Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Orthotopic Transplantation Models of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma Derived From Cell Lines and Primary Tumors and Displaying Varying Metastatic Activity

Objective: To establish a series of clinically relevant orthotopic transplantation models of human pancreatic adenocarcinoma from both cell lines and primary tumors under uniform experimental conditions. Methods: Ten pancreatic cancer cell lines and 12 primary tumors were orthotopically transplanted in SCID mice. The cell lines and xenografts were characterized for K-ras, BRAF, p53, p16, and DPC4 aberrations employing direct sequencing, immunohistochemistry, and Western blotting. Results: All xenografts showed high intrapancreatic tumorigenicity and extensive local tumor growth, and each showed a unique behavioral and genetic profile. Tumor characteristics were retained during serial passaging. The cell line–derived xenografts represented the entire expected range of histologic differentiation. Although the overall metastatic rate was moderate to high, the metastatic pattern varied; 4 cell lines showed a high metastatic rate to the liver. The primary tumor–derived xenografts retained their similarity to the corresponding original donor tumors with regard to histologic presentation and biologic behavior. K-ras, p53, p16, and DPC4 aberrations were revealed in 80%, 70%, 50%, and 40% of cell lines and 100%, 33%, 75%, and 58% of primary tumor derived xenografts, respectively. No BRAF mutations were present. The metastatic behavior of the xenografts was significantly associated with the degree of histologic differentiation, number of genes altered, and p53 status. Conclusions: The new models reflected the wide range of patho-biological features and genetic alterations that characterize human pancreatic cancer and may be used collectively or selectively as a markedly improved in vivo tool for preclinical and molecular studies of pancreatic cancer.
Generalized Causal Mediation Analysis

Summary The goal of mediation analysis is to assess direct and indirect effects of a treatment or exposure on an outcome. More generally, we may be interested in the context of a causal model as characterized by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), where mediation via a specific path from exposure to outcome may involve an arbitrary number of links (or “stages”). Methods for estimating mediation (or pathway) effects are available for a continuous outcome and a continuous mediator related via a linear model, while for a categorical outcome or categorical mediator, methods are usually limited to two‐stage mediation. We present a method applicable to multiple stages of mediation and mixed variable types using generalized linear models. We define pathway effects using a potential outcomes framework and present a general formula that provides the effect of exposure through any specified pathway. Some pathway effects are nonidentifiable and their estimation requires an assumption regarding the correlation between counterfactuals. We provide a sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of this assumption. Confidence intervals for pathway effect estimates are obtained via a bootstrap method. The method is applied to a cohort study of dental caries in very low birth weight adolescents. A simulation study demonstrates low bias of pathway effect estimators and close‐to‐nominal coverage rates of confidence intervals. We also find low sensitivity to the counterfactual correlation in most scenarios.
herapeutic processes and clinical outcomes of body psychotherapy in chronic chizophrenia – An open clinical trial

Persistent negative symptoms are an ongoing challenge in the treatment of chronic schizophrenia. Evidence from randomised controlled trials suggests that arts/non-verbal therapies may be effective in treating negative symptoms of schizophrenia. These treatments have not yet been evaluated in open clinical settings. The present uncontrolled clinical trial examines the therapeutic processes and clinical outcomes of group body psychotherapy (BPT) on marked negative symptoms in patients with chronic schizophrenia. Changes in symptom scores, subjective quality of life, social functioning and emotional processing between baseline and post-treatment were assessed. The ratings from clinical assessments of independent researchers were compared with the post-therapy summary assessment of the therapists. A total of 39 eligible patients were referred, out of which 18 patients agreed to participate and received BPT in addition to treatment as usual within three therapy groups run by different therapists. Patients had high symptom levels and low psychosocial functioning at baseline. Negative symptoms and general psychopathology significantly reduced during treatment. Positive symptoms and other outcomes did not change. Researcher ratings of psychopathology were in line with the assessment of clinical outcome by therapists and qualitative observations on changes in movement behaviour during therapy. The results of this study are consistent with findings from a RCT (Röhricht & Priebe, 2006), indicating that BPT is associated with reduced negative symptoms even when administered in routine clinical settings. Therapists’ qualitative judgements may be considered as a valid source for assessing treatment outcomes. Future studies should explore effects of longer term treatments on other outcomes. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Barriers to the adoption of online supply chain solutions in small and medium enterprises

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to identify and measure the perceived importance of barriers in the SME community to the adoption of internet business procurement and supply chain solutions.Design/methodology/approach – This was a telephone survey of a sample of 173 Canadian small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), stratified by size of company (small and medium) and according to whether they were distributors, retailers or manufacturers. The data were analyzed statistically through an analysis of variance approach.Findings – Few differences were found between SME internet adopters and non‐adopters. There is a need for education for all SME management on the benefits and drawbacks to using e‐business solutions. Inter‐organizational information systems that are required to link supply chain partners can be a serious barrier to online solutions. There is a significant dependency among supply chain partners in decisions on adopting online links. Flexibility, agility and ability of SMEs can help th.
A mouse model to study organ homing behaviour of haemopoietic progenitor cells reveals high selectivity but low efficiency of multipotent progenitors to home into haemopoietic organs

To study the homing behaviour of an enriched multipotent primitive haemopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) population in mice, undifferentiated murine factor‐dependent multipotent HPCs (FDCP‐mix), stably transfected with the green fluorescence protein gene, were intravenously injected into congenic mice. After 2 or 24 h, cell suspensions were prepared from bone marrow, spleen, lung, liver, muscle, colon, kidney, brain or blood of the mice and analysed by flow cytometry. Using direct quantifiable determination of total HPC numbers homed per organ and a method to estimate the degree of organ contamination by HPC that were present in blood vessels within the organs before preparation, the highest absolute numbers of HPC were detected in the liver and lungs at 2 h but this was sharply decreased at 24 h, whereas HPC selectively accumulated in the bone marrow and spleen at 24 h after transplantation. Only a few HPC were detected in other organs. The seeding efficiency of homed FDCP‐mix HPC to the bone marrow and spleen was approximately 1·5% and ranged between that of primary whole bone marrow cells and lineage‐depleted freshly isolated bone marrow cells. Pretreatment of HPC with inhibitors of signal transduction indicated that short‐term homing of multipotent HPC into haemopoietic organs is an active process requiring co‐ordinated intracellular signalling through Rho family small GTPases and protein kinases. Thus, short‐term homing of FDCP‐mix HPC into haemopoietic organs is of low efficiency but high selectivity, and provides a system to analyse the mechanisms and manipulation of primitive HPC which saves large numbers of donor animals.
Species status and population genetic structure of grapevine eriophyoid mites

Bud mite, blister mite (Colomerus vitis Pagenstecher), and rust mite (Calepitrimerus vitis Nalepa) (Acari: Eriophyoidae) are recognized grapevine pests. Much of the biology and ecology of these pests is poorly understood. We used two types of molecular markers to gain further insight into the breeding biology and population structure of these mites, using individuals collected from sites around south‐eastern Australia. Patterns of genetic variation observed using PCR‐RFLP of ITS 1 (Internal Transcribed Spacer 1) confirmed the separate species status of the rust mite, and resolved the species status of bud and blister mites, revealing two closely related but distinct species. Microsatellite markers revealed extensive genetic differentiation between bud mite populations and blister mite populations even at micro‐geographical levels, suggesting low movement in these species. The findings indicate that separate control strategies are needed against bud and blister mites, and that localized control strategies are likely to be effective given their limited dispersal.
A New Strategy to Prepare Competitive Template in Quantitative Competitive PCR

Competitive PCR is an useful technique in studying gene expression. In this article a new strategy to prepare competitive template, which had homologous primer annealing region and length-different with the target template, was proposed, with IGF-1 gene cDNA as an example. There is an unique restriction endonuclease Mspl recognize site in IGF-1 cDNA but thirteens in plasmid pUC-18 backbone. Digested with Mspl, the recombinant plasmid pUC-IGF-1 was cut into small fragments with identical sticky ends on their 3'and 5'terminals. Under the function of T4 DNA ligase these small fragments might be linked with each other randomly. Then the ligation, served as template, was PCR amplified with a pair of primers assigned to IGF-1 cDNA. As a result, bedsides a 160 bp IGF-1 cDNA, another DNA fragment about 600 bp was successfully amplified. DNA sequencing revealed that this 600 bp fragment was formed by an insertion of 440 bp into the Mspl site of IGF-1 cDNA. Which could be used as competitive template for detecting the concentration of IGF1 transcript in the samples.
The Impact of Web-Based Procurement on the Management of Operating Resources Supply

SUMMARY The focus of this article is on the impact of Web-based order processing systems for procurement strategy in the management of maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) supply. The management of MRO supplies has been little discussed in the literature, and in many organizations is undertaken in a devolved, decentralized, and uncoordinated fashion. Consequently, MRO procurement is often a poorly managed and non-value-added activity, yet MRO purchases may account for many millions of dollars of expenditure for organizations across most, if not all, industries. To explore the impact of Web-based procurement systems on MRO purchasing, a Delphi study was conducted providing access and analysis of commercially sensitive data.1 In this article, it is contended that greater information processing capability achieved through the use of electronic commerce, specifically Web-based procurement, will enable significant cost improvements and strategic leverage to be obtained through a more strategic approach to management of the typically low-value, high-variety goods and services that constitute the main category of MRO items. E-procurement of MRO items may be a so-called “killer application” on the basis of potential efficiency gains. Further, an important consequence of the reengineering of the MRO procurement process will be to raise the professional profile of the purchasing function through enhanced internal customer service and significant total cost improvements.
Unlocking the Supply Chain to Build Competitive Advantage

Customer demands on manufacturers and retailers are increasing relentlessly. Spurred by the Internet's “click it and get it” value proposition, a growing number of consumers and business buyers want customized products, convenient ordering, and rapid fulfillment. Delivering against these rising expectations is not easy, however. This is especially true for traditional or incumbent companies that have additional cultural obstacles to overcome. Companies have mastered the challenges of speed, convenience, and reliability and are gaining competitive advantage.
Ensuring fairness among ECN and non‐ECN TCP over the Internet

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) has been proved to provide a fast indication of incipient congestion and thus better the performance of a TCP/IP network. In this work, we carry out investigations on gateway or router performance in providing fairnesss when both FIM ECN‐capable and non‐ECN‐capable connections are employed. We propose a new packet‐dropping scheme called Fair In‐time Dropping (FID) which drops packets from a connection upon detecting an incipient indication of congestion depending on its share of gateway or router buffer occupancy. We also show that a combination of FIM and FID offers the best fairness compared with a combination of FIM along with other dropping schemes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Structural hashing: efficient three dimensional object recognition

An approach for the recognition of multiple three-dimensional object models from three-dimensional scene data is presented. The authors work on dense data, but neither the models nor the scene data have to be complete. The problem is addressed in a realistic environment: the viewpoint is arbitrary, the objects vary widely in complexity, and no assumptions about the structure of the surface are made. The approach is novel in that it uses two different types of primitives for matching: small surface patches, where differential properties can be reliably computed, and lines corresponding to depth or orientation discontinuities. These are represented by splashes and 3-D curves respectively. It is shown how both of these primitives can be encoded by a set of super segments, consisting of connected linear segments. These super segments are entered into a hash table, and provide the essential mechanism for fast retrieval and matching. <<ETX>>
Memory System Optimizations for Customized Computing - From Single-Chip to Datacenter

Energy efficiency is one of the key considerations for various systems, from handheld devices to servers in a data center. Application-specific accelerators can provide 10 - 1000X energy-efficiency improvement over general-purpose processors through customization and by exploiting the application parallelism. The design of memory system is the key to improve performance and energy efficiency for both accelerators and processors. However, even with customization and acceleration, the single-server computation power is still limited and cannot support need of large-scale data processing and analytics. Therefore, the second goal of this dissertation is to provide customization support in the in-memory cluster computing system for such big data applications. The first part of this dissertation investigates the design and optimizations of memory system. Our goal is to design a high-performance and energy-efficient memory system that supports both general-purpose processors and accelerator-rich architectures (ARAs). We proposed hybrid caches architecture and corresponding optimizations for processor caches. We also provide an optimal algorithm to synthesize the ARA memory system. In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on improving the performance of an important domain, DNA sequencing pipeline, which demands huge computation need together with big data characteristics. We adopt the in-memory cluster computing framework, Spark, to provide scalable speedup while providing hardware acceleration support in the cluster. With such system, we can reduce the time of sequence alignment process from tens of hours to 32 minutes.
R 4-A . 2 : Rapid Similarity Prediction , Forensic Search & Retrieval in Video

This project develops video analytics for maintaining airport and perimeter security. Our objectives include real-time suspicious activity detection, seamless tracking of individuals across sparse multi-camera networks, and the forensic search for individuals and activities in years of archived data. Surveillance networks are becoming increasingly effective in the public and private sectors. Generally, use of these surveillance networks falls into either a real-time or forensic capacity. For real-time use, the activities of interest are known a-priori, and the challenge is to detect those activities as they occur in the video. For forensic use, the data is archived until a user chooses an activity to search for. Forensic use calls for a method of content-based retrieval in large video corpuses, based on user-de ined queries. In general, identifying relevant information for tracking and forensics across multiple cameras with non-overlapping views is challenging. This is dif icult given the wide range of variations, from the traditional pose, illumination, and scale issues to spatio-temporal variations of a scene, itself.
ORGANIZATIONAL GOVERNANCE AND EMPLOYEE PAY: HOW OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE AFFECTS THE FIRM'S COMPENSATION STRATEGY

This research investigated how the ownership structure is related to the firm's overall compensation strategy. The findings extend previous research that focused primarily on CEO compensation strategy. We show that there are significant differences in the compensation practices that apply to all employees as a function of the ownership structure. The results show that for owner‐controlled firms and owner‐managed firms there is significant pay/performance sensitivity for all employees. In management‐controlled firms, changes in pay are related to changes in size of the firm. These findings lead us to conclude that ownership structure not only affects upper management's pay, but also the pay of all employees through substantial differences in the firm's compensation practices. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Numerical Study on the Impact of Grouting Material on Borehole Heat Exchangers Performance in Aquifers

U-pipes for ground source heat pump (GSHP) installations are generally inserted in vertical boreholes back-filled with pumpable grouts. Grout thermal conductivity is a crucial parameter, dominating the borehole thermal resistance and impacting the heat exchanger efficiency. In order to seal the borehole and prevent leakages of the heat carrier fluid, grouting materials are also hydraulically impermeable, so that groundwater flow inside the borehole is inhibited. The influence of groundwater flow on the borehole heat exchangers (BHE) performance has recently been highlighted by several authors. However groundwater impact and grouting materials influence are usually evaluated separately, disregarding any combined effect. Therefore simulation is used to investigate the role of the thermal and hydraulic conductivities of the grout when the BHE operates in an aquifer with a relevant groundwater flow. Here 3 main cases for a single U-pipe in a sandy aquifer are compared. In Case 1 the borehole is back-filled with the surrounding soil formation, while a thermally enhanced grout and a low thermal conductivity grout are considered in Case 2 and Case 3 respectively. Simulations are carried out maintaining the inlet temperature constant in order to reproduce the yearly operation of the GSHP system. For each of the 3 cases three different groundwater flow velocities are considered. The results show that a high thermal conductivity grout further enhances the effects of a significant groundwater flow. The conditions when neglecting the grout material in the numerical model does not lead to relevant errors are also identified.
Monitoring the eye lens: which dose quantity is adequate?

Recent epidemiological studies suggest a rather low dose threshold (below 0.5 Gy) for the induction of a cataract of the eye lens. Some other studies even assume that there is no threshold at all. Therefore, protection measures have to be optimized and current dose limits for the eye lens may be reduced in the future. The question of which personal dose equivalent quantity is appropriate for monitoring the dose to the eye lens arises from this situation. While in many countries dosemeters calibrated in terms of the dose equivalent quantity Hp(0.07) have been seen as being adequate for monitoring the dose to the eye lens, this might be questionable in the case of reduced dose limits and, thus, it may become necessary to use the dose equivalent quantity Hp(3) for this purpose. To discuss this question, the dose conversion coefficients for the equivalent dose of the eye lens (in the following eye lens dose) were determined for realistic photon and beta radiation fields and compared with the values of the corresponding conversion coefficients for the different operational quantities. The values obtained lead to the following conclusions: in radiation fields where most of the dose comes from photons, especially x-rays, it is appropriate to use dosemeters calibrated in terms of Hp(0.07) on a slab phantom, while in other radiation fields (dominated by beta radiation or unknown contributions of photon and beta radiation) dosemeters calibrated in terms of Hp(3) on a slab phantom should be used. As an alternative, dosemeters calibrated in terms of Hp(0.07) on a slab phantom could also be used; however, in radiation fields containing beta radiation with the end point energy near 1 MeV, an overestimation of the eye lens dose by up to a factor of 550 is possible.
Assessing the table grape supply chain performance in China - a value chain analysis perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the cost-benefits, financial performance and relationships of the key actors in the table grape supply chain by using value chain analysis method. Design/methodology/approach – This study presents the result of analysis on financial performance of key actors in three table grape supply chains and the relationship among them using value chain analysis. The table grape supply chain was analyzed using data collected from a field survey in five regions of China. The key actors of these chains were interviewed. The costs, benefits, operational and financial performance of supply chain actors were analyzed. Findings – The results show that, despite receiving the highest proportion of total net profit and making the highest value creation, vinegrowers are facing fluctuant and uncertain commercial returns due to the production and market risks, fluctuation of farm-gate price and the buyer dominant relationship with wholesalers. Moreover, although it is profitab.