Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk of Mortality Subsequent to Umbilical Cord Infection Among Newborns of Southern Nepal: Cord Infection and Mortality

Background: Neonatal sepsis may stem from local umbilical cord infections. Signs of cord infection are common in low-resource settings, yet the risk of mortality subsequent to these signs has not been quantified in either developed or developing countries. We compared the risk of mortality between infants with and without signs of umbilical cord infection during a community-based trial of chlorhexidine interventions in southern Nepal. Methods: Newborns were evaluated for signs of umbilical cord infection (pus, redness, swelling). A nested case-control approach was used to estimate the odds of mortality between infants with and without umbilical cord infection as defined by various levels of severity. For each death in the parent trial, 10 controls were selected, matched on sex, treatment group, and number of cord assessments. The main outcome measures were all-cause and sepsis-specific mortality. Results: Among 23,246 assessed infants, there were 392 deaths. Odds of all-cause mortality were 46% (8–98%) higher among infants with redness extending onto the abdominal skin. A nonsignificant increased odds of mortality [odds ratio (OR): 2.31; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.66–8.10] was observed among infants with severe redness and pus. Infections occurring after the third day of life were associated with subsequent risk of all-cause (OR: 3.11; 95% CI: 1.68–5.74) and sepsis-specific (OR: 4.63; 95% CI: 2.15–9.96) mortality. Conclusions: This study provides evidence that common local signs of cord infection are associated with increased risk of mortality. Where exposure of the umbilical cord to potentially invasive pathogens is high, interventions to increase hygienic care of the cord should be promoted and including hand washing, avoiding harmful topical applications, and topical cord antisepsis.
A latent cause theory of classical conditioning

Classical conditioning experiments probe what animals learn about their environment. This thesis presents an exploration of the latent cause theory of classical conditioning. According to the theory, animals assume that events within their environment are attributable to a latent cause. Learning is interpreted as an attempt to recover the generative model that gave rise to these observed events. In this thesis, the latent cause theory is applied to three distinct areas of classical conditioning, in each case offering a novel account of empirical phenomena. In the first instance, the effects of inference over an uncertain latent cause model structure are explored. A key property of Bayesian structural inference is the tradeoff between the model complexity and data fidelity. Recognizing the equivalence between this tradeoff and the tradeoff between generalization and discrimination found in configural conditioning suggests a statistical account of these phenomena. By considering model simulations of a number of conditioning paradigms (including some not previously viewed as "configural"), behavioral signs that animals employ model complexity tradeoffs are revealed. Next, the consequence of merging latent variable theory with a generative model of change are studied. A model of change describes how the parameters and structure of the latent cause model evolve over time. The resulting non-stationary latent cause model offers a novel perspective on the factors that influence animal judgments regarding environmental change. In particular, the model correctly predicts that the introduction of an unexpected stimulus can spur fast learning. Finally a version of a latent cause model is developed that explicitly encodes a latent timeline to which observed stimuli and reinforcements are associated, preserving their temporal order. In this context, the latent cause model is equivalent to a hidden Markov model. This model is able to account for a theoretically challenging set of experiments which collectively suggest that animals encode the temporal relationships among stimuli and use this representation to predict impending reinforcement. This thesis offers a unified theoretical framework for classical conditioning. It uses state of the art statistical methods to explore a novel theoretical account of a wide range of empirical phenomena, many of which have otherwise resisted a computational explanation.
Cerebral Blood Volume Measurements – Gd_DTPA vs. VASO - and Their Relationship with Cerebral Blood Flow in Activated Human Visual Cortex

Measurements of task-induced changes in cerebral blood volume (CBV) have been demonstrated using VAscular Space Occupancy (VASO) techniques (noninvasive and newly developed) and a contrast agent-based (Gd- DTPA) method (invasive but well-established) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared the two methods in determining CBV changes during multi-frequency visual stimulation (4 and 8 Hz). Specifically, we aimed to assess the impact of repetition time (TR) on CBV changes determination using VASO. With additional measurements of cerebral blood flow (CBF), the flow-volume coupling relationship (α value) and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen were further determined. The results showed that i) using VASO, short TR (2s) caused overestimation of CBV changes, while long TR (6s) generated consistent CBV results, by comparison to the GD-DTPA method; ii) overestimation of CBV changes caused underestimated CMRO2 changes, but did not alter the frequency-related pattern, i.e., CMRO2 changes at 4 Hz were greater than those at 8 Hz regardless of the TR; and iii) the tasked-induced CBF-CBV coupling was stimulus frequency-dependent, i.e., α = 0.35-0.38 at 4 Hz and α = 0.51-0.53 at 8 Hz. Our data demonstrated that, with carefully chosen TRs, CBV measurements can be achieved non-invasively with VASO techniques.
Psychology Research and Behavior Management Dovepress a Google Trends-based Approach for Monitoring Nssi

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is an intentional, direct, and socially unacceptable behavior resulting in the destruction of one's own body tissues with no intention of dying or committing suicide, even though it is associated with a higher risk of attempted, planned, or just considered suicide. In this preliminary report, we introduce the concept of " NSSI 2.0 " ; that is to say, the study of the Internet usage by subjects with NSSI, and we introduce a Google Trends-based approach for monitoring NSSI, called NSSI infodemiology and infoveillance. Despite some limitations, Google Trends has already proven to be reliable for infectious diseases monitoring, and here we extend its application and potentiality in the field of suicidology. Ad hoc web portals and surveys could be designed in light of the reported results for helping people with NSSI.
Engineered Neuronal Circuits: A New Platform for Studying the Role of Modular Topology

Neuron–glia cultures serve as a valuable model system for exploring the bio-molecular activity of single cells. Since neurons in culture can be conveniently recorded with great fidelity from many sites simultaneously, it has long been suggested that uniform cultured neurons may also be used to investigate network-level mechanisms pertinent to information processing, activity propagation, memory, and learning. But how much of the functionality of neural circuits can be retained in vitro remains an open question. Recent studies utilizing patterned networks suggest that they provide a most useful platform to address fundamental questions in neuroscience. Here we review recent efforts in the realm of patterned networks’ activity investigations. We give a brief overview of the patterning methods and experimental approaches commonly employed in the field, and summarize the main results reported in the literature. The general picture that emerges from these reports indicates that patterned networks with uniform connectivity do not exhibit unique activity patterns. Rather, their activity is very similar to that of unpatterned uniform networks. However, by breaking the connectivity homogeneity, using a modular architecture, it is possible to introduce pronounced topology-related gating and delay effects. These findings suggest that patterned cultured networks may serve as a new platform for studying the role of modularity in neuronal circuits.
Effect of stored-blood transfusion on oxygen delivery in patients with sepsis.

BACKGROUND Red blood cell transfusion is commonly used to augment systemic oxygen delivery to supranormal levels in patients with sepsis. However, clinical studies have not consistently demonstrated that this therapeutic maneuver is accompanied by an increase in oxygen utilization at either the whole-body level or within individual organs. STUDY OBJECTIVES To determine the effect of red blood cell transfusion on gastrointestinal and whole-body oxygen uptake. DESIGN Prospective, controlled, interventional study. SETTING Multidisciplinary intensive care unit of a tertiary care teaching hospital. PATIENTS Twenty-three critically ill patients with sepsis undergoing mechanical ventilation. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Systemic oxygen uptake was measured by indirect calorimetry and calculated by the Fick method. Gastric intramucosal pH as measured by tonometry was used to assess changes in splanchnic oxygen availability. Measurements were made prior to transfusion of 3 U of packed red blood cells. These were then repeated immediately following transfusion, as well as 3 and 6 hours later. There was no increase in systemic oxygen uptake measured by indirect calorimetry in any of the patients studied for up to 6 hours posttransfusion (including those patients with an elevated arterial lactate concentration). However, the calculated systemic oxygen uptake increased in parallel with the oxygen delivery in all the patients. More importantly, we found an inverse association between the change in gastric intramucosal pH and the age of the transfused blood (r = -.71; P < .001). In those patients receiving blood that had been stored for more than 15 days, the gastric intramucosal pH consistently decreased following the red blood cell transfusion. CONCLUSION We failed to demonstrate a beneficial effect of red blood cell transfusion on measured systemic oxygen uptake in patients with sepsis. Patients receiving old transfused red blood cells developed evidence of splanchnic ischemia. We postulate that the poorly deformable transfused red blood cells cause micro-circulatory occlusion in some organs, which may lead to tissue ischemia in some organs.
Overlapped Circular SC-LDPC Codes and Their Modified Coupled Codes

In this paper, overlapped circular spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes (OC-LDPC) are proposed and their modified coupled codes are derived, which show more improved performance compared with the spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes. It is known that the SC-LDPC codes show asymptotically good performance when the chain length is sufficiently large. However, a large chain length requires a large number of iterations for decoding, which is often ignored in asymptotic analysis but it causes large decoding complexity in the decoding process. The proposed OC-LDPC codes reduce the decoding complexity while maintaining good asymptotic properties of the SC-LDPC codes. The improvement in the decoding complexity comes from that the proposed code is split into two SC-LDPC codes with shorter chain length during the decoding process. Thus, the OC-LDPC code can be decoded with lower iteration numbers required for decoding of two splitted SC-LDPC codes. Also, we design finite-length protograph-based codes for the proposed codes and it is shown that the proposed codes have superior finite-length code performances than the SC-LDPC codes.
CMS's Hospital-Acquired Condition Lists Link Hospital Payment, Patient Safety

With its recent policy change that denies hospital payment for certain preventable adverse events, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has wielded the powerful tool of payment incentives to promote patient safety and quality improvement. As of October 1, 2008, Medicare no longer pays hospitals for the extra costs they incur when patients develop certain “hospitalacquired conditions” that are a result of the hospital’s care. Patients will not be billed for any additional costs that occur as a result of these conditions.
A Study of Consumer Trust in On-line Shopping: Methodological & Research Considerations

Research as to how consumer trust can be built in an on-line environment is limited and varies considerably in terms of the dimensions of the problem that are examined. Consequently, much of our understanding of the antecedents of trust in on-line shopping context remains fragmented. This paper outlines an in-progress study in which a previously validated measurement instrument was applied in Ireland and in the United States in order to investigate the existence and importance of specific perceptions and factors that are thought to predict the generation of consumer trust in Internet shopping. It is expected that the results of this study will provide a refined understanding of the predictors and moderators of trust in an electronic purchase environment and thus make a valuable contribution not only to information systems research but also to the overall body of marketing, trust and diffusion research. In addition, the detailed insights afforded by this study are likely to be of benefit to vendors operating in a global environment in their attempts to engender consumer trust in their websites and thus increase their success in the competitive electronic commerce marketplace.
Evaluation of EM absorption loss for continuous monitoring of breast cancer

Continuous monitoring of breast cancer is a vital step in the treatment plan of a breast cancer survivor who has an 11-20% risk of recurrence and a 3x-4x chance of developing breast cancer in a different location within the breast. This study proposes electromagnetic (EM) absorption loss measurements as a cost-effective method which has the potential to replace the rudimentary and inaccurate breast self-examination and complement the traditional X-ray mammography exams, which are cost-prohibitive and carry radiation exposure risk. A breast cancer survivor can continuously monitor the health of her breast by periodically comparing absorption loss measurements to a reference absorption loss measurement taken after a lumpectomy. Results show successful detection of tumors at different locations within the breast with just a 3-element phased array.
GLUix: a global layer unix for a network of workstations

Recent improvements in network and workstation performance have made workstation clusters an attractive architecture for diverse workloads, including interactive sequential and parallel applications. Although viable hardware solutions are available today, the largest challenge in making such a cluster usable lies in the system software. This paper describes the design and implementation of GLUnix, operating system middleware for a cluster of workstations. GLUnix was designed to provide transparent remote execution, support for interactive parallel and sequential jobs, load ballancing, and backward compatibility for existing application binaries. GLUnix was constructed to be easily portable to a number of platforms. GLUnix has been in daily use for over two and a half years and is currently running on a 100‐node cluster of Sun UltraSPARCs. This paper relates our experiences with designing, building, and operating GLUnix. We discuss three important design tradeoffs faced by any cluster system, and present the reasons for our choices. Each of these design decisions is then re‐evaluated in light of both our experience and recent technological advancements. We then describe the user‐level, centralized, event‐driven architecture of GLUnix and highlight a number of aspects of the implementation. Performance and scalability measurements of the system indicate that a centralized, user‐level design can scale gracefully to significant cluster sizes, incurring only an additional 220 μs of overhead per node for remote execution. The discussion focuses on the successes and failures we encountered while building and maintaining the system, including a characterization of the limitations of a user‐level implementation and various features that were added to satisfy the user community. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Computing similarity between items in a digital library of cultural heritage

Large amounts of cultural heritage content have now been digitized and are available in digital libraries. However, these are often unstructured and difficult to navigate. Automatic techniques for identifying similar items in these collections could be used to improve navigation since it would allow items that are implicitly connected to be linked together and allow sets of similar items to be clustered. Europeana is a large digital library containing more than 20 million digital objects from a set of cultural heritage providers throughout Europe. The diverse nature of this collection means that the items do not have standard metadata to assist navigation. A range of methods for computing the similarity between pairs of texts are applied to metadata records in Europeana in order to estimate the similarity between items. Various methods for computing similarity have been proposed and can be classified into two main approaches: (1) knowledge-based, which make use of external knowledge sources and (2) corpus-based approaches, which rely on analyzing the frequency distributions of words in documents. Both techniques are evaluated against manual judgements obtained for this study and a multiple-choice test created from manually generated categories in cultural heritage collections. We find that a combination of corpus and knowledge-based approaches provide the best results in both experiments.
Bridging gaps: On the performance of airborne LiDAR to model wood mouse-habitat structure relationships in pine forests

LiDAR technology has firmly contributed to strengthen the knowledge of habitat structure-wildlife relationships, though there is an evident bias towards flying vertebrates. To bridge this gap, we investigated and compared the performance of LiDAR and field data to model habitat preferences of wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) in a Mediterranean high mountain pine forest (Pinus sylvestris). We recorded nine field and 13 LiDAR variables that were summarized by means of Principal Component Analyses (PCA). We then analyzed wood mouse’s habitat preferences using three different models based on: (i) field PCs predictors, (ii) LiDAR PCs predictors; and (iii) both set of predictors in a combined model, including a variance partitioning analysis. Elevation was also included as a predictor in the three models. Our results indicate that LiDAR derived variables were better predictors than field-based variables. The model combining both data sets slightly improved the predictive power of the model. Field derived variables indicated that wood mouse was positively influenced by the gradient of increasing shrub cover and negatively affected by elevation. Regarding LiDAR data, two LiDAR PCs, i.e. gradients in canopy openness and complexity in forest vertical structure positively influenced wood mouse, although elevation interacted negatively with the complexity in vertical structure, indicating wood mouse’s preferences for plots with lower elevations but with complex forest vertical structure. The combined model was similar to the LiDAR-based model and included the gradient of shrub cover measured in the field. Variance partitioning showed that LiDAR-based variables, together with elevation, were the most important predictors and that part of the variation explained by shrub cover was shared. LiDAR derived variables were good surrogates of environmental characteristics explaining habitat preferences by the wood mouse. Our LiDAR metrics represented structural features of the forest patch, such as the presence and cover of shrubs, as well as other characteristics likely including time since perturbation, food availability and predation risk. Our results suggest that LiDAR is a promising technology for further exploring habitat preferences by small mammal communities.
A scalable formal method for design and automatic checking of user interfaces

The paper addresses the formal specification, design and implementation of the behavioral component of graphical user interfaces. Dialogs are specified by means of modular, communicating grammars called VEG (Visual Event Grammars), which extend traditional BNF grammars to make the modeling of dialogs more convenient. A VEG specification is independent of the actual layout of the GUI, but it can be easily integrated with various layout design toolkits. The specification may be verified with the model checker Spin, in order to test consistency and correctness, to detect deadlocks and unreachable states, and also to generate test cases for validation purposes. Efficient code is automatically generated by the VEG toolkit, based on compiler technology. Realistic applications have been specified, verified and implemented, like a Notepad-style editor, a graph construction library and a large real application to medical software. The complete VEG toolkit is going to be available soon as free software.
Fowl Immunoglobulins: Quantitation in Birds Genetically Resistant and Susceptible to Marek's Disease

The development of serum immunoglobulins was observed in chicks genetically resistant (N line) and susceptible (P line) to Marek's disease (MD), in conditions free from infection with MD. IgG was present at hatching at about 5.0 mg/ml and decreased to about 0.5 mg/ml by 12 to 15 days. Active production of IgG was apparent at about 20 days of age and reached levels of 2.0 to 3.0 mg/ml by 67 days. Low levels of IgM were present at hatching, and a gradual increase was seen to 1.0 to 2.0 mg/ml by 67 days. IgA was not detectable at hatching; it appeared in N-line birds at 5 days and in P-line birds at 13 days, and by 67 days was about 0.10 to 0.13 mg/ml. After 30 to 40 days, immunoglobulin levels were generally higher in N-line than in P-line birds. However, it was concluded that no primary immunoglobin deficiency existed sufficient to explain the susceptibility of the P-line birds to MD
Optimizing spatio-spectral filters by motor imagery pattern quantification in self-paced Brain Computer Interface

Analyzing ongoing brain activities and distinguishing no control (NC) state of users are the most challenging parts in the self-paced BCI. Many spatial filters such as Common Spatial Pattern and its other developed versions have been proposed to differentiate among specific motor imagery (MI) activities, but they didn't result in significant achievements in the self-paced BCI. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a new spatio-spatial filter optimization method by a novel quantification measure for motor imagery patterns. Maximizing the correlation between the linear mixtures of motor cortex channels and motor imagery patterns is used as goal function for genetic optimization algorithm. No sensitivity to initial value is the significant property of this evolutionary algorithm. The most important consequence of this method is increasing the resolution of motor imagery pattern and also improving the motor imagery detection rate in self-paced BCI. Our approach was validated on self-paced dataset 1 of the BCI Competition IV and was compared to different spatial filters including CSP, TRCSP, WTRCSP, and Laplacian filter. The proposed method achieved the highest Area under ROC among the other methods.