Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mycoplasma genitalium infections: current treatment options and resistance issues

Mycoplasma genitalium is one of the important causes of non-gonococcal urethritis. Rising incidence and emerging antimicrobial resistance are a major concern these days. The poor clinical outcomes with doxycycline therapy led to the use of azithromycin as the primary drug of choice. Single-dose azithromycin regimen over a period of time was changed to extended regimen following studies showing better clinical cures and less risk of resistance development. However, emerging macrolide resistance, either due to transmission of resistance or drug pressure has further worsened the management of this infection. The issues of drug resistance and treatment failures also exist in cases of M. genitalium infection. At present, the emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) M. genitalium strains is an alarming sign for its treatment and the associated public health impact due to its complications. However, newer drugs like pristinamycin, solithromycin, sitafloxacin, and others have shown a hope for the clinical cure, but need further clinical trials to optimize the therapeutic dosing schedules and formulate appropriate treatment regimens. Rampant and inappropriate use of these newer drugs will further sabotage future attempts to manage MDR strains. There is currently a need to formulate diagnostic algorithms and etiology-based treatment regimens rather than the syndromic approach, preferably using combination therapy instead of a monotherapy. Awareness about the current guidelines and recommended treatment regimens among clinicians and local practitioners is of utmost importance. Antimicrobial resistance testing and global surveillance are required to assess the efficacy of current treatment regimens and for guiding future research for the early detection and management of MDR M. genitalium infections.
A pipelined synchronization approach for satellite-based automatic identification system

Because of the wide field of view (FOV) to monitor vessel movements, satellite-based automatic identification system (S-AIS) has been promoted in recent years. However, synchronization is a tough work in S-AIS receiver because of the large Doppler shift and serious signal collision resulting from simultaneous transmission in the FOV of a satellite. In this paper, we propose a pipelined synchronization approach with good performance and low complexity. It consists of three parts, i.e., packet detection, windowing and timing recovery, and frequency and timing offset estimation, which can be implemented in feedforward structure with low complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed synchronization approach has significant performance gain compared with existing algorithms and provides an acceptable estimation range to cope with large Doppler shift and message collision.
A Qualitative Evaluation of Clinical Audit in UK Dental Foundation Training

Clinical Audit (CA) has been recognized as a useful tool for tool for improving service delivery, clinical governance, and the education and performance of the dental team. This study develops the discussion by investigating its use as an educational tool within UK Dental Foundation Training (DFT). The aim was to investigate the views of Foundation Dentists (FDs) and Training Programme Directors (TPDs) on the CA module in their FD training schemes, to provide insight and recommendations for those supervising and undertaking CA. A literature review was conducted followed by a qualitative research methodology, using group interviews. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed using NVIVO, a Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis tool. CA was found to be a useful tool for teaching management and professionalism and can bring some improvement to clinical practice, but TPDs have doubts about the long-term effects on service delivery. The role of the Educational Supervisor (ES) is discussed and recommendations are given for those supervising and conducting CA.
Metformin attenuates folic‐acid induced renal fibrosis in mice

Progressive tubulointerstitial fibrosis has been recognized as a common pathological process that leads to the progression of all chronic kidney disease (CKD). Innovative strategies are needed to both prevent and treat CKD. Inflammatory and fibrotic signaling pathways play central roles in the progression of CKD regardless of aetiology. Hence, targeting inflammatory and fibrotic responses holds promise to limit renal fibrosis. Metformin has been the most prescribed glucose‐lowering medicine worldwide, and its potential for many other therapeutic applications is also being explored intensively. Increasing evidence indicates metformin may limit renal fibrosis. However, the exact mechanisms whereby metformin limits renal injury are not fully understood. The anti‐fibrotic effects of metformin, independent of improved glycaemic control was examined in a folic acid‐induced mouse model of nephropathy for 14 days. Human proximal tubular cells (HK2 cells) exposed to TGF‐β1 were used in in vitro models to examine mechanistic pathways. Folic acid induced nephropathy was associated with the overexpression of inflammatory markers MCP‐1, F4/80, type IV collagen, fibronectin and TGF‐β1 compared to control groups, which were partially attenuated by metformin treatment. In vitro studies confirmed that metformin inhibited TGF‐β1 induced inflammatory and fibrotic responses through Smad3, ERK1/2, and P38 pathways in human renal proximal tubular cells. These results suggest that metoformin attenuates folic acid‐induced renal interstitial fibrogenesis through TGF‐β1 signaling pathways.
A modeling approach for credit card fraud detection in electronic payment services

There is an increase in the volume of electronic transactions in the Web in recent years, mainly due to the significant growth that has been observed in e-commerce. This scenario makes the frauds in electronic transactions a matter of high importance. This work proposes a comprehensive approach to address the problem of fraud in the emerging market of on-line payment services. We present a model for this problem, based on the history of the main entities involved in a transaction and we retrieve features to classify whether the transaction is a fraud or not. In order to validate our results, we use real data provided by a large Latin American on-line payment service company.
Inflectional Morphology in Fluent Aphasia: A Case Study in a Highly Inflected Language

Inflectional morphology difficulties are typically reported in non-fluent aphasia with agrammatism, but a growing number of studies show that they can also be present in fluent aphasia. In agrammatism, morphological difficulties are conceived as the consequence of impaired phonological encoding and would affect regular verbs more than irregular verbs. However, studies show that inflectional morphology difficulties concern both regular and irregular verbs, and that their origin could be more conceptual/semantic in nature. Additionally, studies report more pronounced impairments for the processing of the past tense compared to other tenses. The goal of this study was to characterize the impairment of inflectional morphology in fluent aphasia. RY, a 69-year-old man with chronic fluent aphasia completed a short neuropsychological and language battery and three experimental tasks of inflectional morphology. The tasks assessed the capacity to select the correct inflected form of a verb based on time information, to access the time information included in an inflectional morpheme, and to produce verbs with tense inflection. His performance was compared to a group of five adults without language impairments. Results showed that RY had difficulties selecting the correct inflected form of a verb, accessing time information transmitted by inflectional morphemes, and producing inflected verbs. His difficulties affected both regular and irregular verbs, and verbs in the present, past, and future tenses. The performance also shows the influence of processing limitations over the production and comprehension of inflectional morphology. More studies of inflectional morphology in fluent aphasia are needed to understand the origin of difficulties.
Reliability-aware striping with minimized performance overheads for flash-based storage devices

As data retention and disturb problems of coming flash chips keep deteriorating, improving the reliability/endurance of flash devices has become a critical issue in many flash-based storage applications. Meanwhile, the increasing access parallelism of nowadays flash devices provides a possibility to adopt larger striping units in RAID-liked technology to furthermore enhance the data reliability, even though larger striping units might also bring more performance overheads. This work is thus motivated by the individual merits on reliability (resp. performance) provided by the larger (resp. smaller) striping units. Very different from many existing RAID-integrated flash management designs, this work proposes a reliability-aware striping design to adaptively determine a "proper" stripe size for data with different (updated) patterns to achieve reliability enhancement with limited performance degradation. The experiments were conducted based on representative realistic workloads to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme, for which the results are very encouraging.
Resilience in ecotoxicology: Toward a multiple equilibrium concept

The term resilience describes stress–response patterns across scientific disciplines. In ecology, advances have been made to clearly define resilience based on underlying mechanistic assumptions. Engineering resilience (rebound) is used to describe the ability of organisms to recover from adverse conditions (disturbances), which is termed the rate of recovery. By contrast, the ecological resilience definition considers a systemic change, that is, when ecosystems reorganize into a new regime following disturbance. Under this new regime, structural and functional aspects change considerably relative to the previous regime, without recovery. In this context, resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. In the present study, we argue that both definitions and uses are appropriate in ecotoxicology, and although the differences are subtle, the implications and uses are profoundly different. We discuss resilience concepts in ecotoxicology, where the prevailing view of resilience is engineering resilience from chemical stress. Ecological resilience may also be useful for describing systemic ecological changes because of chemical stress. We present quantitative methods that allow ecotoxicologists and risk managers to assess whether an ecosystem faces an impending regime shift or whether it has already undergone such a shift. We contend that engineering and ecological resilience help to distinguish ecotoxicological responses to chemical stressors mechanistically and thus have implications for theory, policy, and application. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:2574–2580. © 2017 SETAC
Cross-lingual knowledge linking across wiki knowledge bases

Wikipedia becomes one of the largest knowledge bases on the Web. It has attracted 513 million page views per day in January 2012. However, one critical issue for Wikipedia is that articles in different language are very unbalanced. For example, the number of articles on Wikipedia in English has reached 3.8 million, while the number of Chinese articles is still less than half million and there are only 217 thousand cross-lingual links between articles of the two languages. On the other hand, there are more than 3.9 million Chinese Wiki articles on Baidu Baike and Hudong.com, two popular encyclopedias in Chinese. One important question is how to link the knowledge entries distributed in different knowledge bases. This will immensely enrich the information in the online knowledge bases and benefit many applications. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-lingual knowledge linking and present a linkage factor graph model. Features are defined according to some interesting observations. Experiments on the Wikipedia data set show that our approach can achieve a high precision of 85.8% with a recall of 88.1%. The approach found 202,141 new cross-lingual links between English Wikipedia and Baidu Baike.
RhoA/Rho-kinase triggers epithelial-mesenchymal transition in mesothelial cells and contributes to the pathogenesis of dialysis-related peritoneal fibrosis

Peritoneal fibrosis (PF) with associated peritoneal dysfunction is almost invariably observed in long-term peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are pro-oxidant compounds produced in excess during the metabolism of glucose and are present in high levels in standard PD solutions. The GTPase RhoA has been implicated in PF, but its specific role remains poorly understood. Here, we studied the effects of RhoA/Rho-kinase signaling in AGEs-induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in human peritoneal mesothelial cells (HPMCs), and evaluated morphological and molecular changes in a rat model of PD-related PF. Activation of RhoA/Rho-kinase and activating protein-1 (AP-1) was assessed in HPMCs using pull-down and electrophoretic mobility shift assays, respectively, while expression of transforming growth factor-β, fibronectin, α-smooth muscle actin, vimentin, N-cadherin, and E-cadherin expression was assessed using immunohistochemistry and western blot. AGEs exposure activated Rho/Rho-kinase in HPMCs and upregulated EMT-related genes via AP-1. These changes were prevented by the Rho-kinase inhibitors fasudil and Y-27632, and by the AP-1 inhibitor curcumin. Importantly, fasudil normalized histopathological and molecular alterations and preserved peritoneal function in rats. These data support the therapeutic potential of Rho-kinase inhibitors in PD-related PF.
Active front-end converter input filter minimization using sequential sampling space vector modulation for multi-motor drives

Sequential sampling space vector modulation, and its equivalent the phase-shifted carrier PWM, have been used with good results in various multi-level converter structures. However, up to now they have been usually restrained to operation with a power-balanced set of converters in order to assure harmonic cancellation between the parallel or series connected converters. This paper expands the use of sequential sampling space vector modulation, and proposes its use with an unbalanced set of converters. Particularly, a 900 kVA paper machine comprising 9 induction motor drives is considered. The use of this technique among the active front-end converters of the machine effectively cancels out input current harmonics. In fact, results are such that a 0.02 pu reactor in each drive suffices to ensure 5% total input current THD. This is attained even under 100% load unbalance between motor drives. The feasibility of this method is demonstrated by showing that the current harmonics of the active front-end converters remain constant throughout the whole operating range, that is from zero to nominal power. An extensive evaluation using experimental and simulated results of the paper machine is presented for validation of the proposed method.
Optimal Thresholds for Coverage and Rate in FFR Schemes for Planned Cellular Networks

Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is an inter-cell interference coordination scheme that is being actively researched for emerging wireless cellular networks. In this work, we consider hexagonal tessellation based planned FFR deployments, and derive expressions for the coverage probability and normalized average rate for the downlink. In particular, given reuse $\frac{1}{3}$ (FR$3$ ) and reuse $1$ (FR$1$) regions, and a Signal-to-Interference-plus-noise-Ratio (SINR) threshold $S_{th}$ which decides the user assignment to either the FR$1$ or FR$3$ regions, we theoretically show that: $(i)$ The optimal choice of $S_{th}$ which maximizes the coverage probability is $S_{th} = T$, where $T$ is the required target SINR (for ensuring coverage), and $(ii)$ The optimal choice of $S_{th}$ which maximizes the normalized average rate is given by the expression $S_{th}=\max(T, T')$, where $T'$ is a function of the path loss exponent and the fade parameters. For the optimal choice of $S_{th}$, we show that FFR gives a higher rate than FR$1$ and a better coverage probability than FR$3$. The impact of frequency correlation over the sub-bands allocated to the FR$1$ and FR$3$ regions is analysed, and it is shown that correlation decreases the average rate of the FFR network. Numerical results are provided, and these match with the analytical results.
Electrodeposited nickel nanowires for magnetic-field effect transistor (MagFET)

The growing interest in magnetic nanowires (NW) is connected to possibility of employing them for advanced applications in wide technological fields, such as data storage and biotechnology. In addition, NW can be used as sensor devices for several applications, since they present high sensitivity to the environment. One of the major challenges when dealing with transport measurements in NW is to trap them between electrodes, which allows electrical characterization and therefore fabrication of nanowire-based devices. This can be used for investigation of electrical transport properties of individual NW and fabrication of NW-based devices, such as sensors and field effect transistors. Especially for ferromagnetic NW, one can use the present method for fabrication of magnetic field-effect transistors (MagFET)
A reconfigurable quadcopter with foldable rotor arms and a deployable carrier

This paper presents for the first time a reconfigurable quadcopter with foldable rotor arms and a deployable carrier. Structure design of the proposed quadcopter is presented and dynamic model of the whole system is established. Numerical simulation is then implemented illustrating manoeuvrability and stability of the proposed quadcopter. Further, using FEA method structure analysis of the reconfigurable rotor-arm system is carried out, verifying the strength and stiffness of the flight structure. The proposed reconfigurable quadcopter can be used for both aerial and terrestrial exploration with the terrestrial function to be achieved by a micro walking/wheeled robot stored in the deployable carrier.
A new simple and fast thermally-solvent assisted method to bond PMMA–PMMA in micro-fluidics devices

A rapid and simple thermally-solvent assisted method of bonding was introduced for poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) based microfluidic substrates. The technique is a low-temperature (68 °C), and rapid (15 min) bonding technique; in addition, only a fan-assisted oven with some paper clamps are used. Two different solvents (ethanol and isopropyl alcohol) with two different methods of cooling (one-step and three steps) were employed to determine the best solvent and method of cooling (residual stresses may be released in different cooling methods) by considering bonding strength and quality. In this bonding technique, a thin film of solvent between two PMMA sheets disperses tends to dissolve a thin film of PMMA sheet surface, then evaporate, and finally reconnect monomers of the PMMA sheets at the specific operating temperature. The operating temperature of this method comes from the coincidence of the solubility parameter graph of PMMA with the solubility parameter graph of the solvents. Different tests such as tensile strength test, deformation test, leakage tests, and surface characteristics tests were performed to find the optimum conditions for this bonding strategy. The best bonding quality and the highest bonding strength (28.47 MPa) occurred when 70% isopropyl alcohol solution was employed with the one-step cooling method. Furthermore, the bonding reversibility was taken into account and critical percentages for irreversible bonding were obtained for both of the solvents and methods. This method provides a perfect bonding quality for PMMA substrates, and can be used in laboratories without needing any expensive and special instruments, because of its merits such as lower bonding time, lower-cost, and higher strength etc in comparison with the majority of other common bonding techniques.
Linear and nonlinear variable selection in competing risks data

Subdistribution hazard model for competing risks data has been applied extensively in clinical researches. Variable selection methods of linear effects for competing risks data have been studied in the past decade. There is no existing work on selection of potential nonlinear effects for subdistribution hazard model. We propose a two‐stage procedure to select the linear and nonlinear covariate(s) simultaneously and estimate the selected covariate effect(s). We use spectral decomposition approach to distinguish the linear and nonlinear parts of each covariate and adaptive LASSO to select each of the 2 components. Extensive numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed procedure can achieve good selection accuracy in the first stage and small estimation biases in the second stage. The proposed method is applied to analyze a cardiovascular disease data set with competing death causes.
Epithelial/mesenchymal plasticity: how have quantitative mathematical models helped improve our understanding?

Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of cells to reversibly alter their phenotypes in response to signals, presents a significant clinical challenge to treating solid tumors. Tumor cells utilize phenotypic plasticity to evade therapies, metastasize, and colonize distant organs. As a result, phenotypic plasticity can accelerate tumor progression. A well‐studied example of phenotypic plasticity is the bidirectional conversions among epithelial, mesenchymal, and hybrid epithelial/mesenchymal (E/M) phenotype(s). These conversions can alter a repertoire of cellular traits associated with multiple hallmarks of cancer, such as metabolism, immune evasion, invasion, and metastasis. To tackle the complexity and heterogeneity of these transitions, mathematical models have been developed that seek to capture the experimentally verified molecular mechanisms and act as ‘hypothesis‐generating machines’. Here, we discuss how these quantitative mathematical models have helped us explain existing experimental data, guided further experiments, and provided an improved conceptual framework for understanding how multiple intracellular and extracellular signals can drive E/M plasticity at both the single‐cell and population levels. We also discuss the implications of this plasticity in driving multiple aggressive facets of tumor progression.