Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy Tube: Medical and Ethical Issues in Placement

OBJECTIVE:Offering and recommending PEG tube placement to patients has been a topic of considerable interest in the medical literature. The role of individual health care professionals in the decision making process is poorly defined. PEG tubes are often placed inappropriately because of unrealistic and inaccurate expectations of what they can accomplish in patients unable to tolerate adequate oral intake. We have developed an algorithm for PEG placement for the geriatric, oncology, and neurology patients based on a critical review of current literature.METHODS:An extensive review of the literature was performed focusing on PEG tube placement in oncology, neurology, and geriatric patients. This algorithm was developed to provide both the primary care provider and the specialist with appropriate indications for PEG placement in these patient populations.RESULTS:Appropriate indications for PEG placement are 1) Esophageal obstruction (e.g., esophageal cancer), 2) Neurologic etiology of dysphagia without obstruction (e.g., status post cerebrovascular accident, pseudobulbar palsy), 3) Prolonged refusal to swallow without evidence of concomitant terminal illness (e.g., protracted pseudodementia due to severe depression), 4) Supplemental nutrition for patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy.CONCLUSIONS:If no physiologic benefit is expected with PEG placement (anorexia-cachexia syndrome), the health care team has no obligation to offer or perform an intervention. This same principle would apply if intervention improves physiologic states but has no effect on quality of life (e.g., permanent vegetative state). Small-bore feeding tubes are cost effective and relatively safe for enteral feedings of up to 6–8 weeks. This is especially pertinent in the population with acute neurological deficits, in which prognostication on extent of impairment is best estimated by communication with neurologist. In the geriatric population there is no proved benefit in weight gain or markers of nutrition (albumin, prealbumin) in patients with malnutrition due to impaired oral intake.
Design and analysis of an under-actuated XYθ stage for automated tissue indentation

Micro manipulation is essential for tissue indentation tasks in micro-scale experiment, and microscopes must be equipped with multi degree-of-freedom (DOF) stages to accurately reach the regions of interest (ROI). Current microscope stages have three main drawbacks when applied to material characterization tasks. First, most microscope stages are designed for 2- or 3-DOF manipulation, lacking the ability to rotate the specimen. Second, the average micro-positioning stage is manually adjusted, and finally most stages accomplish either a large travel range or sub-micron resolution manipulation, but not both. These limitations pose a challenge for phenotyping diseases using quantitative mechanical signatures. This research is motivated by the need for improved accuracy in breast cancer detection. The following work aims to improve upon current micro-positioning stages by allowing for 4-DOF motion (XYθ for in-plane motion and Z direction indentation) and the ability to employ a variety of devices for material characterization. The ability to rotate the specimen will provide improved accuracy in reaching the ROI and robust measurement in uncertain specimen environments. The work described herein explains the design and analysis toward an under-actuated micro-positioning stage for automated tissue indentation.
Multiple vehicles based new landmark feature mapping for highly autonomous driving map

A highly autonomous driving (HAD) map can improve the perception and localization performance of autonomous cars. However, when the HAD map cannot represent the real world precisely as a result of changes in the environment, reliability of autonomous cars may be decreased; therefore, it is essential that up-to-date map information is maintained. In order to keep the HAD map up-to-date, new landmark features must be updated continuously. This paper focuses on new landmark feature mapping in the HAD map based on multiple cars equipped with low-cost sensors. The features can be accurately mapped in the HAD map by matching between sensor information and the HAD map information, and by integrating multiple features estimated from various cars. The proposed algorithm is composed of three steps: data acquisition, new landmark feature map estimation using the HAD map, and feature integration. The algorithm is evaluated by means of certain simulation scenarios and experiments.
Load and interference aware joint cell association and user scheduling in uplink cellular networks

This paper studies the potential benefit of joint load balancing and interference mitigation in the uplink wireless network through optimized cell association and user scheduling across multiple cells. Coordinating uplink transmission is considerably more challenging than the downlink, because the uplink interference strongly depends on the transmission patterns of other users in the neighboring cells. This paper formulates the uplink joint cell association and scheduling problem as a network utility maximization problem. We propose a series of problem reformulations based on fractional programming, and recursively solve the resulting convex approximation to reach a local optimum of the proportionally fair resource allocation problem. Numerical results suggest that the proposed method can provide significant performance improvement as compared to the benchmarks.
edge : Extraction of Differential Gene Expression Version 2 . 8 . 0

Note: edge was first released in 2005 and described in the publication Leek et al. (2006). It was an independently released R package by the John Storey Lab, which included multi-threading and a graph-ical user interface. However, the current version is now available through Bioconductor as a standard R package.
Primary prevention of CVD: diet.

INTRODUCTION Diet is important in the cause of many chronic diseases. Individual change in dietary behaviour has the potential to decrease the burden of chronic disease, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD). METHODS AND OUTCOMES We conducted a systematic review and aimed to answer the following clinical question: What are the effects of dietary advice in generally healthy adults without existing CVD or increased CVD risk factors to improve cardiovascular outcomes (mortality, cardiovascular events, and cardiovascular risk factors)? We searched: Medline, Embase, The Cochrane Library, and other important databases up to March 2014 (Clinical Evidence reviews are updated periodically; please check our website for the most up-to-date version of this review). We included harms alerts from relevant organisations such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). RESULTS We found 14 studies that met our inclusion criteria. We performed a GRADE evaluation of the quality of evidence for interventions. CONCLUSIONS In this systematic review, we present information relating to the effectiveness and safety of the following interventions: advice to increase fibre intake alone, advice to increase fruit and vegetable intake alone, advice to reduce and/or modify fat intake alone, and advice to reduce sodium intake alone.
Analysis of the V2 Vasopressin Receptor (V2R) Mutations Causing Partial Nephrogenic Diabetes Insipidus Highlights a Sustainable Signaling by a Non-peptide V2R Agonist*

Disease-causing mutations in G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) genes, including the V2 vasopressin receptor (V2R) gene, often cause misfolded receptors, leading to a defect in plasma membrane trafficking. A novel V2R mutation, T273M, identified in a boy with partial nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (NDI), shows intracellular localization and partial defects similar to the two mutants we described previously (10). Although non-peptide V2R antagonists have been shown to rescue the membrane localization of V2R mutants, their level of functional rescue is weak. Interestingly, it has been reported that a non-peptide agonist, OPC51803, activates misfolded V2R mutants intracellularly without degradation, thus potentially serving as a therapeutic agent against NDI (14). In our current experiments, however, a peptide antagonist blocked arginine vasopressin (AVP)- or OPC51803-stimulated cAMP accumulation both in COS-7 and MDCK cells, suggesting that OPC51803 mainly stimulates cell surface V2R mutants. In addition, our analyses revealed that OPC51803 works not only as a non-peptide agonist that causes activation/β-arrestin-dependent desensitization of V2R mutants expressed at the plasma membrane but also as a pharmacochaperone that promotes the endoplasmic reticulum-retained mutant maturation and trafficking to the plasma membrane. The ratio of the pharmacochaperone effect to the desensitization effect likely correlates negatively with the residual function of the tested mutants, suggesting that OPC5 has a more favorable effect on the V2R mutants with a less residual function. We speculated that the canceling of the desensitization effect of OPC51803 by the pharmacochaperone effect after long-term treatment may produce sustainable signaling, and thus pharmacochaperone agonists such as OPC51803 may serve as promising therapeutics for NDI caused by misfolded V2R mutants.
Driver Action Prediction Using Deep (Bidirectional) Recurrent Neural Network

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) can be significantly improved with effective driver action prediction (DAP). Predicting driver actions early and accurately can help mitigate the effects of potentially unsafe driving behaviors and avoid possible accidents. In this paper, we formulate driver action prediction as a timeseries anomaly prediction problem. While the anomaly (driver actions of interest) detection might be trivial in this context, finding patterns that consistently precede an anomaly requires searching for or extracting features across multi-modal sensory inputs. We present such a driver action prediction system, including a real-time data acquisition, processing and learning framework for predicting future or impending driver action. The proposed system incorporates camera-based knowledge of the driving environment and the driver themselves, in addition to traditional vehicle dynamics. It then uses a deep bidirectional recurrent neural network (DBRNN) to learn the correlation between sensory inputs and impending driver behavior achieving accurate and high horizon action prediction. The proposed system performs better than other existing systems on driver action prediction tasks and can accurately predict key driver actions including acceleration, braking, lane change and turning at durations of 5sec before the action is executed by the driver.
Recognising panoramas

The problem considered in this paper is the fully automatic construction of panoramas. Fundamentally, this problem requires recognition, as we need to know which parts of the panorama join up. Previous approaches have used human input or restrictions on the image sequence for the matching step. In this work we use object recognition techniques based on invariant local features to select matching images, and a probabilistic model for verification. Because of this our method is insensitive to the ordering, orientation, scale and illumination of the images. It is also insensitive to 'noise' images which are not part of the panorama at all, that is, it recognises panoramas. This suggests a useful application for photographers: the system takes as input the images on an entire flash card or film, recognises images that form part of a panorama, and stitches them with no user input whatsoever.
Emergence of cytochrome bc complexes in the context of photosynthesis

The cytochrome bc (cyt bc) complexes are involved in Q‐cycling; they oxidize membrane quinols by high‐potential electron acceptors, such as cytochromes or plastocyanin, and generate transmembrane proton gradient. In several prokaryotic lineages, and also in plant chloroplasts, the catalytic core of the cyt bc complexes is built of a four‐helical cytochrome b (cyt b) that contains three hemes, a three‐helical subunit IV, and an iron‐sulfur Rieske protein (cytochrome b 6 f‐type complexes). In other prokaryotic lineages, and also in mitochondria, the cyt b subunit is fused with subunit IV, yielding a seven‐ or eight‐helical cyt b with only two hemes (cyt bc 1‐type complexes). Here we present an updated phylogenomic analysis of the cyt b subunits of cyt bc complexes. This analysis provides further support to our earlier suggestion that (1) the ancestral version of cyt bc complex contained a small four‐helical cyt b with three hemes similar to the plant cytochrome b 6 and (2) independent fusion events led to the formation of large cyts b in several lineages. In the search for a primordial function for the ancestral cyt bc complex, we address the intimate connection between the cyt bc complexes and photosynthesis. Indeed, the Q‐cycle turnover in the cyt bc complexes demands high‐potential electron acceptors. Before the Great Oxygenation Event, the biosphere had been highly reduced, so high‐potential electron acceptors could only be generated upon light‐driven charge separation. It appears that an ancestral cyt bc complex capable of Q‐cycling has emerged in conjunction with the (bacterio)chlorophyll‐based photosynthetic systems that continuously generated electron vacancies at the oxidized (bacterio)chlorophyll molecules.
The Effect of Dominance on the Use of the QST − FST Contrast to Detect Natural Selection on Quantitative Traits

THE comparison between Wright's among-population fixation index F ST (a descriptor of the effect of the breeding structure on population diversity for neutral genes) and Spitze's quantitative index of population divergence Q ST [defined as V b/( V b + 2 V w), where V b and V w are, respectively, the
Biomacromolecular structures: An introduction to EMBL-EBI resources

Biomacromolecular structures Biomacromolecules [2] are large biological polymers, such as nucleic acids, proteins and carbohydrates, that are made up of monomers linked together. For example, proteins are composed of monomers called amino acids. They are linked together to form a polypeptide chain, which folds into a three dimensional (3D) structure to constitute a functional protein (Figure 1). Often a functional macromolecule is composed of more than one such chain and sometimes requires small molecules [3] to assist in its function.
Methimazole discontinuation before radioiodine therapy in patients with Graves’ disease

IntroductionAlthough radioiodine therapy (RIT) has been used for the treatment of hyperthyroidism for many decades, there is no consensus on the optimal time of methimazole (MMI) discontinuation before RIT. The aim of this clinical trial is to study the effect of three different time points of MMI discontinuation on response to RIT. Method and patientsOverall, 151 patients (18–65 years old), with Graves’ disease who were taking MMI and referred to I-131 therapy, were consecutively assigned to one of three groups, and MMI was discontinued for 24–48, 48.1–72, and 72.1–168 h in group, 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Radioiodine uptake was measured in all patients and the radioiodine dose was calculated according to the Quimby formula to deliver 7.4 MBq of I-131 per gram of thyroid weight. Response to RIT was assessed at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after RIT. ResultsA total of 102 women and 49 men were included in the study. The mean administered dose of I-131 was 362.9±188.7 MBq (9.8±5.1 mCi) and the mean time to response for radioiodine was 4.1±3.6 months. There was no significant difference between the three groups in age, thyroid weight, anti-TPO level, radioactive iodine uptake level, and radioiodine dose (P>0.1). Response to RIT at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after administration was also not different between the three groups (P>0.57). ConclusionNo difference was found in the response to treatment between patients with MMI discontinuation for 24–48, 48.1–72, and 72.1–96 h before RIT. Shorter discontinuation of MMI before RIT may be preferable in most patients. Video Abstract: http://links.lww. com/NMC/A39
Deconstructing Diversity Discourses in the Field of Educational Management and Leadership

Discourses of diversity have supplanted those of equal opportunity or social justice in many Western democratic societies. While the notion of diversity is seemingly empowering through its recognition of cultural, religious, racial and gender difference within nation states, the emergence of this discourse during the 1990s has been in the context of neoliberal managerialist discourses that assume social action is fully explicable through theories of maximizing self interest. Thus notions of diversity, while originating in collective demands of social movements of feminism, anti racism and multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, have in recent times privileged learning and leadership as an individual accomplishment and not a collective practice. Thus the dominant discourse of diversity is more in alignment with the deregulatory aspects of the increasingly managerial and market orientation of schooling, decentring earlier discourses of more transformatory notions premised upon reducing inequality and discrimination and developing ‘inclusivity’ in and through schooling. This paper provides a contextual and conceptual framework through which to explore the intersections and divergences of discourses of diversity in schools and their practical application.
The Manufacture of a Novel 3D Hydroxyapatite Microstructure Derived from Cuttlefish Bones for Potential Tissue Engineering Applications

Porous three-dimensional hydroxyapatite scaffolds were synthesised from aragonitic cuttlefish bones via a micro wave based technique. Due to its close similarity to the mineral phase found in the natural hu man bone matrix, synthetically produced hydroxyapatite is considered a viable apatite substitute for natural bone in a number of bio medical applications. The X-ray diffract ion data confirms the conversion of crystalline formations of calciu m carbonate, the main component of the cuttlefish, to hydro xyapatite. The synthesis process is straightforward, efficient and creates a highly porous 3 dimensional microstructure that has the potential to be used in a wide range of hard tissue engineering applications such as bone repair, filling material and bone augmentation.
Asymptotic disturbance rejection for Hammerstein positive real systems

We present control algorithms for stabilization and asymptotic disturbance rejection for Hammerstein systems with positive real linear dynamics. To do this, we extend the nonlinear controller modification technique of Bernstein and Haddad (1994) to include matched plant disturbances. The controller is based on a Lyapunov function that estimates the disturbance bound. These estimates are then used to construct high-gain switching controllers that guarantee convergence of the plant output while accounting for input nonlinearities.
Child Marriage and Faith Affiliation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Stylized Facts and Heterogeneity

C hild marriage remains highly prevalent in Africa, especially in rural areas and among vulnerable socio-economic groups (UNFPA 2012; UNICEF 2014; Nguyen and Wodon 2015a). Physiological and social criteria suggest that most boys and girls aged 14 and younger are much too young for sexual, marital, and reproductive transitions, while many among the 15–17-year-olds are also too young (Dixon-Mueller 2008). Child marriage, defined here as marriage before the age of 18, is known to have negative impacts on health as well as educational attainment, labor force participation, intimate partner violence, and empowerment (for a review, see Parsons et al. 2015, in this issue). It therefore makes sense, as many countries have done, including in Africa, to legally restrict marriage before the age of 18. Yet despite such restrictions, many girls still marry early, suggesting that more needs to be done to eliminate the practice. If faith plays a role in the continuation of the practice, there should be a role for faith leaders and faith-based organizations in the fight against child marriage, as argued by Walker (2015) and Karam (2015) in this issue. But does faith really play an important role in the persistence of the practice of child marriage? This is a complex question to answer, and different types of data can be brought to bear. In order to provide an introductory discussion of the issue, this article has two main objectives. The first objective, which is the focus of the next section, is to provide an account of trends in child marriage in Africa and a brief analysis of the statistical association between child marriage and faith affiliation. This helps to establish broad stylized facts or general observations on the basis of household survey
Molecular aspects of ischaemic postconditioning

Preconditioning, a well established phenomenon had been used since 1980s to attenuate ischaemia‐reperfusion induced injury. However, inability to predict the onset of ischaemia in clinical settings led to the discovery of a new concept of postconditioning (PoCo), in 2000s whereby brief repetitive cycles of ischaemia with intermittent reperfusion followed by prolonged ischaemia‐elicited tissue protection. There is an impressive array of molecular mechanisms contributing to PoCo‐mediated tissue‐protection, which include triggers like adenosine (ADO), opioid, erythropoietin (EPO), endogenous nitric‐oxide, reactive oxygen species, acetylcholine, tissue factors, pro‐inflammatory cytokines and bradykinin; mediators like reperfusion injury salvage kinase pathways including phosphoinositide‐3‐kinase, extra‐cellular signal regulated kinase½ pathway, protein kinase G and protein kinase C; end‐effectors like mitohondrial permeability transition pore and mitochondrial potassium ATP channel. The clinical applicability of PoCo has been extended with the use of PoCo mimetic agents like insulin, glucagon like peptide, EPO, statins and ADO before reperfusion in patients with ischaemia reperfusion injury. Remote PoCo has also emerged as a new concept; however, considerable research is required for understanding its molecular mechanisms. In this review, an exhaustive attempt has been made to unearth some molecular aspects of PoCo.
The product of the murine homolog of the Drosophila extra sex combs gene displays transcriptional repressor activity

The heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein K protein represents a novel class of proteins that may act as docking platforms that orchestrate cross-talk among molecules involved in signal transduction and gene expression. Using a fragment of K protein as bait in the yeast two-hybrid screen, we isolated a cDNA that encodes a protein whose primary structure has extensive similarity to the Drosophila melanogaster extra sex combs (esc) gene product, Esc, a putative silencer of homeotic genes. The cDNA that we isolated is identical to the cDNA of the recently positionally cloned mouse embryonic ectoderm development gene, eed. Like Esc, Eed contains six WD-40 repeats in the C-terminal half of the protein and is thought to repress homeotic gene expression during mouse embryogenesis. Eed binds to K protein through a domain in its N terminus, but interestingly, this domain is not found in the Drosophila Esc. Gal4-Eed fusion protein represses transcription of a reporter gene driven by a promoter that contains Gal4-binding DNA elements. Eed also represses transcription when recruited to a target promoter by Gal4-K protein. Point mutations within the eed gene that are responsible for severe embryonic development abnormalities abolished the transcriptional repressor activity of Eed. Results of this study suggest that Eed-restricted homeotic gene expression during embryogenesis reflects the action of Eed as a transcriptional repressor. The Eed-mediated transcriptional effects are likely to reflect the interaction of Eed with multiple molecular partners, including K protein.