Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A randomized trial of Chinese herbal medicines for the treatment of symptomatic hepatitis C.

BACKGROUND Many patients with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) cannot be successfully treated with interferon-based regimens. Chinese herbal medicines have been widely prescribed for HCV in Asia, and many infected patients in the United States have used these agents. However, data to support the efficacy of these medications are limited and, to our knowledge, no published trials have been conducted in a US population. METHODS In a double-blinded design, 45 patients with HCV and fatigue were randomized to receive a combination of Chinese herbal medications or a matched placebo for 12 weeks. The main outcome measures were changes in health-related quality of life using the role physical and vitality scale scores from the validated Hepatitis Quality of Life Questionnaire and alanine aminotransferase levels. In addition, other Hepatitis Quality of Life Questionnaire variables, HCV load, and adverse effects were monitored. RESULTS In patients with HCV, the herbal medications had no effect on any quality-of-life variables, as measured by the Hepatitis Quality of Life Questionnaire. In addition, no significant changes in alanine aminotransferase or serum HCV RNA levels were noted. No significant adverse effects were observed. CONCLUSIONS In this study, a regimen of Chinese herbal medicines did not improve quality of life, liver chemistry results, or viral load in a cohort of patients with HCV. Patients and practitioners should remain cautious about the use of herbal medicines for HCV, because studies have not shown a clear benefit of these agents.
Surgical Ventricular Restoration: An Operation To Reverse Remodeling - The Basic Science (Part I)

Congestive heart failure as a consequence of ischemic heart disease is an increasing medical problem. Notwithstanding the huge advances in the medical and conventional surgical management of heart failure, eventual outcomes remain suboptimal. This 2 part article outlines the magnitude of the problem, the limitations of conventional therapies as they exist, and the use of newer procedures that directly address the restoration of ventricular pump function. The first part of the article deals with the pathology of different facets of the remodeling process, and the unique anatomy, geometry and flow dynamics as they pertain to ventricular function in the normal as well as the failing heart. It then details the limitations of conventional therapy, thereby laying the basis for the need and evolution of newer surgical procedures and ends with the selection of patients for ventricular restoration procedures and the pitfalls in the choice of patients for such newer techniques.
Dreaded “Otherness”

Research on bodies and sexualities has long debated ideas about choice, agency, and power, particularly as women conform to, or rebel against, traditional social scripts about femininity and heterosexuality. In this study, I have used responses from 34 college women who completed an extra credit assignment in a women’s studies class that asked them to reject social norms and grow out their leg and underarm hair for a period of 10 weeks. Responses reveal that women confronted direct and anticipated homophobia and heterosexism from others as well as hostility for rejecting traditional norms of femininity. Heterosexual women regularly encountered demands that they acquire permission to grow body hair from their male partners, while queer and bisexual women expressed reluctance about further “outing” themselves via their body hair. I consider implications for linking sexual identity discrimination and body hair practices, and for imagining bodies as sites of resistance inside and outside of pedagogical settings.
Multirate Systems and Filter Banks

The outline of this chapter is as follows. Section 2 reviews various types of existing finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) two-channel filter banks. The basic operations of these filter banks are considered and the requirements are stated for alias-free, perfect-reconstruction (PR), and nearly perfect-reconstruction (NPR) filter banks. Also some efficient synthesis techniques are referred to. Furthermore, examples are included to compare various two-channel filter banks with each other. Section 3 concentrates on the design of multi-channel (M-channel) uniform filter banks. The main emphasis is laid on designing these banks using tree-structured filter banks with the aid of two-channel filter banks and on generating the overall bank with the aid of a single prototype filter and a proper cosine-modulation or MDFT technique. In Section 4, it is shown how octave filter banks can be generated using a single two-channel filter bank as the basic building block. Also, the relations between the frequency-selective octave filter banks and discrete-time wavelet banks are briefly discussed. Finally, concluding remarks are given in Section 5.
Parametric Modeling of Survival Times Among Breast Cancer Patients in a Teaching Hospital, Osogbo

In Nigeria, Breast Cancer is the most common malignancy among women. Unfortunately, many breast cancer patients present for treatment late. Using a parametric survival model to predict the survival times of patients and contribution of the prognostic factors, the study focused on the 1-year survival of breast cancer patients from the day of presentation. A total 89 women, who were diagnosed with breast cancer in which 32.56% reported early for treatment from 2009 to 2014, were recorded. Age, stage of presentation, average years of breastfeeding, neoadjuvant treatment offered, age at menarche and use of contraceptives were the variables used in the study. The predictive model that can be used to predict survival times of breast cancer patients was obtained. The results showed that stage at presentation is significant at 0.05 significance level.
Social support as a mediator of religious involvement and physical and emotional functioning in a national sample of African-Americans

Researchers propose social support as one of the factors that may explain the positive relationship often observed between religious involvement and health outcomes. African-Americans are a population that tends to have higher than average levels of religious involvement and are also disproportionately impacted by most health conditions. The present study sought to determine whether social support mediates the role of religious involvement in physical and emotional functioning and depressive symptoms, among a national probability sample of African-Americans (N = 803). Study participants completed telephone interviews. We used structural equation modelling to test hypotheses based on the theoretical model. Findings suggest evidence for a mediating role of belonging and tangible support in the association between religious behaviours and physical functioning as well as depression. There was no mediational role played by appraisal support, or for emotional functioning. Implications for faith-based health promotion interventions are discussed.
Triangular Factorization and Inversion by Fast Matrix Multiplication

The fast matrix multiplication algorithm by Strassen is used to obtain the triangular factorization of a permutation of any nonsingular matrix of order n in 2.35, i.e. if n > (2.35)5 t 100. Strassen uses block LDU factorization (Householder (2, p. 126)) recursively to compute the inverse of a matrix of order m2k by m2k divisions, < (6/5)m37k - m2k multiplications, and < (6/5)(5 + m)m27k - 7(m2k)2 additions. The inverse of a matrix of order n could then be computed by ? (5.64)nlO02 7 arithmetic operations.
Comparative Evaluation of Colistin Susceptibility Testing Methods among Carbapenem-Nonsusceptible Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii Clinical Isolates

ABSTRACT We compared six colistin susceptibility testing (ST) methods on 61 carbapenem-nonsusceptible Klebsiella pneumoniae (n = 41) and Acinetobacter baumannii (n = 20) clinical isolates with provisionally elevated colistin MICs by routine ST. Colistin MICs were determined by broth microdilution (BMD), BMD with 0.002% polysorbate 80 (P80) (BMD-P80), agar dilution (AD), Etest, Vitek2, and MIC test strip (MTS). BMD was used as the reference method for comparison. The EUCAST-recommended susceptible and resistant breakpoints of ≤2 and >2 μg/ml, respectively, were applied for both K. pneumoniae and A. baumannii. The proportions of colistin-resistant strains were 95.1, 77, 96.7, 57.4, 65.6, and 98.4% by BMD, BMD-P80, AD, Etest, MTS, and Vitek2, respectively. The Etest and MTS methods produced excessive rates of very major errors (VMEs) (39.3 and 31.1%, respectively), while BMD-P80 produced 18% VMEs, AD produced 3.3% VMEs, and Vitek2 produced no VMEs. Major errors (MEs) were rather limited by all tested methods. These data show that gradient diffusion methods may lead to inappropriate colistin therapy. Clinical laboratories should consider the use of automated systems, such as Vitek2, or dilution methods for colistin ST.
The Lived Experience of Early-Stage Alzheimer’s Disease: A Three-Year Longitudinal Phenomenological Case Study

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore how one person experienced the early years of dementia as she was living through the pre-clinical and earlyclinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Interviews were held onfour occasions over a period of three years. The data were analyzed usingthe descriptive phenomenological psychological method, in which theresearcher approached the data from a caring perspective. The livedexperience of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease showed to be acomplex transitional phenomenon that involves a dynamic process of personaladjustment. The process is set in motion as the participant receives thediagnosis and will eventually lead her towards a state of increased opennessand receptiveness toward the disease. The results describe this process asit unfolds in the context of the overall experience, and the variousadjustments that the participant undertakes. Some reflections concerning theplausible needs of patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s diseaseare included in the discussion.
Tissue density and state of activation of eosinophils in the nasal mucosa of allergic and nonallergic rhinopathic patients

The tissue density of eosinophils and the degree of activation of eosinophils in the nasal mucosa of allergic and nonallergic rhinopathic patients were studied by a combination of the immunogold method, which uses EG2 antibody which binds to the secreted form of eosinophils, and the Luna method. The tissue density of eosinophils and the degree of EG2‐positivity were higher in the allergic nasal mucosa than in the nonallergic nasal mucosa. The eosinophils in the tissue were mainly EG2‐positive in contrast with those in the vessels. Epithelial shedding was rarely observed and was not related to the tissue density of eosinophils or EG2‐positivity. Our results suggest that the eosinophils in the allergic nasal mucosa are activated in the tissue, not in the vessel.
Annual Risk of Death Resulting From Short Falls Among Young Children: Less Than 1 in 1 Million

OBJECTIVE. The objective of the work was to develop an estimate of the risk of death resulting from short falls of <1.5 m in vertical height, affecting infants and young children between birth and the fifth birthday. METHODS. A review of published materials, including 5 book chapters, 2 medical society statements, 7 major literature reviews, 3 public injury databases, and 177 peer-reviewed, published articles indexed in the National Library of Medicine, was performed. RESULTS. The California Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control Branch injury database yielded 6 possible fall-related fatalities of young children in a population of 2.5 million young children over a 5-year period. The other databases and the literature review produced no data that would indicate a higher short-fall mortality rate. Most publications that discuss the risk of death resulting from short falls say that such deaths are rare. No deaths resulting from falls have been reliably reported from day care centers. CONCLUSIONS. The best current estimate of the mortality rate for short falls affecting infants and young children is <0.48 deaths per 1 million young children per year. Additional research is suggested.
An Abstract Interface for System Software on Large-Scale Clusters

Scalable management of distributed resources is one of the major challenges when building large-scale clusters for high-performance computing. This task includes transparent fault tolerance, efficient deployment of resources and support for all the needs of parallel applications: parallel I/O, deterministic behavior and responsiveness. These challenges may seem daunting with commodity hardware and operating systems, since they were not designed to support a global, single management view of a large-scale system. In this paper we propose and demonstrate an abstract network interface in the cluster interconnect to facilitate the implementation of a simple yet powerful global operating system. This system, which can be thought of as a coarse-grain SIMD operating system, can allow commodity clusters to grow to thousands of nodes, while still retaining the usability and performance of the single-node workstation.
Social Interaction in a Multiage, Single-Grade Classroom

Social interaction in a typical multiage first grade Brazilian classroom was examined with the aim of determining the extent of age segregation and the nature of cross-age interaction in such a mixed-age setting. The 12 older and the 12 younger children in the classroom were videotaped during academic activities. Dyadic contacts were analysed with respect to sex and age group of initiator and receiver as well as for content of the interaction. Older children preferred to interact with agemates and were selected as peers more frequently than younger children. Girls were less age-segregated than boys, and young boys were the most isolated group in the classroom. Cross-age interactions showed different patterns among boys and girls. The need for further research is stressed to assess the effects of such a social structure on the school adjustment of the young boys.
Generative and discriminative algorithms for spoken language understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) for conversational systems (SDS) aims at extracting concept and their relations from spontaneous speech. Previous approaches to SLU have modeled concept relations as stochastic semantic networks ranging from generative approach to discriminative. As spoken dialog systems complexity increases, SLU needs to perform understanding based on a richer set of features ranging from a-priori knowledge, long dependency, dialog history, system belief, etc. This paper studies generative and discriminative approaches to modeling the sentence segmentation and concept labeling. We evaluate algorithms based on Finite State Transducers (FST) as well as discriminative algorithms based on Support Vector Machine sequence classifier based and Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We compare them in terms of concept accuracy, generalization and robustness to annotation ambiguities. We also show how non-local non-lexical features (e.g. a-priori knowledge) can be modeled with CRF which is the best performing algorithm across tasks. The evaluation is carried out on two SLU tasks of different complexity, namely ATIS and MEDIA corpora.
Trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) renders HER2+ breast cancer highly susceptible to CTLA-4/PD-1 blockade

An antibody-drug conjugate overcomes resistance to immune checkpoint blockade in HER2-positive breast cancer. Targeted therapy with more punch Overexpression of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) is common in breast cancer, and it is associated with poor outcomes despite the availability of trastuzumab, an antibody against HER2, and other HER2-targeted agents. The reason for the poor outcomes is that many patients develop resistance to the targeted drugs. Müller et al. have now shown that this resistance can be overcome with trastuzumab emtansine, an antibody-drug conjugate that combines the HER2-targeting ability of trastuzumab with a cytotoxic drug, which the antibody delivers directly to the tumor. In addition to its cytotoxic effects, treatment with trastuzumab emtansine activated a strong antitumor immune response and effectively combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors, suggesting that it can be used in combination therapy. Targeted drug delivery with antibody-drug conjugates such as the HER2-directed ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) has emerged as a powerful strategy for cancer therapy. We show that T-DM1 is particularly effective in eliciting antitumor immunity in patients with early breast cancer (WSG-ADAPT trial) and in a HER2-expressing orthotopic tumor model. In the latter, despite primary resistance to immunotherapy, combined treatment with T-DM1 and anti–CTLA-4/PD-1 (cytotoxic T lymphocyte–associated protein-4/programmed cell death protein-1) was curative because it triggered innate and adaptive immunity. Tumor rejection was accompanied by massive T cell infiltration, TH1 (T helper 1) cell polarization, and, notably, a substantial increase in regulatory T cells. Depletion of regulatory T cells resulted in inflammation and tissue damage, implying their essential role in protecting the host during therapy. This study provides insights into the mechanisms of T-DM1’s therapeutic activity and a rationale for potential therapeutic combination strategies with immunotherapy.
YA-SRAP: Yet another serverless RFID authentication protocol

Several security threats in RFID systems are obstacles to intermingle this technology into human lives. On the other hand ensuring flexible privacy mechanism has been a challenge due to extremely inadequate computational storage of typical RFID tags. So in order to relieve tags from responsibility, privacy protection and security assurance was guaranteed by central server. In this paper, we describe serverless, lightweight, forward secured and untraceable authentication protocol for RFID tags. This authentication protocol ensures security against almost all major attacks without the intervention of server. Furthermore it is very critical to guarantee untraceability and scalability simultaneously. Here we are proposing a scheme to make our protocols more scalable via ownership transfer. To the best of our knowledge this is incorporated in the serverless system for the first time. (8 pages)
Reliability in the Assessment of Program Quality by Teaching Assistants During Code Reviews

It is of paramount importance that formative feedback is meaningful in order to drive student learning. Achieving this, however, relies upon a clear and constructively aligned model of quality being applied consistently across submissions. This poster presentation raises concerns about the inter-rater reliability of code reviews conducted by teaching assistants in the absence of such a model. Five teaching assistants each reviewed 12 purposely selected programs submitted by introductory programming students. An analysis of their reliability revealed that while teaching assistants were self-consistent, they each assessed code quality in different ways. This suggests a need for standard models of program quality, alongside supporting rubrics and other tools, to be used during code reviews to improve the reliability of formative feedback.
Anatomic basis for mitral valve modelling.

The increasing popularity of mitral valve repair and current interest in replacement with a mitral homograft or heterograft warrant a new look at the normal functional anatomy of the system. We conducted a detailed review of the anatomic structure of both the intact and excised mitral apparatus of porcine and human species. The following intact structural dimensions were measured: total annular length, anterior and posterior annular length. Excised measurements included: total annular length, anterior and posterior annular lengths, leaflet edge lengths, leaflet heights, and anterolateral and posteromedial commissural heights. Leaflet area was calculated from planimetric measurements. Chordal lengths were measured and distribution recorded. The majority of leaflet measurements were not statistically different between groups. For both groups, the measured annular length increased significantly upon valve excision. In both groups, the posterior leaflet area was significantly larger than the anterior leaflet area, and the area of each leaflet alone was significantly greater than the calculated orifice area. Chordal length was not significantly different between groups, however, distribution varied slightly with the ratio of origins to insertions being 8:1 (porcine) and 5:1 (human). The results are consistent with previous studies of the human mitral valve. This study showed little difference between human and porcine data, and the porcine valve was identified as an appropriate model for further investigation of the mitral valve system. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Multidistance diffuse correlation spectroscopy for simultaneous estimation of blood flow index and optical properties

Abstract. Traditionally, diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) measures microvascular blood flow by fitting a physical model to the measurement of the intensity autocorrelation function from a single source-detector pair. This analysis relies on the accurate knowledge of the optical properties, absorption, and reduced scattering coefficients of the medium. Therefore, DCS is often deployed together with diffuse optical spectroscopy. We present an algorithm that employs multidistance DCS (MD-DCS) for simultaneous measurement of blood flow index, as well as an estimate of the optical properties of the tissue. The algorithm has been validated through noise-free and noise-added simulated data and phantom measurements. A longitudinal in vivo measurement of a mouse tumor is also shown. MD-DCS is introduced as a stand-alone system for small source-detector separations (<2 cm) for noninvasive measurement of microvascular blood flow.
Loss of Myocardial Ischemic Postconditioning in Adenosine A1 and Bradykinin B2 Receptors Gene Knockout Mice

Background— Ischemic postconditioning (PostC) is a recently described cardioprotective modality against reperfusion injury, through series of brief reflow interruptions applied at the very onset of reperfusion. It is proposed that PostC can activate a complex cellular signaling cascade, in which cell membrane receptors could serve as the upstream triggers of PostC. However, the exact subtypes of such receptors remain controversial or uninvestigated. To this context, the purpose of present study was to determine the definitive role of adenosine A1 and bradykinin B1 and B2 receptors in PostC. Methods and Results— The hearts isolated from adult male C57BL/6J wild-type mice or the mice lacking adenosine A1, or bradykinin B1 or B2 receptors subjected to zero-flow global ischemia and reperfusion in a Langendorff model. PostC, consisting of 6 cycles of 10 seconds of reperfusion and 10 seconds of ischemia, demonstrated significantly reduced myocardial infarct size (22.8±3.1%, mean±SEM) as compared with the non-PostC wild-type controls (35.1±2.8%, P<0.05). The infarct-limiting protection of PostC was absent in adenosine A1 receptor knockout mice (34.9±2.7%) or bradykinin B2 receptor knockout mice (33.3±1.7%) and was partially attenuated in bradykinin B1 receptor–deficient mice (25.6±2.9%; P>0.05). On the other hand, PostC did not significantly alter postischemic cardiac contractile function and coronary flow. Conclusions— With the use of three distinctive strains of gene knockout mice, the current study has provided the first conclusive evidence showing PostC-induced infarct-limiting cardioprotection could be triggered by activation of multiple types of cell membrane receptors, which include adenosine A1 and bradykinin B2 receptors.