Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MRI brain findings in ephedrone encephalopathy associated with manganese abuse: Single-center perspective

Summary Background Manganese (Mn) is a well-known toxic agent causing symptoms of parkinsonism in employees of certain branches of industry. Home production of a psychostimulant ephedrone (methcathinone), involving the use of potassium permanganate, became a new cause of intoxications in Poland. Case Report This article presents clinical symptoms, initial brain MRI findings and characteristics of changes observed in follow-up examinations in 4 patients with manganese intoxication associated with intravenous administration of ephedrone. All patients in our case series presented symptoms of parkinsonism. T1-WI MRI revealed high intensity signal in globi pallidi in all patients; hyperintense lesions in midbrain were observed in three patients, while lesions located in cerebellar hemispheres and pituitary gland in just one patient. The reduction of signal intensity in the affected brain structures was observed in follow-up studies, with no significant improvement in clinical symptoms. Conclusions Brain MRI is helpful in the assessment of distribution as well as dynamics of changes in ephedrone encephalopathy. Regression of signal intensity changes visible in brain MRI is not associated with clinical condition improvement. Although brain MRI findings are not characteristic for ephedrone encephalopathy, they may contribute to diagnosing this condition.
Women's experiences with tailored use of a combined oral contraceptive: a qualitative study.

STUDY QUESTION What are women's experiences with tailored use of combined oral contraceptive pills (COCPs)? SUMMARY ANSWER Some women reported very positive experiences with tailored use of COCPs, others did not like the unpredictability about when they would bleed and some women reported increased anxiety about possible pregnancy. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY While many studies have investigated views toward extended use of COCPs, little research has examined women's actual experiences with these regimens. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION This was a semi-structured qualitative interview study that was part of a larger randomized trial of a standard (21 daily pills followed by a 7-day pill-free interval) versus a tailored regimen (daily pills until 3-consecutive-day bleeding triggers a 3-day pill-free interval) of Microgynon 30® mcg (Ethinyl estradiol 30 mcg, Levonorgestrel 150 mcg). PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTINGS, METHODS Interviews were conducted with 26 women (17 in the tailored group and 9 who switched their assigned treatment group) . Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE Women discussed positive changes associated with tailored use of COCPs, as well as some negative consequences. The major themes identified in the interview data were: ease of tailored regimen; changes in cycle-related symptoms; adjustment to reduced/absent bleeding and unpredictability about bleeding. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION The sample comprised mainly young, nulliparous women. The majority of women were using COCPs at the start of the study. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS Clinicians discussing extended-use regimes with patients should mention that women may need time to adjust to an extended-use regime. Future research should attempt to identify predictors of response to extended use of COCPs.
Timing of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstructive Surgery and Risk of Cartilage Lesions and Meniscal Tears

Background There is inadequate evidence to determine when to perform surgery on anterior cruciate ligament—deficient knees. Purpose To study the association between timing of anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction and the risk of having meniscal tears and cartilage lesions. Study Design Cohort study (prognosis); Level of evidence, 2. Methods All patients registered in the Norwegian National Knee Ligament Registry who had undergone primary anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction from 2004 and throughout 2006 were reviewed. Logistic regression analyses were used to estimate the relationship between time from injury until anterior cruciate ligament surgery and the risk of meniscal tears or cartilage lesions. Results Of a total of 3475 patients, there were 909 patients (26%) with cartilage lesions, 1638 patients (47%) with meniscal tears, and 527 patients (15%) with both cartilage and meniscal lesions. The odds of a cartilage lesion in the adult knee (>16 years) increased by 1.006 (95% confidence interval, 1.003-1.010) for each month that elapsed from injury to surgery. The cartilage in young adults (17-40 years) deteriorated further with an increase in odds of 1.03 (95% confidence interval, 1.02-1.05) related to the aging in years of the patient. The odds for meniscal tears in young adults increased by 1.004 (95% confidence interval, 1.002-1.006) for each month that elapsed since injury. The presence of 1 degenerative lesion increased the odds of having the other degenerative lesion by between 1.6 and 2.0 in all patient groups. Conclusion The odds of a cartilage lesion in the adult knee increased by nearly 1% for each month that elapsed from the injury date until the surgery date and that of cartilage lesions were nearly twice as frequent if there was a meniscal tear, and vice versa.
Midas : An FPGA-based Architecture Simulator for Multiprocessors

We present Midas, an economical FPGA-based architecture simulator that allows rapid early design-space exploration of manycore systems. Midas models target-system timing and functionality separately, and it employs hostmultithreading for an efficient FPGA implementation. It is a high-throughput, cycle-accurate full-system simulator, capable of booting real operating systems. The Midas prototype runs on a single Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA board and simulates a 64-core shared-memory target machine. We evaluate its performance using a modern parallel benchmark suite running on our manycore research operating system, achieving two orders of magnitude speedup compared to a widely-used software-based architecture simulator.
Augmented sifting of multiple-valued decision diagrams

Discrete functions are now commonly represented by binary (BDD) and multiple-valued (MDD) decision diagrams. Sifting is an effective heuristic technique which applies adjacent variable interchanges to find a good variable ordering to reduce the size of a BDD or MDD. Linear sifting is an extension of BDD sifting where XOR operations involving adjacent variable pairs augment adjacent variable interchange leading to further reduction in the node count. In this paper, we consider the extension of this approach to MDDs. In particular, we show that the XOR operation of linear sifting can be extended to a variety of operations. We term the resulting approach augmented sifting. Experimental results are presented showing sifting and augmented sifting can be quite effective in reducing the size of MDDs for certain types of functions.
Fooling the eye of the beholder: deceptive status signalling among the poor in developing countries

Poor consumers in the developing world use a variety of status signalling devices that rely on deception of the observer. A frequently used deceptive strategy is the consumption of counterfeit instead of original status-intensive goods, mainly cheap copies of expensive brand-name goods from developed countries. The choice for such deceptive modes of conspicuous consumption is analysed within a product characteristics approach as developed by Lancaster and compared with non-deceptive alternatives. Under the controversial assumption that the poor care about status, it is shown that counterfeit goods embody a more 'appropriate' combination of status and functionality than original goods. It appears that the consumption of counterfeits potentially enhances the welfare of low-income consumers, depending on the extent to which the eye of the relevant beholder is effectively deceived. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Dome a Distributed Object Oriented Execution Environment

In this paper we describe the architecture and implementation strategy of a concurrent distributed object oriented program execution environment, where concurrently executing processes access objects in a virtual shared memory. Lin-earizability, basic correctness condition for the semantics of concurrent object invocation, is implemented using a lock-free protocol, and integrated transparently into sequential code requiring no explicit synchronisation.
Joint Direction Finding and Propagation Delay Estimation in the Presence of Mutual Coupling

In this paper we propose a Multiple-SIgnal-Classification (MUSIC) based algorithm for joint direction finding and delay estimation of the impinging rays in the presence of antenna mutual coupling. We show that with the addition of auxiliary sensors on both sides of the antenna array the algorithm developed earlier can be extended to this scenario. The new algorithm also consists of three stages of the one-dimensional (1-D) MUSIC algorithms which alternatively estimate the impinging directions of arrival (DOAs) and delays in a hierarchical tree structure. Moreover, a constrained temporal filtering process or a constrained spatial beamforming process are employed to partitioned progressively the signals with either close DOAs or close delays into finer subgroups, aiming at higher estimation accuracy and lower computational load. In addition, the developed algorithm proceeds in a tree structure, so the estimated parameters are automatically paired. Conducted simulation results show that the new algorithm provides satisfactory performance but with drastically reduced computations compared with previous work in the presence of mutual coupling.
An event-driven model for the SpiNNaker virtual synaptic channel

Neural networks present a fundamentally different model of computation from conventional sequential hardware, making it inefficient for very-large-scale models. Current neuromorphic devices do not yet offer a fully satisfactory solution even though they have improved simulation performance, in part because of fixed hardware, in part because of poor software support. SpiNNaker introduces a different approach, the “neuromimetic” architecture, that maintains the neural optimisation of dedicated chips while offering FPGA-like universal configurability. Central to this parallel multiprocessor is an asynchronous event-driven model that uses interrupt-generating dedicated hardware on the chip to support real-time neural simulation. In turn this requires an event-driven software model: a rethink as fundamental as that of the hardware. We examine this event-driven software model for an important hardware subsystem, the previously-introduced virtual synaptic channel. Using a scheduler-based system service architecture, the software can “hide” low-level processes and events from models so that the only event the model sees is “spike received”. Results from simulation on-chip demonstrate the robustness of the system even in the presence of extremely bursty, unpredictable traffic, but also expose important model-evel tradeoffs that are a consequence of the physical nature of the SpiNNaker chip. This event-driven subsystem is the first component of a library-based development system that allows the user to describe a model in a high-level neural description environment and be able to rely on a lower layer of system services to execute the model efficiently on SpiNNaker. Such a system realises a general-purpose platform that can generate an arbitrary neural network and run it with hardware speed and scale.
LARGE volume string compactifications at finite temperature

We present a detailed study of the finite-temperature behaviour of the LARGE Volume type IIB flux compactifications. We show that certain moduli can thermalise at high temperatures. Despite that, their contribution to the finite-temperature effective potential is always negligible and the latter has a runaway behaviour. We compute the maximal temperature Tmax, above which the internal space decompactifies, as well as the temperature T*, that is reached after the decay of the heaviest moduli. The natural constraint T* < Tmax implies a lower bound on the allowed values of the internal volume . We find that this restriction rules out a significant range of values corresponding to smaller volumes of the order ~ 104ls6, which lead to standard GUT theories. Instead, the bound favours values of the order ~ 1015ls6, which lead to TeV scale SUSY desirable for solving the hierarchy problem. Moreover, our result favours low-energy inflationary scenarios with density perturbations generated by a field, which is not the inflaton. In such a scenario, one could achieve both inflation and TeV-scale SUSY, although gravity waves would not be observable. Finally, we pose a two-fold challenge for the solution of the cosmological moduli problem. First, we show that the heavy moduli decay before they can begin to dominate the energy density of the Universe. Hence they are not able to dilute any unwanted relics. And second, we argue that, in order to obtain thermal inflation in the closed string moduli sector, one needs to go beyond the present EFT description.
Image Laplace Denoising Based on Sparse Representation

Image denoising using sparse and redundant representation has drawn a lot of research attentions. For the existing denoising algorithms, the additive noise is always assumed to follow the Gaussian distribution. But in many application cases, the noise is not Gaussian. In this paper, we address the image Laplace denoising problem, where the additive noise is Laplace. Thus, our model is proposed by adopting the Bayesian MAP estimation theory. We operate this model on image patches and show how to solve it with linear programming. Our experimental results have shown good performance of our new method both in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and visually.
Managing Time in a Software Factory: Temporal and Spatial Organization of IS Development Activities

This article reports an ethnographic study that investigates the ways in which time was experienced and managed in an information systems (IS) development project. The study is based on 6 months of intensive overt participant observation of the development of Executive Information Systems in a large multinational company. Drawing on time geography, this article discusses a social perspective of time and social dynamics of time management in IS development project teams and outlines its implications for formal approaches to time management.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Hospitalized Patients with Schizophrenia

Introduction: Comorbid obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been reported among patients with schizophrenia in other countries. But, the literature is not well-documented on this issue in Iran (Persia). The present study aimed to investigate the prevalence and severity of OCD and some of its related factors in a group of patients with schizophrenia in Iran. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study. A total of 150 hospitalized patients with schizophrenia were recruited at Razi Psychiatric Hospital in Tehran, Iran. Demographic and clinical checklists, as well as the Yale-Brown obsessive-compulsive scale (Y-BOCS), scale for assessment of negative symptoms (SANS), and scale for assessment of positive symptoms (SAPS) were administered to collect data. OCD was the dependent variable and independent variables included age, sex, severity of positive and negative symptoms, duration of schizophrenic disorder, the number of hospitalizations, and antipsychotic medications administered to them. Data were analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA), Chi-square, and T-test. Results: Overall, 31.3% of patients had OCD with an average severity of 12.81(SD=10.27). The prevalence of OCD was not affected by the number of psychiatric hospitalizations for schizophrenia or the duration of schizophrenic disorder. The severity of OCD significantly reduced as the duration of schizophrenia and the severity of negative symptoms increased. Conclusion: OCD was found among a considerable proportion of the study sample. OCD may be associated with exacerbating schizophrenic symptoms. Therefore, psychiatrists should consider the simultaneous treatment of OCD and schizophrenia. Further studies are suggested in this issue.
Response to: Comment on “Evaluation of Antiviral Therapy Performed after Curative Therapy in Patients with HBV-Related Hepatocellular Carcinoma: An Updated Meta-Analysis”

Thanks are due to you for this letter and we would like to respond regarding some questions raised about our meta-analysis. In this letter, the authors questioned the index used in the meta-analysis and recommended hazard ratio (HR) instead of relative risk (RR) [1]. HR is truly a good index for survival analysis of one disease because it considers the effects of time and it worked when extracting data from studies we selected; however, RR is appropriate for comparing the control group and treatment group (NAs group) here, as it has equal effects to OR. The total number of patients was the same only in 1-year and 3-year recurrence, but, in OS and DFS, the numbers were different [2]. Disease-free survival has been defined as no recurrence of HCC in our article [2]. Randomized trials were really what we wanted to study in our meta-analysis; however, due to a lack of enough studies and data, this was unfortunately not possible [2]. We are not sure if postoperative NAs therapy has no impact on patients' short-term survival, for the reason that HBV reactivation usually occurs one month after operations were performed [3], so that is why we performed this meta-analysis. And as our results show, we do not agree with the comment that NAs have no short-term effects on survival and recurrence [1]. We would like to thank again the authors for this valuable letter and also for their concerns. We would like to receive further suggestions on our study.
Optimal DG placement for minimizing power loss in distribution feeder systems using sensory-deprived optimization algorithm

The considerable benefits of applying a DG-unit such as power loss reduction, environmental friendliness, voltage improvement, postponement of system upgrading, and increasing reliability, have resulted in significant research interest. This paper presents an application of the newly introduced sensory-deprived optimization algorithm (SDOA) to determine the optimal DG-unit's size, power factor and location to minimize the total system real power loss. The SDOA algorithm is a meta-heuristic, population-based optimization technique inspired by the intelligent behavior/survival of sensory-deprived human beings. To validate the results of applying SDOA, the IEEE 33-bus and 69-bus feeder systems are tested. The results are compared with those found using other methods. The outcomes verify that the SDOA is efficient, robust, fast and capable of handling mixed integer nonlinear optimization problems. The efficiency of the proposed SDOA is confirmed by the fact that the standard deviation of the results attained for 30 independent runs is virtually zero.
Model Coupling between the Weather Research and Forecasting Model and the DPRI Large Eddy Simulator for Urban Flows on GPU-accelerated Multicore Systems

In this report we present a novel approach to model coupling for shared-memory multicore systems hosting OpenCL-compliant accelerators, which we call The Glasgow Model Coupling Framework (GMCF). We discuss the implementation of a prototype of GMCF and its application to coupling the Weather Research and Forecasting Model and an OpenCL-accelerated version of the Large Eddy Simulator for Urban Flows (LES) developed at DPRI. The first stage of this work concerned the OpenCL port of the LES. The methodology used for the OpenCL port is a combination of automated analysis and code generation and rule-based manual parallelization. For the evaluation, the non-OpenCL LES code was compiled using gfortran, fort and pgfortran}, in each case with auto-parallelization and auto-vectorization. The OpenCL-accelerated version of the LES achieves a 7 times speed-up on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GPGPU, compared to the fastest possible compilation of the original code running on a 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2640. In the second stage of this work, we built the Glasgow Model Coupling Framework and successfully used it to couple an OpenMP-parallelized WRF instance with an OpenCL LES instance which runs the LES code on the GPGPI. The system requires only very minimal changes to the original code. The report discusses the rationale, aims, approach and implementation details of this work.
Identification of Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae 61 Type III Secretion System Hrp Proteins That Can Travel the Type III Pathway and Contribute to the Translocation of Effector Proteins into Plant Cells

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas syringae translocates effector proteins into plant cells via an Hrp1 type III secretion system (T3SS). T3SS components HrpB, HrpD, HrpF, and HrpP were shown to be pathway substrates and to contribute to elicitation of the plant hypersensitive response and to translocation and secretion of the model effector AvrPto1.
Efficacy of L-carnitine supplementation on frailty status and its biomarkers, nutritional status, and physical and cognitive function among prefrail older adults: a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial

Background Frailty is a biological syndrome of decreased reserve and resistance to stressors due to decline in multiple physiological systems. Amino acid deficiency, including L-carnitine, has been proposed to be associated with its pathophysiology. Nevertheless, the efficacy of L-carnitine supplementation on frailty status has not been documented. Thus, this study aimed to determine the effect of 10-week L-carnitine supplement (1.5 g/day) on frailty status and its biomarkers and also physical function, cognition, and nutritional status among prefrail older adults in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Methodology This study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial conducted among 50 prefrail subjects randomized into two groups (26 in L-carnitine group and 24 in placebo group). Outcome measures include frailty status using Fried criteria and Frailty Index accumulation of deficit, selected frailty biomarkers (interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, and insulin-like growth factor-1), physical function, cognitive function, nutritional status and biochemical profile. Results The results indicated that the mean scores of Frailty Index score and hand grip test were significantly improved in subjects supplemented with L-carnitine (P<0.05 for both parameters) as compared to no change in the placebo group. Based on Fried criteria, four subjects (three from the L-carnitine group and one from the control group) transited from prefrail status to robust after the intervention. Conclusion L-carnitine supplementation has a favorable effect on the functional status and fatigue in prefrail older adults.
CD4+ T‐cell‐mediated anti‐tumor immunity can be uncoupled from autoimmunity via the STAT4/STAT6 signaling axis

Previous reports have suggested that autoimmune sequelae may be an unavoidable consequence of successful immunization against tumor‐associated antigens, which are typically non‐mutated self‐antigens. Using a melanoma model, we demonstrated that CD4+ T‐cell‐mediated anti‐tumor immunity and autoimmunity could be separated by modulating the STAT4/STAT6 signaling axis. Our results have revealed an unexpected dichotomy in the effector phase following cancer vaccination where anti‐tumor immunity is mediated via a STAT6 and IL‐4‐dependent pathway, whereas autoimmune pathology is mediated via STAT4 through a mechanism that relies partially on IFN‐γ. Our results offer a possibility to elicit specific anti‐tumor responses without triggering unwanted tissue autoimmune diseases.