Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Usefulness of diffusion-weighted MR imaging in predicting Masaoka-Koga clinical staging of thymic epithelial tumors by using the apparent diffusion coefficient.

Editor: In the October 2014 issue of Radiology, Dr Abdel Razek and colleagues (1) reported on the usefulness of diffusionweighted magnetic resonance (MR) imaging in the differentiation of early (stage I and II) from advanced (stage III and IV) stage thymic epithelial tumors according to the Masaoka-Koga staging system by using the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC). Having an effective imaging biomarker that is able to help differentiate early from advanced stage disease before surgery would be beneficial for determining the treatment strategy because the latter requires neoadjuvant chemotherapy (2,3). Unfortunately, in the present study, this finding is influenced by the low percentage of high-risk thymomas in the early stage disease group (two of nine patients, 22%), which reflects, for this cohort, a strong correlation between Masaoka-Koga staging and the Jeong simplification of the World Health Organization (WHO) classification. Conversely, previous studies with a large sample size demonstrated no correlation between surgical and histologic classification, reporting percentages of high-risk thymomas up to 50% in the early stage disease group (4). Thus, for thymomas, this finding could not be applicable to other cohorts. Furthermore, Dr Abdel Razek and colleagues included in the advanced disease group both thymomas and thymic carcinomas. Because the WHO recognizes thymic carcinomas as a separate entity, we believe that these should be grouped separately. Indeed, thymic carcinomas have different histologic characteristics and a different pathogenesis compared to thymomas, exhibit an aggressive behavior, and occasionally are classified as early stage disease (5). In addition, considering their higher cellular density and atypia compared to high-risk thymomas, in which slight cellular atypia are found in type B3 thymomas, one might expect lower ADCs for thymic carcinomas. Conversely, Dr Abdel Razek and colleagues found similar ADCs between these groups. This finding could be related to a higher overestimation of ADCs for thymic carcinomas compared to thymomas due to neoangiogenesis. Indeed, because Dr Abdel Razek and colleagues included the b = 0 sec/mm2 images for the ADC computation, they did not obtain perfusion-insensitive ADCs and those values were determined also with tissue perfusion that is higher in thymic carcinomas, with a consequent higher perfusion-induced ADC overestimation (from 10.5% to 21% if the volume fraction of flow is 0.10 and the higher b value is 1000 or 500 sec/mm2, respectively) (6–8). Finally, in the Results section, Dr Abdel Razek and colleagues wrongly reported an insignificant P value of . 089 for necrosis between low-risk and high-risk thymomas and/or thymic carcinomas instead of the significant P value of . 014 reported in table 2 and the abstract.
Understanding physiotherapists' roles in ontario primary health care teams.

PURPOSE To understand physiotherapists' roles and how they are enacted within Ontario primary health care (PHC) teams. METHODS Following a pragmatic grounded theory approach, 12 physiotherapists practising within Ontario PHC teams participated in 18 semi-structured in-depth in-person interviews. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim, then entered into NVIVO-8. Coding followed three progressive analytic stages and was iterative in nature, guided by grounded theory. An explanatory scheme was developed. RESULTS Physiotherapists negotiate their place within the PHC teams through five interrelated roles: (1) manager; (2) evaluator; (3) collaborator; (4) educator; and (5) advocate. These five roles are influenced by three contextual layers: (1) inter-professional team; (2) community and population served; and (3) organizational structure and funding. Canada's PHC mandate (access, teams, information, and healthy living) frame the contexts that influence role enactment. CONCLUSIONS To fulfill the PHC mandate, physiotherapists carry out multiple roles that are based on a broad holistic perspective of health, within the context of a collaborative inter-professional team and the community, through an evidenced-informed approach to care. There appear to be multiple ways of successfully integrating physiotherapists within PHC teams, provided that role enactment is context sensitive and congruent with the mandate of PHC.
Visuospatial functions in atypical parkinsonian syndromes

Objectives: Visuospatial deficits have been occasionally reported but never systematically studied in atypical parkinsonian syndromes. The interpretation of existing studies is complicated by the possible influence of motor and frontal executive deficits. Moreover, no attempt has been made to distinguish visuoperceptual from visuospatial tasks. The aim of the present study was to assess visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities in three atypical parkinsonian syndromes while minimising the influence of confounding variables. Methods: Twenty patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA), 43 with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), and 25 with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) as well as 30 healthy age matched controls were examined with the Visual Object and Space Perception Battery (VOSP). Results: Visuospatial functions were intact in MSA patients. PSP patients showed mild deficits related to general cognitive decline and the severity of oculomotor symptoms. The CBD group showed the most pronounced deficits, with spatial tasks more impaired than object based tasks. Performance on object based, but not spatial, tasks was related to general cognitive status. The extent of the visuospatial impairment could not be predicted from disease duration or severity. Conclusion: Visuospatial functions are not consistently impaired in atypical parkinsonian syndromes. The degree and pattern of impairment varies across the diseases, suggesting that the observed deficits could have a different neural basis in each condition. The distinction between the object based (“ventral stream”) and the space oriented (“dorsal stream”) processing might be useful in the interpretation of visuospatial deficits in parkinsonian syndromes, especially in CBD.
Design Space Modeling and Simulation for Physically Constrained 3D CPUs

Design space exploration (DSE) is becoming increasingly complex and 3D integration compounds the problem by imposing a more complex design space. Moreover, 3D design is a new frontier of CPU design, expected to rely more heavily on statistical modeling than designer intuition. Past work has used regression modeling with random sampling of the design space. In this paper we propose a directed simulation technique where intermediate predictions more efficiently direct simulation resources. Our results show over 98% model accuracy while simulating less than 5% of the design space and reducing simulation time more than 4.5x compared to random sampling.
Non-unique differential turbo matrix modulation

We consider differential matrix modulation with forward error control coding and iterative (turbo) detection. Optimized mappings of bits to matrices which allow turbo gains are given for different unitary differential matrix modulation schemes. Particularly, we propose a differential matrix modulation where the number of possible transmit matrices is smaller than the number of possible bit sequences. The ambiguities are resolved in an iterative ("turbo") detector. The proposed scheme enables improved performance compared to existing proposals particularly in the error floor region. Since the number of possible transmit matrices is reduced compared to state of the art schemes, the detection complexity is reduced. Furthermore, the peak to average power ratio is reduced which relaxes the requirements for linearity of amplifiers. The backoff of amplifiers can be reduced which results in lower battery consumption and costs
Markov state model of the two-state behaviour of water.

With the help of a Markov State Model (MSM), two-state behaviour is resolved for two computer models of water in a temperature range from 255 K to room temperature (295 K). The method is first validated for ST2 water, for which the so far strongest evidence for a liquid-liquid phase transition exists. In that case, the results from the MSM can be cross-checked against the radial distribution function g5(r) of the 5th-closest water molecule around a given reference water molecule. The latter is a commonly used local order parameter, which exhibits a bimodal distribution just above the liquid-liquid critical point that represents the low-density form of the liquid (LDL) and the high density liquid. The correlation times and correlation lengths of the corresponding spatial domains are calculated and it is shown that they are connected via a simple diffusion model. Once the approach is established, TIP4P/2005 will be considered, which is the much more realistic representation of real water. The MSM can resolve two-state behavior also in that case, albeit with significantly smaller correlation times and lengths. The population of LDL-like water increases with decreasing temperature, thereby explaining the density maximum at 4 °C along the lines of the two-state model of water.
ImageCLEF@ICPR Contest: Challenges, Methodologies and Results of the Photo Annotation Task

The Photo Annotation Task is performed as one task in the Image CLEF@ICPR contest and poses the challenge to annotate 53 visual concepts in Flickr photos. Altogether 12 research teams met the multilabel classification challenge and submitted solutions. The participants were provided with a training and a validation set consisting of 5,000 and 3,000 annotated images, respectively. The test was performed on 10,000 images. Two evaluation paradigms have been applied, the evaluation per concept and the evaluation per example. The evaluation per concept was performed by calculating the Equal Error Rate and the Area Under Curve (AUC). The evaluation per example utilizes a recently proposed Ontology Score. For the concepts, an average AUC of 86.5% could be achieved, including concepts with an AUC of 96%. The classification performance for each image ranged between 59% and 100% with an average score of 85%.
Carbon Fiber Aerogel Made from Raw Cotton: A Novel, Efficient and Recyclable Sorbent for Oils and Organic Solvents

Twisted carbon fiber (TCF) aerogel with good selective sorption is produced in large scale by using raw cotton as the precursor. TCF aerogel shows highly efficient sorption of organic liquids (pump oil: up to 192 times its own weight; chloroform: up to 115 times its own weight). Moreover, it could be regenerated many times without decrease of sorption capacity by distillation, combustion or squeezing, which depends on the type of pollutants.
A survey on nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithms with its domain specifications

Nature inspired metaheuristics algorithms are well known economical approaches for solving several hard optimization problems. This paper furnishes a survey of some of the main metaheuristics. It provides the components and concepts that are employed in these algorithms so as to research their similarities and variations. The classification adopted in this paper differentiates by the behaviors obtained to develop the wide variety of nature inspired algorithms. The literature survey is guided by the presentation of control parameters, intensification, and diversification used in these algorithms and its domain specifications.
Perianesthetic Risks and Outcomes of Pheochromocytoma and Paraganglioma Resection

Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas are often surgically curable. However, resection of these tumors can be life threatening. We undertook this study to determine the frequency of, and risk factors for, perioperative complications in patients undergoing resection of pheochromocytoma or paraganglioma. We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of patients during 1983–1996 who underwent surgical resection of catecholamine-secreting pheochromocytoma or paraganglioma. Preoperative risk factors, adverse intraoperative events, and complications occurring in the 30 days after operation were recorded. Blood pressures were collected from manual records. The ranked sum test and Fisher’s exact test were used for analyses. Adverse perioperative events or complications occurred in 45 of 143 patients (31.5%; exact 95% confidence interval, 24.0% to 39.8%). Of these 45 patients, 41 experienced one or more adverse intraoperative events. The most common adverse event was sustained hypertension (36 patients). There were no perioperative deaths, myocardial infarctions, or cerebrovascular events. Preoperative factors univariately associated with adverse perioperative events included larger tumor size (P = 0.007), prolonged duration of anesthesia (P = 0.015), and increased levels of preoperative urinary catecholamines and catecholamine metabolites: vanillylmandelic acid (P = 0.019), metanephrines (P = 0.004), norepinephrine (P = 0.014), and epinephrine (P = 0.004). Despite premedication of most patients with phenoxybenzamine and a &bgr;-adrenergic blocker, varying degrees of intraoperative hemodynamic lability occurred. Implications Few patients who had pheochromocytoma or paraganglioma resection experienced significant perioperative morbidity and none died in the largest retrospective study on this topic to date. This study confirms the very good perioperative outcomes demonstrated in smaller studies on this high-risk population, and identifies several risk factors for adverse outcomes.
Modeling and feedback control of mobile robots equipped with several steering wheels

This paper deals with state feedback control of nonholonomic systems whose configuration space presents some singular points. The whole study is driven on the example of mobile robots equipped with several steering wheels. Linearizing dynamic feedback and time-varying feedback are successively considered to handle the tracking of a moving reference trajectory and the stabilization of the robots to a rest configuration, respectively. Both laws are designed in such a way that the systems singular configurations cannot definitely be met. Finally, a commutation procedure between the two laws is presented, in order to handle the very natural problem of tracking a reference trajectory ended by a rest configuration.
Microglial modulation of neuronal activity in the healthy brain

Investigations on the role of microglia in the brain have traditionally been focused on their contributions to disease states. However, recent observations have now convincingly shown that microglia in the healthy brain are not passive bystanders, but instead play a critical role in both central nervous system development and homeostasis of synaptic circuits in the adult. Here, we review the various mechanisms by which microglia impact neuronal communication in the healthy adult brain, both by sensing nearby synaptic responses and by actively modulating neuronal function. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 78: 593–603, 2018
Removal of petroleum‐crude oil from aqueous solution by Saccharomyces cerevisiae SHSY strain necessitates at least an inducible CYP450ALK homolog gene

Petroleum crude‐oil (PCO) components are known to be mutagenic or carcinogenic, and their contamination in soil and aquifer is of great environmental concern. PCO could be degraded by bacteria, fungi, and yeast. In yeast, the family CYP52 (P450ALKs) of Cytochrome P450 was described as n‐alkane‐degrading enzymes. In this study, we isolated a new strain SHSY of Saccharomyces able to grow on hydrocarbons compounds. Morphological and molecular characterization led to identify the isolated yeast SHSY as a Saccharomyces cerevisiae. SHSY strain had a remarkable ability to tolerate a high concentration of PCO and use it as a carbon source. A significant relationship was established between the increase in biomass (42.46 ± 1.01‐fold) and the disappearance of the crude oil (72.34%) in an aqueous solution. A 690‐bp amplicon corresponding to a high conserved region of known CYP450ALK genes was amplified in the genomic DNA of SHSY strain. The sequence of the amplified fragment shared a high identity (71.8%) with CYP52A3 gene of Pichia stipites. The expression of CYP52A3 homolog gene was induced and the expression of both InoP2/InoP4 transcription factor genes in SHSY was stimulated in the presence of PCO. The identified strain SHSY of S. cerevisiae presents an interesting model to minimize the mixed toxicity of PCO in polluted environmental sites.
Morphological Analysis for Statistical Machine Translation

We present a novel morphological analysis technique which induces a morphological and syntactic symmetry between two languages with highly asymmetrical morphological structures to improve statistical machine translation qualities. The technique pre-supposes fine-grained segmentation of a word in the morphologically rich language into the sequence of prefix(es)-stem-suffix(es) and part-of-speech tagging of the parallel corpus. The algorithm identifies morphemes to be merged or deleted in the morphologically rich language to induce the desired morphological and syntactic symmetry. The technique improves Arabic-to-English translation qualities significantly when applied to IBM Model 1 and Phrase Translation Models trained on the training corpus size ranging from 3,500 to 3.3 million sentence pairs.
The role of gamma/delta T cells in the feto-maternal relationship.

Polymorphic MHC is absent from the trophoblast, therefore, it resists NK as well as CTL-mediated lysis in vitro. Activated gamma / delta TCR positive cells are significantly enriched in the decidua as well as in peripheral blood of healthy pregnant women. Human peripheral gamma / delta lymphocytes preferentially express the V gamma 9/V delta 2 TCR, whereas those of the decidua use the V delta 1 chain. These subpopulations are functionally polarized, the former being Th1, the latter Th2. Potentially cytotoxic V delta 2+ lymphocytes recognize HLA-E on the trophoblast via the CD94/NKG2A receptor, which induces an inhibitory signal, thus potentially inhibiting Th1 type cytokine production.
Growth pattern in 7-12 years old Arak children (central Iran) in comparison with other ethnic subgroups of Iran.

BACKGROUND growth is a remarkable index of health and can be influenced by genetic and environment conditions. The pattern of growth is unique for every nation and worldwide studies have demonstrated separate national standards. In the case of Iran, there is not enough information in this field. METHODS This study was undertaken on 7-12 years old children from Arak. The data for each individual such as age, height, weight and body mass index (BMI) were recorded. Differences in the data between two sexes were tested by means of the paired sample t- test and the mean BMI was compared with sex- and age-specific reference values from the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 2000 growth chart using independent sample t-tests. Levels of P < 0.05, P < 0.01 and P < 0.001 were recorded as significant. RESULTS In this study, males were significantly taller and heavier than females at the same age (P < or = 0.01) except for length at age 10 and weight at age 12. The BMI curves were between 50th and 25th percentiles of CDC. CONCLUSIONS The present study shows the effect of socioeconomic background that had been also considered in other studies in Iran. There is a need for ethnic specific growth charts and BMI cut-off points for underweight, overweight and obesity in children of each ethnic subgroup of Iranian population.
Starch Digestion and Glucose Absorption in the Small Intestine

The main objective of this work was to understand phenomena occurring during food digestion by using a dynamic in vitro Small Intestine Model (SIM), of particular interest was to study the effect of mixing and food formulation on starch hydrolysis and glucose absorption. The SIM reproduces the characteristic mixing of the human small intestine by expansion and contraction of two cuffs around the external tube. Corn starch hydrolysis was studied in single phase fluids varying the concentration of amylase and the viscosity of digesta by adding guar gum (0.5 %, w/v) under simulated physiological conditions. Results showed the effect of segmentation motion on nutrient delivery to the intestinal wall as a consequence of changes in the mass transfer coefficient. This is most likely due to the increased mixing in the SIM. The rate of glucose absorption was decreased from 0.75 to 0.48 μM/s when guar gum (0.5%, w/v) was added to the corn starch solution. As the viscosity of the solution increased from 2 to 200 mPa.s glucose absorption was reduced up to 50%. Experiments of starch digestion in the SIM, with and without the presence of guar, have shown that guar reduces the rate of starch digestion by impairing mixing and reducing diffusion within the fluid. This research has demonstrated the capability of using an in vitro rig to simulate and obtain an engineering understanding of transport phenomena occurring in the small intestine leading to absorption of active components. Current work is aimed at developing a reaction engineering understanding of the gastrointestinal tract.
Characterization of Rabbit Ear Skin as a Skin Model for in vitro Transdermal Permeation Experiments: Histology, Lipid Composition and Permeability

Aim: The aim of this work was to characterize rabbit ear skin in view of its use in transdermal permeation experiments. Method: The characterization included histological analysis of the tissue, qualitative and quantitative analysis of stratum corneum (SC) lipids, differential scanning calorimetry and permeation experiments (caffeine, nicotinamide, progesterone). As a reference, pig ear skin was used. Results: The results obtained show that rabbit ear skin has a similar SC thickness compared to pig skin although the viable epidermis has a different structure. The lipid composition of rabbit SC was similar to pig SC but was characterized by a lower content of ceramides and a higher content of cholesterol esters and triglycerides. In terms of permeability, rabbit ear skin was 4–7 times less permeable to hydrophilic compounds, probably because of the higher lipophilicity of its SC. The permeability to progesterone was comparable between isolated pig epidermis and rabbit ear skin. Conclusion: Overall, the results obtained in this work support the usefulness of rabbit ear skin as barrier for skin penetration studies, for both lipophilic and hydrophilic permeants.