Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anti-Müllerian Hormone as a Sensitive Marker of Ovarian Function in Young Cancer Survivors

We evaluated ovarian function by measuring the levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH), estradiol, and gonadotropins in 83 young women treated for cancer during childhood and adolescence, and classified according to post-treatment gonadal toxicity versus 38 healthy females. Results. The mean AMH values were lower in the entire cohort independently of the risk group as compared to the control, whereas FSH was elevated only in the high risk group. The lowest AMH values were noted in patients after bone marrow transplantation (BMT) and those treated for Hodgkin lymphoma (HL). Nineteen patients (22.9%) had elevated FSH. They all had low AMH values. Lowered AMH values (but with normal FSH and LH) were observed in 43 patients (51.8%). There was no effect of age at the time of treatment (before puberty, during or after puberty) on AMH levels. Conclusion. Our results show the utility of AMH measurement as a sensitive marker of a reduced ovarian reserve in young cancer survivors. Patients after BMT and patients treated for HL, independently of age at treatment (prepuberty or puberty), are at the highest risk of gonadal damage and early menopause.
Channel estimation using implicit training

In this paper, a new method to perform channel estimation is presented. It is shown that accurate estimation can be obtained when a training sequence is actually arithmetically added to the information data as opposed to being placed in a separate empty time slot: hence, the word "implicit. " A closed-form solution for the estimation variance is derived, as well as the Cramer-Rao lower bound. Conditions are derived for the training sequences that result in a channel estimation performance that is independent of the channel characteristics. In addition, estimation performance is shown to be independent of the modulation format. A procedure to synthesize optimal training sequences is presented, and the problem of synchronization is solved. The performance of the algorithm is then compared with other methods that use explicit training under GSM-like environmental conditions, and the new algorithm is shown to be competitive with these. Finally, comparisons are also carried out against blind methods over realistic bandlimited channels, and these show that the new method exhibits good performance.
Ethnography and environmental education: understanding the relationships between schools and communities in Costa Rica

Environmental education has been at the centre of international and national policies of sustainable development for the last several decades, and has stimulated debate regarding both its inclusion in curricula and proposed methods for its implementation. Research has given critical attention to diverse theories and practices of environmental education, but has tended to take a narrow methodological focus on specific curricula and policies or on activities within strictly delineated sites such as classrooms or natural areas. In contrast, this research is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in a rural community in Costa Rica, and argues that using a wider ethnographic approach allows for a fuller exploration of the ways in which environmental education programming is negotiated and practised.
Serotonin 2B Receptor Antagonism Prevents Heritable Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension

Serotonergic anorexigens are the primary pharmacologic risk factor associated with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), and the resulting PAH is clinically indistinguishable from the heritable form of disease, associated with BMPR2 mutations. Both BMPR2 mutation and agonists to the serotonin receptor HTR2B have been shown to cause activation of SRC tyrosine kinase; conversely, antagonists to HTR2B inhibit SRC trafficking and downstream function. To test the hypothesis that a HTR2B antagonist can prevent BMRP2 mutation induced PAH by restricting aberrant SRC trafficking and downstream activity, we exposed BMPR2 mutant mice, which spontaneously develop PAH, to a HTR2B antagonist, SB204741, to block the SRC activation caused by BMPR2 mutation. SB204741 prevented the development of PAH in BMPR2 mutant mice, reduced recruitment of inflammatory cells to their lungs, and reduced muscularization of their blood vessels. By atomic force microscopy, we determined that BMPR2 mutant mice normally had a doubling of vessel stiffness, which was substantially normalized by HTR2B inhibition. SB204741 reduced SRC phosphorylation and downstream activity in BMPR2 mutant mice. Gene expression arrays indicate that the primary changes were in cytoskeletal and muscle contractility genes. These results were confirmed by gel contraction assays showing that HTR2B inhibition nearly normalizes the 400% increase in gel contraction normally seen in BMPR2 mutant smooth muscle cells. Heritable PAH results from increased SRC activation, cellular contraction, and vascular resistance, but antagonism of HTR2B prevents SRC phosphorylation, downstream activity, and PAH in BMPR2 mutant mice.
Memristive Threshold Logic Circuit Design of Fast Moving Object Detection

Real-time detection of moving objects involves memorization of features in the template image and their comparison with those in the test image. At high sampling rates, such techniques face the problems of high algorithmic complexity and component delays. We present a new resistive switching-based threshold logic cell which encodes the pixels of a template image. The cell comprises a voltage divider circuit that programs the resistances of the memristors arranged in a single-node threshold logic network, and the output is encoded as a binary value by using a CMOS inverter gate. When a test image is applied to the template-programmed cell, a mismatch in the respective pixels is seen as a change in the output voltage of the cell. The proposed cell when compared with CMOS equivalent implementation shows improved performance in area, leakage power, power dissipation, and delay.
Bromophenols in Marine Algae and Their Bioactivities

Marine algae contain various bromophenols that have been shown to possess a variety of biological activities, including antioxidant, antimicrobial, anticancer, anti-diabetic, and anti-thrombotic effects. Here, we briefly review the recent progress of these marine algal biomaterials, with respect to structure, bioactivities, and their potential application as pharmaceuticals.
Bronchial reacutization and gastroesophageal reflux: is there a potential clinical correlation?

BACKGROUND Pepsin plays a role in gastroesophageal reflux (GER). Aims of this study were to verify if pepsin could be the cause of frequent bronchial exacerbations and to check if the persistence of chronic respiratory symptoms were correlated with pre-existing respiratory diseases. METHODS From January to May 2016, 42 patients underwent a diagnostic bronchoscopy. All patients had a history of at least one bronchial exacerbation during the previous year. Bronchial lavage fluid specimens were obtained. A semiquantitative assessment of pepsin in the samples was carried out based on the intensity of the test sample. RESULTS Pepsin was present in 37 patients (88%), but in patients with bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the finding of pepsin in the bronchoalveolar fluid was 100%. There was a strong positive statistical correlation between pepsin detection and radiological signs of GER (ρ=0.662), and between pepsin detection and diagnosis (ρ=0.682). No correlation was found between the bacteriology and the presence of pepsin in the airways (ρ=0.006). CONCLUSIONS The presence of pepsin in the airways shows the occurrence of reflux. The persistence of respiratory symptoms by at least 2 months suggest an endoscopic bronchial examination. This straightforward test confirms the cause possible irritation of the airways and may prevent further diagnostic tests, such as an EGD or pH monitoring esophageal.
Professing Reform While Seeking Acceptance: The Dilemmas of Teaching Accelerated Courses in Higher Education

Abstract This article describes the findings of a qualitative study that investigated the perceptions and views of faculty teaching adult accelerated courses. The analysis of the data revealed two overarching themes relating to the incorporation of innovative practice. It was discovered that these experienced faculty members all came to see their teaching in a different light. However, as they experimented and adopted new approaches, they also experienced intense professional isolation from their colleagues. We explore the meaning that these faculty members ascribe to their participation in an innovative program and the impact that these innovations have on faculty life.
Cryptanalysis of an efficient three‐party password‐based key exchange scheme

Three‐party password‐authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols allow entities to negotiate a secret session key with the aid of a trusted server with whom they share a human‐memorable password. Recently, Lou and Huang proposed a simple 3PAKE protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography, which is claimed to be secure and to provide superior efficiency when compared with similar‐purpose solutions. In this paper, however, we show that the solution is vulnerable to key‐compromise impersonation and offline password guessing attacks from system insiders or outsiders, which indicates that the empirical approach used to evaluate the scheme's security is flawed. These results highlight the need of employing provable security approaches when designing and analyzing PAKE schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fluoroscopy-guided sacroplasty: special focus on preoperative planning from three-dimensional computed tomography

Background: Osteoporotic sacral insufficiency fractures are usually spontaneous or caused by discrete traumas. The fluoroscopic anatomy of the sacrum can be difficult to understand, and this is why sacroplasty is considered more challenging than ordinary vertebroplasties. Purpose: To demonstrate the planning of the procedure and the effectiveness of treatment with sacroplasty by means of three-dimensional computed tomography (3D CT) by combining multiplanar reconstructions (MPR) and volume-rendering technique (VRT). Material and Methods: Five elderly, osteoporotic patients with intense pelvic and hip pain underwent weeks of inconclusive clinical and radiological diagnostic efforts. Correct diagnosis was finally attained with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and CT. Plain radiographs rarely show fractures, and MR or CT examinations are necessary to demonstrate longitudinal fractures. The procedures were performed with digital biplane equipment using preoperative 3D CT planning procedures. Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) was injected to fill the fracture sites. Results: The fractures were successfully treated with sacroplasty using PMMA. A new technique, which involves placing the needles along the long axis of the sacrum, was optimized to the individual patients’ fractures and sacral anatomy by meticulous planning on a workstation with 3D CT data sets. It was technically successful in all five cases. Four of the five patients had sustained pain relief. Conclusion: Sacral insufficiency fractures are not uncommon and should be considered in the elderly population with low back pain. Sacroplasty using the optimized “long-axis technique” gave almost immediate pain relief for all five patients in our study material. No complications were observed.
The effect of low‐mass substructures on the cusp lensing relation

It has been argued that the flux anomalies detected in gravitationally lensed quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) are evidence for substructures in the foreground lensing haloes. In this paper, we investigate this issue in greater detail, focusing on the cusp relation which corresponds to images of a source located to the cusp of the inner caustic curve. We use numerical simulations combined with a Monte Carlo approach to study the effects of the expected power-law distribution of substructures within A cold dark matter (ACDM) haloes on the multiple images. Generally, the high number of anomalous flux ratios in the cusp configurations is unlikely to be explained by 'simple' perturbers (subhaloes) inside the lensing galaxy, modelled by either point masses or extended Navarro, Frenk & White subhaloes. We considered in our analysis a mass range of 10 5 -10 7 M ⊙ for the subhaloes. We also demonstrate that including the effects of the surrounding mass distribution, such as other galaxies close to the primary lens, does not change the results. We conclude that triple images of lensed QSOs do not show any direct evidence for dark dwarf galaxies such as CDM substructure.
Absorption Line Survey of H3+ toward the Galactic Center Sources. II. Eight Infrared Sources within 30 pc of the Galactic Center

Infrared absorption lines of H+3, including the metastable R(3,3)l line, have been observed toward eight bright infrared sources associated with hot and massive stars located in and between the Galactic center cluster and the Quintuplet cluster 30 pc to the east. The absorption lines with high-velocity dispersion arise in the Galaxy’s central molecular zone (CMZ) as well as in foreground spiral arms. The temperature and density of the gas in the CMZ, as determined from the relative strengths of the H3+ lines, are T = 200–300 K and n ⩽ 50–200 cm−3. The detection of high column densities of H3+ toward all eight stars implies that this warm and diffuse gaseous environment is widespread in the CMZ. The products of the ionization rate and path length for these sight lines are 1000 and 10 times higher than in dense and diffuse clouds in the Galactic disk, respectively, indicating that the ionization rate, ζ, is not less than 10−15 s−1 and that L is at least on the order of 50 pc. The warm and diffuse gas is an important component of the CMZ, in addition to the three previously known gaseous environments: (1) cold molecular clouds observed by radio emission of CO and other molecules; (2) hot (T = 104–106 K) and highly ionized diffuse gas (ne = 10–100 cm−3) seen in radio recombination lines, far infrared atomic lines, and radio-wave scattering; and (3) ultrahot (T = 107–108 K) X-ray emitting plasma. Its prevalence significantly changes the understanding of the environment of the CMZ. The sight line toward GC IRS 3 is unique in showing an additional H3+ absorption component, which is interpreted as being due to either a cloud associated with circumnuclear disk or the “50 km s−1 cloud” known from radio observations. An infrared pumping scheme is examined as a mechanism to populate the (3,3) metastable level in this cloud.
Communication-Free Massively Distributed Graph Generation

Analyzing massive complex networks yields promising insights about our everyday lives. Building scalable algorithms to do so is a challenging task that requires a careful analysis and an extensive evaluation. However, engineering such algorithms is often hindered by the scarcity of publicly available datasets. Network generators serve as a tool to alleviate this problem by providing synthetic instances with controllable parameters. However, many network generators fail to provide instances on a massive scale due to their sequential nature or resource constraints. Additionally, truly scalable network generators are few and often limited in their realism. In this work, we present novel generators for a variety of network models commonly found in practice. By making use of pseudorandomization and divide-and-conquer schemes, our generators follow a communication-free paradigm. The resulting generators are often embarrassingly parallel and have a near optimal scaling behavior. This allows us to generate instances of up to 2^43 vertices and 2^47 edges in less than 22 minutes on 32768 cores. Therefore, our generators allow new graph families to be used on an unprecedented scale.
VgeneRepertoire.org identifies and stores variable genes of immunoglobulins and T-cell receptors from the genomes of jawed vertebrates

The VgeneRepertoire.org platform (http://vgenerepertoire.org) is a new public database repository for variable (V) gene sequences that encode immunoglobulin and T-cell receptor molecules. It identifies the nucleic and amino acid sequences of more than 20,000 genes, providing their exon location in either the contig, scaffold, or chromosome region, as well as locus information for more than 100 jawed vertebrate taxa whose genomes have been sequenced. This web repository provides support to immunologists interested in these molecules and aids in comparative phylogenetic studies.
Consistent Inference in Models Defined by COnditional Moment Restrictions: an Alternative to GMM

This article introduces a unified methodology for estimating and testing nonlinear econometric models defined by conditional moment restrictions. These models are very common in econometrics, such as nonlinear rational expectation models. The current approach for inference in these models is the generalized method of moments (GMM) methodology, as proposed by Hansen and Singleton (1982). Although GMM provides a unified methodology for statistical inference that is simple to implement, it may yield inconsistent statistical procedures because it just employs a finite number of moments. This is a very important theoretical and applied problem, as illustrated by a simplified consumption-based asset pricing model. Contrary to GMM, the methodology proposed in this article delivers consistent statistical procedures because it employs an infinite number of moments that characterizes the conditional moment. In addition, the proposed methodology is widely applicable for general time series data and easy to implement. In particular, the proposed specification test relies on a novel and very simple wild bootstrap procedure.
Robust Tracking With Discriminative Ranking Lists

In this paper, we propose a novel tracking algorithm, i.e., the discriminative ranking list-based tracker (DRLTracker). The DRLTracker models the target object and its local background by using ranking lists of patches of different scales within object bounding boxes. The ranking list of each of such patches is its K nearest neighbors. Patches of the same scale with ranking lists of high purity values (meaning high probabilities to be on the target object) and some confusable background patches constitute the object model under that scale. A pair of object models of two different scales collaborate to determine which patches may belong to the target object in the next frame. The DRLTracker can effectively alleviate the distraction problem, and its superior ability over several representative and state-of-the-art trackers is demonstrated through extensive experiments.
Regular Coalition Formation

In a class of stochastic games of bargaining and coalition formation with nite state space and continuous agreement sets it is shown that in an open, full measure set of parameters there exists a nite, odd number of equilibria (after removing inconsequential multiplicities of equilibrium) and each equilibrium is locally expressible as a smooth function of model parameters. The result implies existence of equilibrium and extends to certain legislative environments.
Max-Margin Invariant Features from Transformed Unlabelled Data

The study of representations invariant to common transformations of the data is important to learning. Most techniques have focused on local approximate invariance implemented within expensive optimization frameworks lacking explicit theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we study kernels that are invariant to a unitary group while having theoretical guarantees in addressing the important practical issue of unavailability of transformed versions of labelled data. A problem we call the Unlabeled Transformation Problem which is a special form of semi-supervised learning and one-shot learning. We present a theoretically motivated alternate approach to the invariant kernel SVM based on which we propose Max-Margin Invariant Features (MMIF) to solve this problem. As an illustration, we design an framework for face recognition and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a large scale semi-synthetic dataset with 153,000 images and a new challenging protocol on Labelled Faces in the Wild (LFW) while out-performing strong baselines.
Empirical Evaluation of CRF-Based Bibliography Extraction from Reference Strings

This paper reports an empirical evaluation of a CRF-based bibliography parser we have developed for reference strings of research papers. The parser uses a conditional random field (CRF) to estimate the correct bibliographic label such as an author's name and a title for each token in a reference string. We applied the parser specifically designed for reference strings to three academic journals, an English one and two Japanese ones, published in Japan. Experiments showed (i) the parser correctly parsed from 90% to 94% of reference strings depending on the kinds of journals used and (ii) segmentation errors induced by tokenization considerably degraded the final parsing accuracies. This paper also discusses some future directions of the bibliography extraction based on a detailed analysis of the experiments.
Target-cell-derived tRNA-like primers for reverse transcription support retroviral infection at low efficiency.

Reverse transcription of a retroviral genome takes place in the cytoplasm of an infected cell by a process primed by a producer-cell-derived tRNA annealed to an 18-nucleotide primer-binding site (PBS). By an assay involving primer complementation of PBS-mutated vectors we analyzed whether tRNA primers derived from the target cell can sustain reverse transcription during murine leukemia virus (MLV) infection. Transduction efficiencies were 4-5 orders of magnitude below those of comparable producer-cell complementations. However, successful usage of a target-cell-derived tRNA primer was proven by cases of correction of single mismatches between Akv-MLV vectors and complementary tRNA primers toward the primer sequence in the integrated vector. Thus, target-cell-derived tRNA-like primers are able to initiate first-strand cDNA synthesis and plus-strand transfer leading to a complete provirus, suggesting that endogenous tRNAs from the infected cell may also have access to the intracellular viral complex at that step of the replication cycle.
Effects of the Manufacturing Process on the Reliability of the Multilayer Structure in MetalMUMPs Actuators: Residual Stresses and Variation of Design Parameters

Potential problems induced by the multilayered manufacturing process pose a serious threat to the long-term reliability of MEMSCAP® actuators under in-service thermal cycling. Damage would initiate and propagate in different material layers because of a large mismatch of their thermal expansions. In this research, residual stresses and variations of design parameters induced by metal multi-user micro electromechanical system processes (MetalMUMPs) were examined to evaluate their effects on the thermal fatigue lifetime of the multilayer structure and, thus, to improve MEMSCAP® design. Since testing in such micro internal structure is difficult to conduct and traditional testing schemes are destructive, a numerical subdomain method based on a finite element technique was employed. Thermomechanical deformation from metal to insulator layers under in-service temperature cycling (obtained from the multiphysics model of the entire actuator, which was validated by experimental and specified analytical solutions) was accurately estimated to define failures with a significant efficiency and feasibility. Simulation results showed that critical failure modes included interface delamination, plastic deformation, micro cracking, and thermal fatigue, similarly to what was concluded in the MEMSCAP® technical report.