Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of Clinical Streptococcus pneumoniae Isolates among other Alpha and Nonhemolytic Streptococci by Use of the Vitek MS Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization–Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry System

ABSTRACT Discrimination between Streptococcus pneumoniae and its close relatives of the viridans group is a common difficulty in matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry-based identification. In the present study, the performances of the Vitek MS MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry system were assessed using 334 pneumococci, 166 other S. mitis group streptococci, 184 non-S. mitis group streptococci, and 19 related alpha- and nonhemolytic aerobic Gram-positive catalase-negative coccal isolates. Pneumococci had been identified by means of optochin susceptibility and bile solubility or serotyping, and other isolates mainly by use of RapidID32 Strep strips. In case of discordant or low-discrimination results, genotypic methods were used. The sensitivity of the Vitek MS for the identification of S. pneumoniae was 99.1%, since only three bile-insoluble isolates were misidentified as Streptococcus mitis/Streptococcus oralis. Conversely, two optochin-resistant pneumococci were correctly identified (specificity, 100%). Three Streptococcus pseudopneumoniae isolates were also correctly identified. Among nonpneumococcal isolates, 90.8% (n = 335) were correctly identified to the species or subspecies level and 2.4% (n = 9) at the group level. For the remaining 25 isolates, the Vitek MS proposed a bacterial species included in the list of possible species suggested by genotypic methods, except for 4 isolates which were not identified due to the absence of the species in the database. According to our study, the Vitek MS displays performance similar to that of the optochin susceptibility test for routine identification of pneumococcal isolates. Moreover, the Vitek MS is efficient for the identification of other viridans group streptococci and related isolates, provided that the species are included in the database.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Medical Intervention in Patients with Early Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Bangladesh

Introduction The incidence of diabetes is increasing. With roughly 800,000 new cases diagnosed each year, the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes has increased by 33% between 1990 and 1998 [1]. Currently, an estimated 15.7 million people, of whom only 65% have been diagnosed, have diabetes. It is also estimated that by 2025 over 20 million people will have diabetes [2]. Accompanying this increased prevalence of diabetes is an increase in the number of associated complications. Diabetes can affect every organ of the body. Poor glycemic control can lead to blindness, lower extremity amputations, and dental disease [3]. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, and complications related to diabetes account for over half of the lower extremity amputations in the United States. Diabetic retinopathy, the main contributor to blindness, is a term for certain abnormalities in the small blood vessels of the retina that are caused by diabetes. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy is essential since retinopathy is often asymptomatic [4]. When first diagnosed, approximately 21% of people with type 2 diabetes show some retinopathy. People with type 1 diabetes tend to develop retinopathy after three to five years from the onset of diabetes [4]. One of the strongest predictors of developing retinopathy is the length of time an individual has had diabetes; the longer the duration, the greater the probability of developing retinopathy [5]. A dilated eye exam is the most effective means for detecting diabetic retinopathy; to ensure an *Corresponding author: Samira Humaira Habib, Senior Research Officer, Diabetic Association of Bangladesh, Health Economics Unit, 122 Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh, E-mail: dhcdp@dab-bd.org
Disease-Associated Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), also called natural interferon (IFN)-producing cells, represent a specialized cell type within the innate immune system. pDCs are specialized in sensing viral RNA and DNA by toll-like receptor-7 and -9 and have the ability to rapidly produce massive amounts of type 1 IFNs upon viral encounter. After producing type 1 IFNs, pDCs differentiate into professional antigen-presenting cells, which are capable of stimulating T cells of the adaptive immune system. Chronic activation of human pDCs by self-DNA or mitochondrial DNA contributes to the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosis and IFN-related autoimmune diseases. Under steady-state conditions, pDCs play an important role in immune tolerance. In many types of human cancers, recruitment of pDCs to the tumor microenvironment contributes to the induction of immune tolerance. Here, we provide a systemic review of recent progress in studies on the role of pDCs in human diseases, including cancers and autoimmune/inflammatory diseases.
Comparison of Laparoscopic Versus Conventional Open Partial Nephrectomy in Dogs

Objective- Laparoscopic partial nephrectomy (LPN) has been proven to be a safe and effective technique in human. This study was conducted to evaluate the feasibility and safety of utilizing laparoscopic partial nephrectomy in dogs and to compare this technique with open routine partial nephrectomy for the first time in Iran. Design- Experimental study. Animals- Sixteen large mixed-breed female dogs, weighting 22±5 kg, 1-2 years age. Procedures- All dogs were anesthetized and positioned for surgery on left kidney. Partial nephrectomy (PN) was performed through five portals in left flank in laparoscopic group and through midline incision in open group. After renal artery was recognized and clamped, the caudal pole of kidney was resected. Then the exposed renal parenchyma was sutured. Operative time, ischemia time, incision length, clinical findings, hematological parameters, blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine and intra and post-operative complications were recorded for one month. Results- Surgeries were performed successfully in both groups and visualization was excellent in laparoscopic group. Mean operative time was insignificantly longer in laparoscopic group. Mean ischemia time was evaluated more in laparoscopic group but total length of incisional scar was obviously longer in open cases. There was mild infection in one portal site of first group. Other parameters were assessed normal and there was no significant complication in both groups. Conclusion and Clinical Relevance- This experience demonstrated that LPN is a safe and feasible procedure in dogs with acceptable outcomes and advantages comparing with open PN.
Shadow Banking and the Four Pillars of Traditional Financial Intermediation

Traditional banking is built on four pillars: small and medium enterprise lending, insured deposit taking, access to lender of last resort (LOLR), and prudential supervision. This article unveils the logic of the quadrilogy by showing that it emerges naturally as an equilibrium outcome in a game between banks and the government. A key insight is that regulation and public insurance services (LOLR, deposit insurance) are complementary. The model also shows how prudential regulation must adjust to the emergence of shadow banking and rationalizes structural remedies to counter bogus liquidity hoarding and financial contagion: ring-fencing between regulated and shadow banking and the sharing of liquidity in centralized platforms.
Assembling Deep Neural Networks for Medical Compound Figure Detection

Compound figure detection on figures and associated captions is the first step to making medical figures from biomedical literature available for further analysis. The performance of traditional methods is limited to the choice of hand-engineering features and prior domain knowledge. We train multiple convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks on top of pre-trained word vectors to learn textual features from captions and employ deep CNNs to learn visual features from figures. We then identify compound figures by combining textual and visual prediction. Our proposed architecture obtains remarkable performance in three run types—textual, visual and mixed—and achieves better performance in ImageCLEF2015 and ImageCLEF2016.
An experience report related to restructuring OODesigner: a CASE tool for OMT

This paper describes experience gained and lessons learned from restructuring OODesigner, a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool for Object Modeling Technique (OMT). This tool supports a wide range of features such as constructing the three models in OMT, managing information repository, documenting class resources, automatically generating C++ and Java code, reverse engineering C++ and Java code, searching and reusing classes in the corresponding repository and collecting metrics data. We had developed the version 1.x of OODesigner during 3 pears since 1994. Although we had developed this version using OMT and C++, we recognized the potential maintenance problem that originated from the ill-designed class architecture. Thus we totally restructured that version during 12 months, and we got a new version that is much easier to maintain than the old one. In this paper, we present what we did to restructure it and what we gained after the restructuring, and we also present a brief overview of the major features of OODesigner.
Detection of traffic signs based on visual saliency model

In this paper, a visual saliency model is used to detect the traffic signs in the natural images. A number of features consist of intensity, color opponency and orientations are extracted from the image by the model. Without the need for image segmentation, the saliency map indicating the area where the traffic signs are can be computed. From the experiments on the real scene images with the domestic traffic signs, the detection rate of 89% is achieved.
Sequence Divergence of Seryl-tRNA Synthetases in Archaea

ABSTRACT The genomic sequences of Methanococcus jannaschii andMethanobacterium thermoautotrophicum contain a structurally uncommon seryl-tRNA synthetase (SerRS) sequence and lack an open reading frame (ORF) for the canonical cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase (CysRS). Therefore, it is not clear if Cys-tRNACys is formed by direct aminoacylation or by a transformation of serine misacylated to tRNACys. To address this question, we prepared SerRS from two methanogenic archaea and measured the enzymatic properties of these proteins. SerRS was purified from M. thermoautotrophicum; its N-terminal peptide sequence matched the sequence deduced from the relevant ORF in the genomic data of M. thermoautotrophicum and M. jannaschii. In addition, SerRS was expressed from a cloned Methanococcus maripaludis serS gene. The two enzymes charged serine to their homologous tRNAs and also accepted Escherichia coli tRNA as substrate for aminoacylation. Gel shift experiments showed that M. thermoautotrophicum SerRS did not mischarge tRNACyswith serine. This indicates that Cys-tRNACys is formed by direct acylation in these organisms.
A distributed particle filter for acustic target tracking in wireless sensor networks

One of the applications of wireless sensor networks is target tracking. There are several methods to target tracking and among these methods, particle filter has high capability in solving nonlinear/non-Gaussian systems. Particle filter is one of the methods for Bayesian recursive estimation for position estimation in wireless sensor networks. Clustered management of dense networks is a famous known method and has many benefits in comparison with other management schemes of sensor nodes. In this paper we designed a new distributed version of particle filtering which is more compatible with dynamic clustering of nodes. Our method decrease the processing overhead of sensor nodes and output results are more accurate than current distributed versions of particle filtering in target tracking applications.
Life-Styles, Health Status and Medical Care Utilization

This study examines the relationship between three life-style variables (drinking, smoking, and physical activity) and three health status measures (physical, mental and general health status) and the use of medical care services. Up to seven years of utilization data were available for linkage with survey data on life-style variables of a random sample of 2,502 adults in an HMO. Relationships between life-style variables and health status measures were examined. Then each life-style variable was examined in relation to medical care utilization for eight disease classes in an ICDA-based disease classification system. A separate analysis is performed for males and females in four age categories. While relationships between the life-style variables and health status measures are not statistically significant for all sex/age groups, they are quite consistently in the expected direction, and life-style variables show some potentially interesting relationships to utilization for diseases with strong psychological or emotional components.
Cross-Topic Opinion Mining for Real-Time Human-Computer Interaction

With the recent growth and expansion of the Web 2.0, there has been an important development of new textual genres, such as blogs posts or forum entries, etc. that are employed to share opinions about a topic of interest. To the best of our knowledge, previous approaches focused on corpus annotation mostly concentrated on subjectivity versus objectivity classification and did not annotate emotions on a fine-grained scale. The scheme we propose in this arti-cle allows for both coarse and fine-grained annotation boundaries, as well as to distinguish among polarities and a large set of emotion classes. We used the an-notated elements to train our real-time opinion mining system, which we subse-quently employ for the classification of new sentences on a closely related topic - “recycling”. We obtain promising results in all the test scenarios, proving, on the one hand, that the corpus is a valid and useful resource, and, on the other hand, that our method used for opinion mining, is adequate.
In-band, point to multi-point, mm-Wave backhaul for 5G networks

Innovations for cost-effective and scalable wireless backhaul solutions in practical mobile network deployment scenarios are essential for realizing the 5G vision of providing “Gbit/s anywhere”. Not only is the backhaul essential to support network densification based on small cell deployments, but also for supporting very low latency inter-BS communication to combat inter-cell interference. Multiplexing backhaul and access on the same frequency band (in-band wireless backhaul) has obvious cost benefits from hardware and frequency reuse perspective, but poses significant technology challenges. We consider an inband solution to meet the backhaul and inter-BS coordination challenges that accompany network densification. In this paper, we present an analysis to persuade the readers of the feasibility of in-band wireless backhaul, discuss realistic deployment and system assumptions and present novel scheduling schemes for inter-BS communications. We show that an in-band wireless backhaul for data backhauling and inter BS-coordination is feasible without significantly hurting the cell access capacities.
Integration of International Medical Graduates in U.S. Psychiatry: The Role of Acculturation and Social Support

ObjectiveThe authors investigated whether social support and acculturation could predict the mental health of international medical graduates pursuing psychiatric residencies in the United States.MethodsA 55-item online survey was assembled by combining three validated instruments for mental health, social support, and acculturation. A link to the survey was e-mailed to training directors of all psychiatric residency and fellowship programs. Directors were requested to forward the survey to their international medical graduate residents for completion between December 2008 and February 2009.ResultsOne hundred eight international medical graduates from 70 different psychiatric residencies and fellowships completed the entire survey. Respondents’ mental health scores were normally distributed. The vast majority scored very high on survey items related to mental health. Acculturation, social support, and postgraduate training year were significant predictors of mental health.ConclusionResidency training programs should attempt to incorporate measures that would help boost the social support and acculturation of international medical graduates (especially junior-level trainees). Acculturation could be improved by language training and courses in American history, culture, and customs, and social support could be expanded by mentoring relationships.
Large-Scale Optimal Power Flow: Effects of Initialization, Decoupling & Discretization

This paper presents the results of extensive numerical testing of a second-order OPF solution method. The testing was conducted using a 1500 bus network under various loading conditions. Three issues were studied: ¿ Sensitivity of the solution with respect to the initial conditions ¿ Accuracy of decoupling the original OPF problem into separate active power and the reactive power OPF problems ¿ Effects of the discretization of transformer taps on solutions. The first issue is particularly important in an EMS environment. An OPF must produce consistent solutions if it is to be used to guide the decision-making of power system operators. This requires that the OPF solution not be sensitive to the (arbitrarily or randomly) selected starting point used by the OPF program, and that changes in the OPF solution point be consistent with the changes in the power system operating constraints. Such changes include the evolution of bus loads over time, control variables which move to their limits over time, and changes in topology due to disturbances. Hence the first objective of the OPF testing was to study the sensitivity of OPF solutions to the choice of initial points. The second issue is of importance because most of the OPF approaches proposed by EMS vendors rely on decoupling of the active and reactive OPF problems in order to achieve acceptable computational performance.
Auxiliary State Machines and Auxiliary Functions: Constructs for Extending AMS Assertions

As research on developing assertion languages for the AMS domain gains in momentum, it is increasingly being felt that extensions of existing assertion languages like PSL and SVA into the AMS domain are not adequate for expressing the analog design intent. This is largely due to the intricacy of the analog behavioral intent which cannot be captured purely in terms of logic. In this paper we show that by using auxiliary forms of formal specifications such as abstract state machines and real valued functions as references for AMS assertions, it becomes possible to model complex AMS behavioral properties. This approach leverages the growing adoption of AMS behavioral modeling in the industry. The paper also shows that the use of auxiliary state machines allows us to separate out the scope of different analog assertions leading to significant performance gains in the assertion checking overhead.
Estimating Dietary Sodium Intake in Individuals Receiving a Randomly Fluctuating Intake

Previous investigations examining techniques to estimate sodium intake in free-living persons failed to consider a varying intake or were not conducted under circumstances in which the intake was actually known. To examine the utility of 24-hour and nocturnal urine collections as estimation of sodium intake under such conditions, we studied 43 white and black men and women ingesting a known sodium intake for 10 days that was randomly varied daily, with a mean intake of 150/+ 2SD (range, 50 to 250/). The mean 24-hour sodium excretion (UNaV) per day was 141/while the mean sodium intake was 151/. On a randomly selected day, both nocturnal and 24-hour UNaV estimated that day's sodium intake reasonably well (r = 0.55). A stepwise regression showed that including consideration of age and blood pressure improved the correlation (r = 0.70). However, to estimate mean sodium intake accurately for the entire 10 days, the average of several 24-hour collections was required. Nine collections were optimal (r = 0.75). Nocturnal specimens were not helpful; the average of all 10 collections correlated weakly (r = 0.30) with sodium intake. These data sugj.est that to estimate mean sodium intake accurately in free-living persons, only 24-hour collections are useful, although nocturnal collections arc helpful in evaluating compliance with low sodium intake. (Hypertension 4: 805–808, 1982)
Towards a Framework for Understanding KM Governance

This paper contributes to KM research by building a framework for analyzing governance arrangements of KM programs and by exploring the relationship between the organizations and their KM approach. Multiple case research is employed in order to identify the mechanisms used by 12 international organizations to govern their KM programs. The research identifies a range of structural, process and relational aspects which contribute to the governance of the KM programs. These aspects are integrated into a KM governance framework. The suggested framework extends current IT based frameworks by integrating KM specific governance aspects. Findings include the low use of formal governance processes and the high dependence on relational mechanisms to guide the KM programs. Moreover, relationships are identified between the KM governance configuration and the size, structure and industry type of the organizations. Recommendations are made for further use of the KM governance framework.
Skeletal Muscle Mitochondrial Function in Peripheral Arterial Disease: Usefulness of Muscle Biopsy

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is a manifestation of atherosclerosis which produces stenoses and occlusions in lower limbs arteries. PAD was commonly divided in four stages, introduced by Rene Fontaine in 1954 (Fontaine et al., 1954): stage 1 defined an asymptomatic patient, stage 2 defined a patient presenting with a significant impairment of his ability to walk (intermittent claudication). Then claudication worsens and the patient develops rest pain in stage 3, and non-healing ulcers or gangrene in stage 4.