Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate on mediators of osteoarthritis in cultured equine chondrocytes stimulated by use of recombinant equine interleukin-1β

Objective—To determine whether glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate (CS) at concentrations approximating those achieved in plasma by oral administration would influence gene expression of selected mediators of osteoarthritis in cytokine-stimulated equine articular chondrocytes. Sample Population—Samples of grossly normal articular cartilage obtained from the metacarpophalangeal joint of 13 horses. Procedure—Equine chondrocytes in pellet culture were stimulated with a subsaturating dose of recombinant equine interleukin (reIL)-1β. Effects of prior incubation with glucosamine (2.5 to 10.0 µg/mL) and CS (5.0 to 50.0 µg/mL) on gene expression of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-1, -2, -3, -9, and -13; aggrecanase 1 and 2; inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS); cyclooxygenase (COX)-2; nuclear factor κB; and c-Jun- N-terminal kinase (JNK) were assessed by use of a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction assay. Results—Glucosamine at a concentration of 10 µg/mL significantly reduced reIL-1β–induced mRNA e.
Effect of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Severely Affected Arm-Hand Motor Function in Patients After an Acute Ischemic Stroke: A Pilot Randomized Control Trial

Objective The aim of this article was to determine whether cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (c-tDCS) to unaffected primary motor cortex (PMC) plus conventional occupational therapy (OT) improves functional motor recovery of the affected arm hand in patients after an acute ischemic stroke compared with sham transcranial direct current stimulation plus conventional OT. Design In this prospective, randomized, double-blinded, sham-controlled trial of 16 severe, acute ischemic stroke patients with severe arm-hand weakness were randomly assigned to either experimental (c-tDCS plus OT; n = 8) or control (sham transcranial direct current stimulation plus OT; n = 8) groups. All patients received a standard 3-hr in-patient rehabilitation therapy, plus an additional ten 30-min sessions of tDCS. During each session, 1 mA of cathodal stimulation to the unaffected PMC is performed followed by the patient's scheduled OT. The primary outcome measure was change in Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) total and subscores on discharge. Result Application of c-tDCS to unaffected PMC resulted in a clinically relevant 10-point improvement in the affected arm-hand function based on ARAT total score compared with a 2-point improvement in the control group. Conclusions Application of 30-min of c-tDCS to the unaffected PMC showed a 10-point improvement in the ARAT score. This corresponds to a large effect size in improvement of affected arm-hand function in patients with severe, acute ischemic stroke. Although not statistically significant, this suggests that larger studies, enrolling at least 25 patients in each group, and with a longer follow-up are warranted.
Murine genes related to the Drosophila AbdB homeotic genes are sequentially expressed during development of the posterior part of the body.

The cloning, characterization and developmental expression patterns of two novel murine Hox genes, Hox‐4.6 and Hox‐4.7, are reported. Structural data allow us to classify the four Hox‐4 genes located in the most upstream (5′) position in the HOX‐4 complex as members of a large family of homeogenes related to the Drosophila homeotic gene Abdominal B (AbdB). It therefore appears that these vertebrate genes are derived from a selective amplification of an ancestral gene which gave rise, during evolution, to the most posterior of the insect homeotic genes so far described. In agreement with the structural colinearity, these genes have very posteriorly restricted expression profiles. In addition, their developmental expression is temporally regulated according to a cranio‐caudal sequence which parallels the physical ordering of these genes along the chromosome. We discuss the phylogenetic alternative in the evolution of genetic complexity by amplifying either genes or regulatory sequences, as exemplified by this system in the mouse and Drosophila. Furthermore, the possible role of ‘temporal colinearity’ in the ontogeny of all coelomic (metamerized) metazoans showing a temporal anteroposterior morphogenetic progression is addressed.
Accurate Inclusion Mass Screening

Verification of candidate biomarker proteins in blood is typically done using multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) of peptides by LC-MS/MS on triple quadrupole MS systems. MRM assay development for each protein requires significant time and cost, much of which is likely to be of little value if the candidate biomarker is below the detection limit in blood or a false positive in the original discovery data. Here we present a new technology, accurate inclusion mass screening (AIMS), designed to provide a bridge from unbiased discovery to MS-based targeted assay development. Masses on the software inclusion list are monitored in each scan on the Orbitrap MS system, and MS/MS spectra for sequence confirmation are acquired only when a peptide from the list is detected with both the correct accurate mass and charge state. The AIMS experiment confirms that a given peptide (and thus the protein from which it is derived) is present in the plasma. Throughput of the method is sufficient to qualify up to a hundred proteins/week. The sensitivity of AIMS is similar to MRM on a triple quadrupole MS system using optimized sample preparation methods (low tens of ng/ml in plasma), and MS/MS data from the AIMS experiments on the Orbitrap can be directly used to configure MRM assays. The method was shown to be at least 4-fold more efficient at detecting peptides of interest than undirected LC-MS/MS experiments using the same instrumentation, and relative quantitation information can be obtained by AIMS in case versus control experiments. Detection by AIMS ensures that a quantitative MRM-based assay can be configured for that protein. The method has the potential to qualify large number of biomarker candidates based on their detection in plasma prior to committing to the time- and resource-intensive steps of establishing a quantitative assay.
Regulatory gene network from a genome-wide association study for sow lifetime productivity traits.

Among swine reproductive traits, sow lifetime productivity (SLP) is considered a profitable trait in commercial pig farming. Notably, longevity and efficiency in SLP can be adopted as the key phenotype representing SLP. In this study, we conducted a co-association network analysis using results from a genome-wide association study for SLP-related traits. A total of 656 purebred Landrace female pigs were genotyped using a 60K SNP array. Significantly associated SNPs identified from the GWAS were annotated for the specific genes. Then, we constructed an association weight matrix to build a network based on the co-associations between the genes and 10 SLP traits. The entire network consisted of 495 nodes and 37 755 significant edges. We identified three key regulatory transcription factors: STAT2 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 2), MYF6 (myogenic factor 6) and TFCP2L1 (transcription factor CP2 like 1). The network revealed that the STAT2 and MYF6 regulatory modules cooperate with each other and specifically influence the longevity and efficiency of sows, whereas the TFCP2L1 family specifically affects the improvement of litter size.
Macrodactyly of the Foot

Background: The purpose of this study was to focus on the problems associated with macrodactyly of the foot and to formulate guidelines for optimum treatment. Methods: Seventeen feet (fifteen patients) with macrodactyly formed the basis of this retrospective review. The feet were classified into one of two groups, depending on whether the macrodactyly involved only the lesser toes (group A) or involved the great toe with or without involvement of the lesser toes (group B). Toe amputation or ray resection was usually done to reduce the length and width of the foot in group A, whereas the length of the first ray was reduced by epiphysiodesis or amputation of the phalanx in four of the five feet in group B. In both groups, soft-tissue debulking was an integral part of the treatment. The severity of the macrodactyly and the effect of treatment were documented radiographically by measurement of the so-called metatarsal spread angle. At the latest follow-up evaluation, each foot was graded with regard to pain and shoe wear. Results: Toe amputation was performed in six of the twelve feet in group A and toe shortening was performed in two, but only three of those procedures had a good result. Ray resection was performed in five feet (as an initial or secondary procedure) in Group A, and all had a good result. The mean reduction of the metatarsal spread angle was 10.0° following resection of a single ray in Group A. In Group B, four of the five feet were rated as having only a fair result because shortening alone did not effectively reduce the size of the great toe. The macrodactyly of the great toe was not treated in the fifth foot, which also had a fair result. Conclusions: Toe amputation, which is cosmetically unappealing, is not effective for treating macrodactyly of the lesser toes and does not address the enlargement of the forefoot. Ray resection results in the best cosmetic and functional outcomes in feet with involvement of the lesser toes. When the great toe is involved, the result is often only fair, and repeated soft-tissue debulking may be necessary.
Controllable data sampling in the space of human poses

Markerless human pose recognition using a single‐depth camera plays an important role in interactive graphics applications and user interface design. Recent pose recognition algorithms have adopted machine learning techniques, utilizing a large collection of motion capture data. The effectiveness of the algorithms is greatly influenced by the diversity and variability of training data. We present a new sampling method that resamples a collection of human motion data to improve the pose variability and achieve an arbitrary size and level of density in the space of human poses. The space of human poses is high dimensional, and thus, brute‐force uniform sampling is intractable. We exploit dimensionality reduction and locally stratified sampling to generate either uniform or application specifically biased distributions in the space of human poses. Our algorithm learns to recognize such challenging poses as sitting, kneeling, stretching, and doing yoga using a remarkably small amount of training data. The recognition algorithm can also be steered to maximize its performance for a specific domain of human poses. We demonstrate that our algorithm performs much better than the Kinect software development kit for recognizing challenging acrobatic poses while performing comparably for easy upright standing poses. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A family of statistical topic models for text and multimedia documents

In this thesis, we investigate several extensions of the basic Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for text and multimedia documents containing images and texts, video and texts, or audio-video and texts. For exploratory analysis of large-scale text document collections, we present Independent Factor Topic Models (IFTM) which captures topic correlations using linear latent variable models to directly uncover the hidden sources of correlations. Such a framework offers great flexibility in exploring different forms of source prior, and in this work we investigate 2 source distributions: Gaussian and Laplacian. When the sparse source prior is used, we can indeed visualize and give interpretation to the sources of correlations and construct a simple topic graph which can be used to navigate large-scale archives. In extending IFTM to learn correlations between latent topics of different data modalities in multimedia documents, we present a topic-regression multi-modal Latent Dirichlet Allocation (tr-mmLDA) which uses a linear regression module to learn the precise relationships between latent variables in different modalites. We employ tr-mmLDA in an image and video annotation task, where the goal is to learn statistical association between images and their corresponding captions, so that the caption data can be accurately inferred in the test set. When dealing with annotation data that act more similar to class labels, the assumption in tr-mmLDA which allows caption words in the same document to be generated from multiple hidden topics might be overly complex. For such annotation data, we propose a novel statistical topic model called sLDA-bin, which extends supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (sLDA) [BM07] model to handle a multivariate binary response variable of the annotation data. We show superior image annotation and retrieval results comparing sLDA-bin with correspondence LDA [BJ03] on standard image datasets. We also extend the association model for the case of image-text and video-text to perform automatic annotation of multimedia documents containing audio and video, we find that unlike cLDA, tr-mmLDA and sLDA-bin can be straight-forwardly extended to include influence from additional data modalities in predicting annotation by incorporating the latent topics from the additional modality as another set of covariates into the linear and logistic regression module respectively.
Laparoscopic Distal Gastrectomy is Feasible in Very Elderly Patients as Compared with Open Distal Gastrectomy

ABSTRACT Laparoscopic gastrectomy was shown to be feasible even in elderly patients in many retrospective case-controlled studies. However, the definition of elderly differed among those studies, such as an age of 65, 70, or 75 years or older. This study was conducted to elucidate the advantages of laparoscopic distal gastrectomy (LDG) in very elderly (≥80 years) patients, and comprised 70 patients, 45 of whom underwent LDG and 25 underwent open distal gastrectomy (ODG) between 2004 and September 2016. LDG had significantly less estimated blood loss (p < .01), earlier flatus (p < .01), earlier food intake (p < .01), and shorter hospitalization (p < .01) as compared with ODG. No significant difference between LDG and ODG was found in the incidence of postoperative surgical complications (p = .40), although LDG tended to reduce overall and medical postoperative complications (p = .11 and .09, respectively). LDG might be a feasible, beneficial treatment with good short-term outcomes in very elderly patients with gastric cancer.
Immune response to respiratory syncytial virus in young Brazilian children.

We have evaluated the cellular and humoral immune response to primary respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection in young infants. Serum specimens from 65 patients <=12 months of age (39 males and 26 females, 28 cases <3 months and 37 cases > or = 3 months; median 3 3.9 months) were tested for anti-RSV IgG and IgG subclass antibodies by EIA. Flow cytometry was used to characterize cell surface markers expressed on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from 29 RSV-infected children. There was a low rate of seroconversion in children <3 months of age, whose acute-phase PBMC were mostly T lymphocytes (63.0 +/- 9.0%). In contrast, a higher rate of seroconversion was observed in children >3 months of age, with predominance of B lymphocytes (71.0 +/- 17.7%). Stimulation of PBMC with RSV (2 x 10(5) TCID50) for 48 h did not induce a detectable increase in intracellular cytokines and only a few showed a detectable increase in RSV-specific secreted cytokines. These data suggest that age is an important factor affecting the infants' ability to develop an immune response to RSV.
Mimo Perfomance Measures -A Signal Processing Point of View

In order to wisely use the degrees of freedom which a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system offers, it is necessary to identify and quantify the possible gains in performance one can expect from MIMO signal processing. In this paper, we derive measures which allow to quantify the amount of antenna gain, diversity gain, and multiplexing gain of a MIMO system. It turns out that it is impossible to maximize all three gains, or any pair of two gains at the same time. The necessary trade-off between performance gains is demonstrated
Barriers to implementing evidence-based smoking cessation practices in nine community mental health sites.

OBJECTIVE Guidelines strongly recommend that smokers with mental illness receive evidence-based smoking cessation interventions similar to those provided to smokers in the general population. The goal of this study was to evaluate the resources, barriers, and willingness to use these evidence-based interventions in mental health settings. METHODS Clinicians at nine community mental health settings (five psychosocial rehabilitation programs and four community mental health clinics) in four counties in Maryland were surveyed. The questionnaire--the Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale-15--evaluated availability, barriers, and utilization of smoking cessation assessment and treatment, including willingness to use evidence-based practices. RESULTS Ninety-five clinicians participated in the study. Most were full-time employees (84%) with master's degrees (56%). The vast majority were nonsmokers or former smokers (94%). Less than half (42%) of the clinicians reported asking their patients about smoking. Less than a third (33%) advised or assisted in smoking cessation. Very few (10%) reported referring identified smokers to telephone quitlines. About a quarter (26%) reported being confident about their ability to provide smoking cessation counseling. A major barrier to providing cessation counseling was the belief that patients were not interested in quitting (77%). On average, clinicians reported a great willingness to use evidence-based smoking cessation interventions if they received appropriate training. CONCLUSIONS Mental health clinicians working in community mental health settings were not consistently providing evidence-based smoking cessation interventions. Barriers appear to be modifiable through training and education.
Longevity assumptions and defined benefit pension plans∗

This paper investigates the relation between life expectancy assumptions and pension liabilities for a large sample of U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plans. We show that longevity assumptions are systematically related to the lagged funding status of a pension plan: underfunded plans make lower life expectancy assumptions. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals that each year of life expectancy increases pension liabilities by around 4-5 percent. The economic magnitude is substantial: a one-year shock to longevity would more than double the degree of aggregate pension underfunding. Forecasts of future life expectancy typically underestimate realized improvements, thereby increasing chances of lumpy adjustments to pension liabilities. JEL Classification: G23; G39; J1; J32 ∗The views expressed herein are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. We thank Laura Kodres, Benedict Clements, Frank Eich and Gregorio Impavido for valuable feedback. Also, we are grateful to David Gustafson and Steven Boyce of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Finally, we are grateful to seminar participants at the European Finance Association, Southern Finance Association, the Swiss Finance Institute, the Vienna Graduate School of Finance, Norwegian School of Economics and the 8th Longevity Risk Conference. A previous version of the paper has been circulated under the title: The impact of longevity improvements on U.S. Corporate Defined Benefit Pension Plans. Please address all correspondence to michael.kisser@nhh.no. †Norwegian School of Economics ‡International Monetary Fund
Evaluation of myocardial contractility in the chronically instrumented dog with intact autonomic nervous system function: effects of desflurane and isoflurane

Characterization of changes in myocardial contractility using indices derived from ventricular pressure‐segment length loops in animals with intact autonomic nervous system (ANS) function is complicated by alterations in systemic hemodynamics mediated by baroreceptor reflexes and by spontaneous respiration and its effects on ventricular pressure and filling. This investigation examined and compared the effects of desflurane and isoflurane on myocardial contractility in dogs with intact ANS reflexes using techniques designed to overcome these potential difficulties. Two groups comprising 18 experiments were performed using nine dogs chronically instrumented for measurement of aortic and left ventricular pressure, the maximum rate of increase of left ventricular pressure (dP/dt), subendocardial segment length, cardiac output and intrathoracic pressure. A brief occlusion of the inferior vena cava was used to alter preload to generate pressure‐length loops prior to onset of baroreceptor reflex‐mediated increases in heart rate. Respiratory variation in ventricular pressure was negated by calculation of “transmural pressure” via instantaneous subtraction of intrathoracic pressure from corresponding left ventricular pressure. Contractility was then evaluated in the conscious and anesthetized states using transmural pressure‐length loops and calculation of the preload recruitable stroke work (PRSW) relationship. Dogs were anesthetized with 1.25, 1.5, or 1.75 MAC desflurane or isoflurane and measurements were repeated after 30 min of equilibration at each anesthetic concentration. Desflurane and isoflurane produced similar declines in PRSW slope [Mw; 41±6 (5.5 ±0.8) during 1.75 MAC desflurane compared to 43 ± 5 mmHg (5.7 ± 0.7 kPa) during 1.75 MAC isoflurane], indicating that these agents cause similar depression of contractile state at equivalent MAC. The PRSW relationship derived from transmural pressure‐length loops using brief inferior vena caval occlusion may facilitate the examination of the impact of other volatile and intravenous anesthetics on myocardial contractility using a load‐independent index of contractile state in the presence of intact ANS reflexes.