Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Posterior Fossa Exploration for Trigeminal Neuralgia Patients Older Than 70 Years of Age

BACKGROUND Patients with medically unresponsive trigeminal neuralgia (TN) who are >70 years of age often undergo operations that typically provide pain relief for <5 years despite having a life expectancy that can exceed 15 years. OBJECTIVE To review the safety and efficacy of posterior fossa exploration (PFE) for TN patients > 70 years of age. METHODS From 1999 to 2009, 67 TN patients >70 years of age (median, 74 years) underwent a PFE. Thirty-seven patients (55%) had failed ≥1 prior surgeries (median, 2). Fifty-nine patients (88%) had a microvascular decompression, and 8 patients (12%) underwent a partial sensory rhizotomy. Follow-up (median, 40 months) was censored at the time of last contact (n = 51), additional surgery (n = 12), or death (n = 4). RESULTS Complete pain relief (no pain, no medications) was 87% at 1 year and 78% at 5 years. Facial pain outcomes did not correlate with patient age, sex, prior surgery, or pain duration. Postoperative complications were noted in 10 patients (15%) and included ataxia (10%), hearing loss (5%), trigeminal dysesthesias (5%), facial weakness (3%), aseptic meningitis (2%), and pulmonary embolus (2%). Factors associated with postoperative complications were prior PFE (P = .01) and neurovascular compression from a dolicoectatic basilar artery (P = .03). CONCLUSION Posterior fossa exploration is safe and effective for physiologically healthy TN patients >70 years of age. It should be deferred in older patients with TN secondary to a dolicoectatic basilar artery and patients who have persistent/recurrent pain after a previous PFE unless simpler procedures prove ineffective at controlling their facial pain.
Changes in expression and distribution of claudin 2, 5 and 8 lead to discontinuous tight junctions and barrier dysfunction in active Crohn’s disease

Background: Epithelial barrier function is impaired in Crohn’s disease. Aim: To define the underlying cellular mechanisms with special attention to tight junctions. Methods: Biopsy specimens from the sigmoid colon of patients with mild to moderately active or inactive Crohn’s disease were studied in Ussing chambers, and barrier function was determined by impedance analysis and conductance scanning. Tight junction structure was analysed by freeze fracture electron microscopy, and tight junction proteins were investigated immunohistochemically by confocal laser scanning microscopy and quantified in immunoblots. Epithelial apoptosis was analysed in terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphate nick-end labelling and 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole staining. Results: Patients with active Crohn’s disease showed an impaired intestinal barrier function as indicated by a distinct reduction in epithelial resistance. As distribution of conductivity was even, focal epithelial lesions (eg, microerosions) did not contribute to barrier dysfunction. Instead, freeze fracture electron microscopy analysis showed reduced and discontinuous tight junction strands. Occludin and the sealing tight junction proteins claudin 5 and claudin 8 were downregulated and redistributed off the tight junction, whereas the pore-forming tight junctions protein claudin 2 was strongly upregulated, which constitute the molecular basis of tight junction changes. Other claudins were unchanged (claudins 1, 4 and 7) or not detectable in sigmoid colon (claudins 11, 12, 14, 15 and 16). Claudin 2 upregulation was less pronounced in active Crohn’s disease compared with active ulcerative colitis and was inducible by tumour necrosis factor α. As a second source of impaired barrier function, epithelial apoptosis was distinctly increased in active Crohn’s disease (mean (SD) 5.2 (0.5)% v 1.9 (0.2)% in control). By contrast, barrier function, tight junction proteins and apoptosis were unaffected in Crohn’s disease in remission. Conclusion: Upregulation of pore-forming claudin 2 and downregulation and redistribution of sealing claudins 5 and 8 lead to altered tight junction structure and pronounced barrier dysfunction already in mild to moderately active Crohn’s disease.
HybMig: A Hybrid Approach to Dynamic Plan Migration for Continuous Queries

In data stream environments, the initial plan of a long-running query may gradually become inefficient due to changes of the data characteristics. In this case, the query optimizer generates a more efficient plan based on the current statistics. The online transition from the old to the new plan is called dynamic plan migration. In addition to correctness, an effective technique for dynamic plan migration should achieve the following objectives: 1) minimize the memory and CPU overhead of the migration, 2) reduce the duration of the transition, and 3) maintain a steady output rate. The only known solutions for this problem are the moving states (MS) and parallel track (PT) strategies, which have some serious shortcomings related to the above objectives. Motivated by these shortcomings, we first propose HybMig, which combines the merits of MS and PT and outperforms both in every aspect. As a second step, we extend PT, MS, and HybMig to the general problem of migration, where both the new and the old plans are treated as black boxes
SYDE 676 Project Report – Fall 2002 Web Document Clustering Using Phrase-based Document Similarity

Measuring the similarity between documents is an essential operation in text mining, especially document clustering. The traditional method of finding the similarity between documents has always been based on extracting individual words from the documents, and using heuristics to give weights to those features. Standard methods in data mining are then used to find the similarity between documents using such features. In this project an information theoretic-based similarity measure is derived based on shared phrases between documents, rather than individual words. The basic concept is finding a metric that makes use of phrases rather than individual words. Two pairwise document similarity measures are proposed, one is corpus-dependent, and the other is corpus-independent. The corpus-independent measure allows for incremental processing of documents. Only the corpus-independent measure was evaluated in this report. The similarity measure is used for clustering web documents, which proved to have superior accuracy over traditional similarity measures. Evaluation of the clustering is performed based on Information Theory measures, specifically using the F-measure and Entropy.
Finiteness Properties of Database Queries

We investigate the problem of checking whether the number of derivation trees of a Datalog program with duplicate semantics is nite or not. We show that given a safe stratiied query and an edb, it is possible to check, in polynomial time, whether the query has a nite number of derivation trees. However, it is undecidable to check whether a safe stratiied query has a nite number of derivation trees for every possible edb. We identify two classes of queries for which checking niteness over all edbs is decidable. We also deene duplicate semantics for Datalog (and thereby for the newly proposed variants of recursive SQL) queries with stratiied negation. Since evaluation involving counting of duplicates may not terminate in recursive SQL, this problem is of signiicant practical importance.
Public hospital spending in England: evidence from National Health Service administrative records

Health spending per capita in England has more than doubled since 1997, yet relatively little is known about how that spending is distributed across the population. This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England. We describe how costs vary across the lifecycle, and the concentration of spending among people and over time. We find that costs per person start to increase after age 50 and escalate after age 70. Spending is highly concentrated in a small section of the population: with 32% of all hospital spending accounted for by 1% of the general population, and 18% of spending by 1% of all patients. There is persistence in spending over time with patients with high spending more likely to have spending in subsequent years, and those with zero expenditures more likely to remain out of hospital.
Communication-less Aerial Co-Manipulation with Cables and the Fundamental role of Internal Force

This paper considers the study of cooperative manipulation of a cable-suspended load with two aerial robots and without explicit communication. The role of the internal force for the asymptotic stability of the beam-position/beam-attitude equilibria is analyzed in depth. Using a nonlinear Lyapunov-based approach, we prove that if a non-zero internal force is chosen then asymptotic stabilization of any desired beam-pose configuration can be achieved with a decentralized and communication-less master-slave admittance controller. If, conversely, a zero internal force is chosen, as done in the majority of the state-of-the-art algorithms, the attitude of the beam is not controllable without communication. Non-zero internal force can be interpreted then as a fundamental factor that enables the use of cables as implicit communication means between the two aerial vehicles in replacement of the explicit ones. Furthermore, the formal proof of the system output-strictly passivity with respect to an energy-like storage function and a certain input-output pair is given. This proves the stability and the robustness of the method even during motion. The theoretical findings are validated through numerical simulations with added noise and realistic uncertainty.
Anterior subaxial cervical spine fixation using a plate with single screw per vertebral body: a simple and efficient construct - clinical series and a cadaver study.

OBJECTIVE To report our experience with a novel construct for traumatic and nontraumatic cervical spine lesions that was validated by biomechanical studies of cadaver cervical spine. STUDY DESIGN Consecutive cases of anterior cervical spine fixation performed over six years reviewed for stability offered by a construct comprising of a plate fixed by a single screw to each vertebral body. SETTING A university hospital and a biomechanical lab. MATERIALS AND METHODS Data were coded and entered into a statistical worksheet for multivariate analysis. Cadaver spine models applied for biomechanical study of stability. RESULTS Total of 103 cases reviewed; 86 with single-level disease; traumatic in 66 (64%) cases and degenerative in 33 (32%) cases, including hard disks, OPLL, and spondylitis (4% with other causes). Fixation was with diskectomy in 59 and with corpectomy in 40. A bone graft was utilized for fusion in 87 and a bone-filled titanium spacer in 13. A single screw was placed in each vertebral body with a locking plate (having linear arrangement of holes). This construct remained strong in 95% of cases at the end of 6-24 months. Five cases failed requiring reoperation. Five patients with cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) died. On statistical analysis, construct was stronger with diskectomy compared with corpectomy. Construct used on cadavers confirmed the biomechanical stability in short segment fixation (C5-6). CONCLUSION A conservative construct utilizing a single screw per vertebral body and a one-holed plate system appears to be strong enough to afford stability in both traumatic and nontraumatic lesions of subaxial cervical spine, comparable to others.
A multiple testing correction method for genetic association studies using correlated single nucleotide polymorphisms

Multiple testing is a challenging issue in genetic association studies using large numbers of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers, many of which exhibit linkage disequilibrium (LD). Failure to adjust for multiple testing appropriately may produce excessive false positives or overlook true positive signals. The Bonferroni method of adjusting for multiple comparisons is easy to compute, but is well known to be conservative in the presence of LD. On the other hand, permutation‐based corrections can correctly account for LD among SNPs, but are computationally intensive. In this work, we propose a new multiple testing correction method for association studies using SNP markers. We show that it is simple, fast and more accurate than the recently developed methods and is comparable to permutation‐based corrections using both simulated and real data. We also demonstrate how it might be used in whole‐genome association studies to control type I error. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method make it an attractive choice for multiple testing adjustment when there is high intermarker LD in the SNP data set. Genet. Epidemiol. 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A configurable medium access control protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 networks

This paper presents the new design of C-MAC, a highly configurable, low-overhead Medium Access Control protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. This new design was developed within EPOSMote, a project targeted at enabling application-specific deployment scenarios for IEEE 802.15. 4 networks. The new C-MAC arose from a careful decomposition of several preexisting MAC protocols aiming at obtaining their state machines. These individual state machines were subsequently merged into a generalized one and captured as a component framework that can be specialized to produce a large variety of application-specific protocols. The framework was implemented in C++ using static metaprogramming techniques, thus ensuring that configurability does not come at expense of performance or code size. The experimental results presented in the paper corroborate the new design with figures comparable to non-configurable, platform-optimized implementations.
Combined effects of FLT3 and NF‐κB selective inhibitors on acute myeloid leukemia in vivo

FMS‐like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3) is an independent poor prognostic marker of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and strategies that specifically target FLT3 are therefore of substantial interest. However, previous studies with FLT3 inhibitors as single agents in patients with AML showed few clinical responses. In the present study, combined effects of FLT3 selective inhibitor (SC‐203048) and NF‐κB selective inhibitor (Parthenolide, PTL) on AML xenograft tumor growth in vivo were examined, and the possible antitumor mechanisms by which SC‐203048 and PTL affect AML xenograft tumor growth were also detected. Results showed that the tumor growth was strongly inhibited, and increased cell apoptosis was also observed after treatments, especially in the combination group; meanwhile, the expressions of FLT3, p65, cyclin D1, and Bc1‐2 decreased significantly, and the expression of nuclear Silencing mediator for retinoic acid and thyroid hormone receptors (SMRT) increased notably. All results indicate that synergism exists between FLT3 and NF‐κB inhibitors, and inhibitors combination treatment may be a potential strategy for AML. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biochem Mol Toxicol 26:35–43 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/jbt.20411
Optical characterization of photopolymer material using λ=532nm and investigation into future use at λ=850nm and λ=1300nm

The propagation of a light beam through a photo-sensitive photopolymer Polyvinyl Alcohol/Acrylamide (PVA/AA), and the creation of self-written waveguides (SWWs), has received much attention. Here we explore the manufacture and characterization of SWWs in PVA/AA for applications at near infrared communication wavelengths 850nm and 1300nm. The SWWs are fabricated using visible light at wavelength 532nm. The insertion and optical loss of the SWWs at different wavelengths will be interrogated. An optical loss and attenuation profile is to be built up for each of the three wavelengths as they propagate down the resulting SWWs.
Multiagent approach to the distributed autonomous explorations

The problem of development and application of the multiagent techniques for organizing mobile exploring agents' cooperative behavior is examined. The main problems related to design and operating of distributed decentralized homogeneous multi-agent systems with restricted local interaction between agents are analyzed. A number of collective behavior models (algorithmic, interpolational, entropic), which discover the problems of distributed decentralized exploration are proposed.
Simulation of SAW Humidity Sensors Based on (112¯0)ZnO/R-Sapphire Structures

The characteristics of two types of surface acoustic waves SAWs (Rayleigh waves and Love waves) propagating in bilayered structures of (112¯0)ZnO/R-sapphire are simulated by a finite element method (FEM) model, in which both SAWs have crossed propagation directions. Furthermore, based on the bilayered structures, the frequency responses of Rayleigh wave and Love wave humidity sensors are also simulated. Meanwhile, the frequency shifts, insertion loss changes and then the sensitivities of both humidity sensors induced by the adsorbed water layer perturbations, including the mechanical and electrical factors, are calculated numerically. Generally, the characteristics and performances of both sensors are strongly dependent on the thickness of the ZnO films. By appropriate selecting the ratio of the film thickness to SAW wavelength for each kind of the sensors, the performances of both sensors can be optimized.
Arrhenius analysis of the relationship between hyperthermia and Hsp70 promoter activation: A comparison between ex vivo and in vivo data

Purpose: Tight regulation of gene expression in the region where therapy is necessary and for the duration required to achieve a therapeutic effect and to minimise systemic toxicity is very important for clinical applications of gene therapy. Hyperthermia in combination with a temperature sensitive heat shock protein (Hsp70) promoter presents a unique approach allowing non-invasive spatio-temporal control of transgene expression. In this study we investigated the in vivo and ex vivo relationship between temperature and duration of thermal stress with respect to the resulting gene expression using an Arrhenius analysis. Materials and methods: A transgenic mouse expressing the luciferase reporter gene under the transcriptional control of a thermosensitive promoter was used to assure identical genotype for in vivo (mouse leg) and ex vivo (bone marrow mononuclear and embryonic fibroblast cells) studies. The mouse leg and cells were heated at different temperatures and different exposure times. Bioluminescence imaging and in vitro enzymatic assay were used to measure the resulting transgene expression. Results: We showed that temperature-induced Hsp70 promoter activation was modulated by both temperature as well as duration of hyperthermia. The relationship between temperature and duration of hyperthermia and the resulting reporter gene expression can be modelled by an Arrhenius analysis for both in vivo as well as ex vivo. Conclusions: However, the increase in reporter gene expression after elevating the temperature of the thermal stress with 1°C is not comparable for in vivo and ex vivo situations. This information may be valuable for optimising clinical gene therapy protocols.
QuickView in small-bowel capsule endoscopy is useful in certain clinical settings, but QuickView with Blue Mode is of no additional benefit

Background Analysis of small-bowel capsule endoscopy (SBCE) is time-consuming. QuickView (QV) has been added to the RAPID software to reduce the reading times. However, its validity is still under intense review. Recently, we have shown that Blue Mode (BM) provides improvements in images for most lesion categories. Aim To assess the validity of QuickView with white light (QVWL) and QuickView with Blue Mode (QVBM) reading, in a group of patients who underwent SBCE in our centre, by comparing it with the standard video sequence review (used as reference) by experienced SBCE readers. Methods This was a retrospective study; all SBCE (August 2008–November 2011), performed with PillCam SB, with complete small-bowel visualization were included. A clinician with previous SBCE experience, unaware of the SBCE reports, reviewed prospectively the video streams on RAPID platform using QVWL and QVBM. All SBCE had been reported previously using the standard mode; these reports were considered as the reference. There were 106 cases of obscure gastrointestinal bleeding (OGIB), 81 cases of known or suspected Crohn’s disease (CD) and 10 cases of polyposis syndromes. Results The mean small-bowel evaluation was 475 (±270) s and 450 (±156) s for QVWL and QVBM, respectively. In the OGIB (n=106; 21 overt/85 occult), with QVWL, 54 [P0 (28), P1 (18), P2 (8)] lesions were detected, 63 [P0 (48), P1 (13), P2 (2)] with QVBM, as compared with 98 [P0 (67), P1 (23), P2 (8)] by standard (reference) reporting. For P1+P2 lesions, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value for QVWL (as compared with reference reporting) were 92.3, 96.3, 96 and 92.8%, respectively. For QVBM, the above values were 91, 96, 96.2 and 90.6%, respectively. Eighty-one (n=81) patients underwent SBCE for small-bowel evaluation on the basis of a clinical history of suspected or known CD. With QVWL, 71 mucosal ulcers were detected, 68 with QVBM, as compared with 155 mucosal ulcers with reference reading. Finally, in the polyposis category with QVWL and QVBM, four polypoid lesions were detected compared with seven with standard (reference) review. Conclusion QV can be used confidently in OGIB in an urgent inpatient setting and in outpatients with occult OGIB or suspected CD. Furthermore, BM does not confer any additional advantage in the QV setting. Standard review settings should be used in all other cases.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Abstmct-In this correspondence, we show how to recover the motion of an observer relative to a planar surface from image brightness derivatives. We do not compute the optical flow as an intermediate step, only the spatial and temporal brightness gradients (at a minimum of eight points). We first present two iterative schemes for solving nine nonlinear equations in terms of the motion and surface parameters that are derived from a least-squares fomulation. An initial pass over the relevant image region is wed to accumulate a number of moments of the image brightness derivatives. All of the quantities used in the iteration are efficiently computed from these totals without the need to refer back to the image. We then show that either of two possible solutions can be obtained in closed form. We first solve a linear matrix equation for the elements of a 3 x 3 matrix. The eigenvalue decomposition of the symmetric part of the matrix is then used to compute the motion parameters and the plane orientation. A new compact notation allows us to show easily that there are at most two planar solutions.