Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CD147 as a Novel Prognostic Biomarker for Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Meta-Analysis

We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the controversial association of CD147 expression with HCC prognosis and clinicopathological characteristics. Eight studies from PubMed (1966–2016), EMBASE (1980–2016), Cochrane Library (1996–2016), Web of Science (1945–2016), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (1982–2016), and Wanfang databases (1988–2016) were considered. The associations between CD147 expression and clinicopathological parameters and overall survival (OS) or DFS/RFS were reassessed using the meta-analysis for odds ratio (OR) or hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI). CD147 expression was associated with DFS/RFS (HR = 3.26; 95% CI: 1.82–5.83; P < 0.0001) but not with OS (HR = 1.35; 95% CI: 0.56–3.29; P = 0.51). We also delved deeper into the association between median survival time and CD147 expression owing to significant heterogeneity and found significant differences between high and low CD147 expression groups with respect to median survival time. CD147 expression was closely associated with the TNM stage (OR = 0.18; 95% CI: 0.04–0.85; P = 0.03) and venous invasion (OR = 6.29; 95% CI: 1.70–23.20; P = 0.006). In contrast, there was no association between CD147 expression and tumor stage, cirrhosis, differentiation, lymph node metastasis, HBsAg, and serum AFP levels. Thus, CD147 expression is potentially closely related to HCC survival and associated clinicopathological parameters, paving the way for further research.
Survival benefits with diverse chemotherapy regimens for ovarian cancer: meta-analysis of multiple treatments.

BACKGROUND Numerous randomized trials have compared different chemotherapy regimens in women with ovarian cancer. Although ovarian cancer survival has improved in recent years, the magnitude of these incremental benefits across diverse regimens is unclear. METHODS We used multiple-treatment meta-analysis methodology to combine information from direct and indirect comparisons of all chemotherapy regimens used in randomized trials of ovarian cancer in the last 40 years. Chemotherapy was categorized by the use or not of platinum and/or taxanes, combinations of agents, and intraperitoneal administration. Monte Carlo simulations were used to determine which regimen most improved survival. Analyses of trials that examined first- and second-line treatments were also performed separately. RESULTS We found 198 trials (N = 38,440 women) involving 120 different chemotherapy regimens published in 1971-2006. Eighty-two trials compared different types of chemotherapy, among which 60 had usable survival information (N = 15,609 women). Monte Carlo simulations showed a 92% probability that the regimen that best prolonged survival is a platinum and taxane combination with intraperitoneal administration; this regimen resulted in a 55% relative risk reduction (95% confidence interval [CI] = 39% to 67%) for mortality as compared with nonintraperitoneal monotherapy using neither platinum nor taxane. Against that same monotherapy comparator, platinum-based combinations with and without intraperitoneal administration achieved 40% (95% CI = 21% to 54%) and 30% (95% CI = 20% to 38%) relative risk reductions for mortality, respectively, and combinations involving platinum and taxane without intraperitoneal administration achieved a 42% (95% CI = 31% to 51%) relative risk reduction. Results were similar when analyses were limited to first-line treatment. Data on second-line treatment were consistent with the superiority of platinum and taxane combinations. CONCLUSIONS Distinct incremental improvements in survival have been achieved for ovarian cancer chemotherapy over time, with the possibility to achieve a doubling or more of time to mortality with platinum and taxane combinations, especially when intraperitoneal administration is used.
Role of the Drosophila Non-Visual ß-Arrestin Kurtz in Hedgehog Signalling

The non-visual ß-arrestins are cytosolic proteins highly conserved across species that participate in a variety of signalling events, including plasma membrane receptor degradation, recycling, and signalling, and that can also act as scaffolding for kinases such as MAPK and Akt/PI3K. In Drosophila melanogaster, there is only a single non-visual ß-arrestin, encoded by kurtz, whose function is essential for neuronal activity. We have addressed the participation of Kurtz in signalling during the development of the imaginal discs, epithelial tissues requiring the activity of the Hedgehog, Wingless, EGFR, Notch, Insulin, and TGFβ pathways. Surprisingly, we found that the complete elimination of kurtz by genetic techniques has no major consequences in imaginal cells. In contrast, the over-expression of Kurtz in the wing disc causes a phenotype identical to the loss of Hedgehog signalling and prevents the expression of Hedgehog targets in the corresponding wing discs. The mechanism by which Kurtz antagonises Hedgehog signalling is to promote Smoothened internalization and degradation in a clathrin- and proteosomal-dependent manner. Intriguingly, the effects of Kurtz on Smoothened are independent of Gprk2 activity and of the activation state of the receptor. Our results suggest fundamental differences in the molecular mechanisms regulating receptor turnover and signalling in vertebrates and invertebrates, and they could provide important insights into divergent evolution of Hedgehog signalling in these organisms.
Commiphora mukul Prevents Myocardial Dysfunction in Streptozotocin Induced Diabetic Rats

The objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of ethyl acetate extract of Commiphora mukul (guggul) (EACM) in streptozotocin (STZ) induced diabetic cardiomyopathy in rats. Diabetes was induced in rats with STZ (45 mg/kg, i.p). The animals were divided in four groups: I- normal control, II-diabetic control, III- diabetic animals treated with EACM (400 mg/kg/day, p.o) and IV- normal animals treated with EACM (400 mg/kg/day, p.o). Cardiomyopathy de- veloped after eight weeks of induction of diabetes. The biochemical parameters (glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol, LDL, HDL, CKMB, LDH) were evaluated at regular intervals. The hemodynamic measurements (LVDEP, Mean BP, Max dP/dT, Min dP/dT, ST segment and QT interval) were done on the 8 th week. Standardized EACM contained 3.36% w/w of guggulsterones. There were significant changes observed in the biochemical, hemodynamic and histological parameters of diabetic animals indicating induction of diabetic cardiomyopathy, whereas diabetic animals treated with EACM for eight weeks showed significant improvement in these parameters which serve as diabetic and cardiac markers. The present study reveals that EACM is effective in preventing diabetes induced myocardial dysfunction. This might be due to its effi- cacy in (a) normalizing the metabolic disturbances by acting as Farnesoid X receptor antagonist (FXR) or PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma agonist thereby regulating the lipid and glucose metabolism, (b) having a cardioprotective effect through various mechanisms such as regulation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), angiotensin type 2 receptor expression etc or (c) both. Thus, guggul might be a promising candidate to be evaluated for clinical efficacy in diabetic patients for the prevention of cardiomyopathy.
Air pollutant emissions from Chinese households: A major and underappreciated ambient pollution source

Significance China suffers from severe outdoor air pollution and associated public health impacts. In response, the government has imposed restrictions on major pollution sources such as vehicles and power plants. We show that due to uncontrolled and inefficient combustion of solid fuels in household devices, emission reductions from the residential sector may have greater air quality benefits in the North China Plain, including Beijing than reductions from other sectors. These benefits would be largest in the winter heating season when severe air pollution occurs. Household emissions, mostly from space heating and cooking with solid fuels, are an important and generally unrecognized source of ambient air pollution in China and other developing countries. Alternative fuels and other ways of reducing emissions would have large benefits. As part of the 12th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government has developed air pollution prevention and control plans for key regions with a focus on the power, transport, and industrial sectors. Here, we investigate the contribution of residential emissions to regional air pollution in highly polluted eastern China during the heating season, and find that dramatic improvements in air quality would also result from reduction in residential emissions. We use the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry to evaluate potential residential emission controls in Beijing and in the Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei (BTH) region. In January and February 2010, relative to the base case, eliminating residential emissions in Beijing reduced daily average surface PM2.5 (particulate mater with aerodynamic diameter equal or smaller than 2.5 micrometer) concentrations by 14 ± 7 μg⋅m−3 (22 ± 6% of a baseline concentration of 67 ± 41 μg⋅m−3; mean ± SD). Eliminating residential emissions in the BTH region reduced concentrations by 28 ± 19 μg⋅m−3 (40 ± 9% of 67 ± 41 μg⋅m−3), 44 ± 27 μg⋅m−3 (43 ± 10% of 99 ± 54 μg⋅m−3), and 25 ± 14 μg⋅m−3 (35 ± 8% of 70 ± 35 μg⋅m−3) in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei provinces, respectively. Annually, elimination of residential sources in the BTH region reduced emissions of primary PM2.5 by 32%, compared with 5%, 6%, and 58% achieved by eliminating emissions from the transportation, power, and industry sectors, respectively. We also find air quality in Beijing would benefit substantially from reductions in residential emissions from regional controls in Tianjin and Hebei, indicating the value of policies at the regional level.
2 Problem Formulation and Model 2.1 Problem Formulation

In this lecture we cover Splay Trees, first introduced and analyzed by Sleator and Tarjan in [6]. Splay tree is a comparison based data structure (in particular — Binary Search Tree), which — in contrast to BST data structures such as AVL tree and Red-Black tree — does not maintain a property of being balanced in any way. Thus, in the worst case, complexity of a single operation could be linear in the size of structure. Nevertheless, thanks to its self-adjusting it has a bunch of interesting properties in terms of amortized guarantees — in particular, the amortized cost of a single operation is at most O(log n), matching worst-case bounds obtained by balanced binary tree. Moreover, often when sequence of inputs is structured in additional way (for example: the sequence is in some sense local, or frequencies of accessing items are far from uniform), the upper bounds for a sequence of operations are significantly better then those given by balanced binary search trees. More about this in Section 4.
Pre-layout delay calculation specification for CMOS ASIC libraries

This paper describes the delay calculation method and the accuracy analysis of its interpolation for CMOS ASIC libraries which contain cell-based primitives and memories to be used during the pre-layout design phase of logic simulation, timing verification, and logic synthesis. The delay calculation method addressed in this paper is specified as IEC CDV 61523-2 standard which consists of the estimation of wire capacitance, and the delay calculation method based on a table look-up. Although the input to the delay calculator is net list and library parameters, the delay parameter part of the library has not been standardized because of its strong dependency on the delay calculation method. We, IEC/TC93/WG2/ALR group, specified it based on the EIAJ work. In IEC CDV 61523-2, we specified in detail a table look up calculation formula for CMOS ASIC library using a linear interpolation in the triangular area which is more accurate than the bilinear interpolation. In this paper, we overview the specification and provide the mathematical background for the interpolation.
Time and Energy Optimal Path Planning in General Flows

Autonomous surface and underwater vehicles (ASVs and AUVs) are increasingly being used for persistent monitoring of ocean phenomena. Typically, these vehicles are deployed for long periods of time and must operate with limited energy budgets. As a result, there is increased interest in recent years on developing energy efficient motion plans for these vehicles that leverage the dynamics of the surrounding flow field. In this paper, we present a graph search based method to plan time and energy optimal paths in a flow field where the kinematic actuation constraints on the vehicles are captured in our cost functions. We also use tools from topological path planning to generate optimal paths in different homotopy classes, which facilitates simultaneous exploration of the environment. The proposed strategy is validated using analytical flow models for large scale ocean circulation and in experiments using an indoor laboratory testbed capable of creating flows with ocean-like features. We also present a Riemannian metric based approximation for these cost functions which provides an alternative method for computing time and energy optimal paths. The Riemannian approximation results in smoother trajectories in contrast to the graph based approach while requiring less computational time.
Nickel(II)-Induced Oxidative Stress, Apoptosis, G2/M Arrest, and Genotoxicity in Normal Rat Kidney Cells

In order to elucidate the effects of nickel (Ni) on oxidative stress, apoptosis, and genotoxicity in renal cells, the levels of intracellular oxidants, lipid peroxidation, apoptotic proteins, and DNA damage were measured in normal rat kidney (NRK) cells after nickel chloride (NiCl2) treatment. NiCl2 appeared to increase the formation of the fluorescent oxidized compound (dichlorofluorescein, DCF) and levels of thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS). In flow cytometric analysis, a rise in cell proportion in sub-G1 phase occurred in a concentration-dependent manner. After Ni treatment, there was reduced expression of Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL proteins, while induced Bad and Bax proteins expression was higher. Single-strand DNA breakage induced by Ni in NRK cells was determined by comet assay. Significant increase DNA damage score (arbitrary units) was noted in a concentration-related manner after treatment with Ni. Induction of intracellular oxidants by Ni was accompanied by an increasing frequency of DNA strand breakage. Our data indicate that Ni-induced oxidative stress and genotoxicity in NRK cells may involve reactive oxygen intermediates, and that Bcl family-mediated signaling pathway may be involved in positive regulation of Ni‐induced renal cytotoxicity.
Nutritional assessment of Ethiopian Beta-Israel children: a cross-sectional survey.

BACKGROUND Malnutrition is a public health problem of significant importance in developing countries. The main aim of this survey is to assess the nutritional status of children of the Beta-Israel community in Gondar, Ethiopia, with special emphasis on the anthropometric growth patterns of infants under 5 years of age. METHODS This is a descriptive cross-sectional survey of 794 preschool children of the Beta-Israel community. The survey comprised socioeconomic and demographic data, evaluation of anthropometric measurements, and clinical evaluation of children for nutrition-related health problems. The clinical variables included assessments for vitamin A, iodine, and iron deficiencies. RESULTS Underweight, stunting, and wasting were seen in 14.6%, 37.2%, and 4.5% of the children, respectively. Moreover, severe underweight, severe stunting, and severe wasting were seen in 2.9%, 14.8%, and 0.5% of the children, respectively. Malnutrition affected 41.4% of all the children, with those 12-23 months old suffering the most (66.7%). Multivariate analysis noted that smaller family size and younger age were related to higher occurrence of malnutrition among children. An overall rate of stunting of 37.2% exceeds the urban average rate for Ethiopia (29.8%). All the children had been breastfed at least for some time, and among those older than 6 months, 46.8% were exclusively breastfed for 6 months. Of the infants, 82.9% were breastfed for over 2 years. No correlation existed with pattern or duration of breastfeeding and degree of malnutrition in infants over 6 months. CONCLUSIONS The urban Beta-Israel Jewish pediatric population in Gondar, Ethiopia suffers from a high rate of malnutrition manifested primarily by stunting (height for age), reflecting a state of chronic malnutrition after 6 months of life secondary to inadequate sources of complementary feeds for the breastfeeding infant.
Highly efficient and robust audio identification and analytics system to secure royalty payments for song artists

Radio is yet one of the most popular broadcast media in many emerging regions and operates as one of the principle sources of income for licensors and publishers, collectively termed as owners of copyrighted music. Royalty payments are legal obligations towards owners of copyrighted music under intellectual property rights legislations. Independent conjoint monitoring of copyrighted music being broadcast over every radio station on each day is an intricate requisite for upholding the said legislations of a country or region and therefore requires automated techniques that are efficient, scalable and robust to both radio and content noise. We consider the development of an automated radio broadcast audio monitoring system with identification and analytics capabilities to assist collection of royalty payments from radio music licensees for copyrighted music, specifically for songs. First, we pre-process a radio broadcast stream to identify song segments, aka objects via an efficient onset detection mechanism. Next, we perform efficient hashing of identified objects in the frequency domain and compare generated hashes with those in the entries of a pre-compiled copyrighted song database using an efficient hash matching technique. Subsequently, our system stores broadcast data of the identified music objects (e.g. timestamp, name of lyricist, etc.,) in the database for later use from an analytic application.
Effects of Maternal Nutrition, Resource Use and Multi-Predator Risk on Neonatal White-Tailed Deer Survival

Growth of ungulate populations is typically most sensitive to survival of neonates, which in turn is influenced by maternal nutritional condition and trade-offs in resource selection and avoidance of predators. We assessed whether resource use, multi-predator risk, maternal nutritional effects, hiding cover, or interactions among these variables best explained variation in daily survival of free-ranging neonatal white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) during their post-partum period (14 May–31 Aug) in Michigan, USA. We used Cox proportional hazards mixed-effects models to assess survival related to covariates of resource use, composite predation risk of 4 mammalian predators, fawn body mass at birth, winter weather, and vegetation growth phenology. Predation, particularly from coyotes (Canis latrans), was the leading cause of mortality; however, an additive model of non-ideal resource use and maternal nutritional effects explained 71% of the variation in survival. This relationship suggested that dams selected areas where fawns had poor resources, while greater predation in these areas led to additive mortalities beyond those related to resource use alone. Also, maternal nutritional effects suggested that severe winters resulted in dams producing smaller fawns, which decreased their likelihood of survival. Fawn resource use appeared to reflect dam avoidance of lowland forests with poor forage and greater use by wolves (C. lupus), their primary predator. While this strategy led to greater fawn mortality, particularly by coyotes, it likely promoted the life-long reproductive success of dams because many reached late-age (>10 years old) and could have produced multiple generations of fawns. Studies often link resource selection and survival of ungulates, but our results suggested that multiple factors can mediate that relationship, including multi-predator risk. We emphasize the importance of identifying interactions among biological and environmental factors when assessing survival of ungulates.
PEGylation of nanoparticles improves their cytoplasmic transport

The efficacy of nucleus-targeted drug- or gene-carrying nanoparticles may be limited by slow transport through the molecularly crowded cytoplasm following endosome escape. Cytoskeletal elements and cellular organelles may pose steric and/or adhesive obstacles to the efficient intracellular transport of nanoparticles. To potentially reduce adhesive interactions of colloids with intracellular components, the surface of model nanoparticles was coated with polyethylene glycol (PEG). Subsequently, multiple-particle tracking (MPT) was used to quantify the cytoplasmic transport rates of particles microinjected into the cytoplasm of live cells. PEGylation increased average nanoparticle diffusivities by 100% compared to unPEGylated particles (time scale of 10 s) in live cells. Faster particle transport correlated with a marked decrease in the number of particles that underwent hindered transport, from 79.2% (unmodified) to 48.8% (PEGylated). This result adds to an impressive list of positive benefits associated with PEGylation of drug and gene delivery vectors.
PERSON ( ENAMEX ) ORGANISATION ( ENAMEX ) LOCATION ( ENAMEX ) DATE ( TIMEX ) TIME ( TIMEX ) MONEY ( NUMEX )

This paper describes a hybrid system that applies maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model with Hidden Markov model (HMM) and some linguistic rules to recognize name entities in Oriya language. The main advantage of our system is, we are using both HMM and MaxEnt model successively with some manually developed linguistic rules. First we are using MaxEnt to identify name entities in Oria corpus, then tagging them temporary as reference. The tagged corpus of MaxEnt now regarded as a training process for HMM. Now we use HMM for final tagging. Our approach can achieve higher precision and recall, when providing enough training data and appropriate error correction mechanism.
Recommendation of open educational resources. An approach based on linked open data

In an open and distributed platform as the Web there are problems associated with the heterogeneity and information overload. In this context, teaching community and learners may need some support to discover the Open Educational Resources best suited for their learning processes. In this paper, the authors propose the high-level design of a framework for the recommendation of learning content in a flexible way. In order to provide a personalized set of resources, an adaptive approach of filtering is used according to the data available of each user. To achieve this goal, the framework has been designed taking into account the best features provided by technologies of the Semantic Web in order to find online material.