shared) of any operation is bounded by a function of the number of processes that are concurrent with the operation, in particular, <italic>O</italic>(<italic>k</italic><supscrpt>4</supscrpt>) for the snapshot implementation.
Educating Critical Professionals

Abstract To promote student learning towards responsible self‐directed learning, teachers need to see themselves as critical, ethical professionals who are willing and capable of taking charge of their own professional growth. The concepts of reflection and research, which are seen as essential components of professional development, are examined in four studies concerned with the different stages of the teacher's career development: preservice, induction, and in‐service teacher education. It is suggested that educating critical professionals is a matter of developing simultaneously both the preservice and in‐service teacher education contents and processes by aiming towards a new paradigm in educational philosophy and pedagogy.