Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Influence of IgE on Cultured Human Mast Cells

Purpose The mast cell plays a pivotal role in the human immune response. Crosslinking of 2 IgE molecules bound to the high affinity IgE receptor (FcεRI) on the surface of the mast cell results in mast cell degranulation and the release of several proinflammatory mediators. Patients with type-I allergy have increased levels of IgE in the blood compared to healthy individuals. Methods In a 6-week culture system of stem cells to human mast cells we investigated the effect of the concentration of IgE. The mast cells were cultured with different concentrations of IgE for the last 10 days of the maturation period. It was observed how the IgE concentration affects the histamine release, FcεRI density on the mast cell surface and the concentration of other mediators. Results A clear correlation between IgE concentration in culture medium and the release of histamine upon activation was observed. It showed a bell-shaped dose response curve, with maximal response around an IgE-concentration of 250 ng/mL. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the mast cells and surface density of FcεRI on mast cell surface was also influenced by the IgE concentration in the culture medium. Conclusions IgE in the culture medium during the last 10 days of mast cell maturation influences the release of the preformed mediator histamine after mast cell activation and the density of FcεRI on the mast cell surface. The release of the de novo synthetized mediator prostaglandin D2 and the expression of chymase and tryptase are not influenced by IgE in culture medium.
Perioperative transfusion of leukocyte depleted blood products in gastric cancer patients negatively influences oncologic outcome

AbstractThe influence of perioperative transfusion (PT) on outcome following surgery for gastric cancer (GC) remains controversial, with randomized trials lacking and observational series confounded by patient risk factors. This analysis determines the association between reception of leukocyte-depleted blood products and post-operative survival for GC.Data from 610 patients who underwent curative surgery for GC in a German tertiary care clinic from 2001 to 2013 were included. Kaplan–Meier survival curves and Cox proportional hazards regression were applied to determine the association of PT and clinical and patient risk factors for overall and relapse-free survival. Propensity score analysis was performed to adjust for observational biases in reception of PT.Higher Union International Contre le Cancer/American Joint Committee on Cancer (UICC/AJCC)-stages (P <0.001), postoperative complications and severity according to the Clavien–Dindo (CD) classification (P <0.001), PT (P = 0.02), higher age (P <0.001), and neoadjuvant chemotherapy (P <0.001) were related to increased mortality rates. Higher UICC-stages (P <0.001), neoadjuvant chemotherapy (P <0.001), and type of surgery (P = 0.02) were independently associated with increased relapse rates. Patients were more likely to receive PT with higher age (P = 0.05), surgical extension to adjacent organs/structures (P = 0.002), tumor location (P = 0.003), and female gender (P = 0.03). In the adjusted propensity score weighted analysis, PT remained associated with an increased risk of death (hazard ratio (HR): 1.31, 95% CI: 1.01–1.69, P = 0.04). Because of the association of PT with negative influence on patient survival following resection for GC, risks from application of blood products should be weighed against the potential benefits.
Jewish Refugee Children in the Netherlands during World War II: Migration, Settlement, and Survival

ABSTRACT This study focuses on Jewish refugee children who fled the Third Reich after the Kristallnacht in November 1938 either using the so-called Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) or by crossing the border illegally. Many parents, desperate after the Kristallnacht, sent their children abroad alone. About 1,800 arrived in the Netherlands. While for some the Netherlands was an intermediate stop, many stayed. We use a mixed-method approach with the aim of providing a better understanding of the survival rates of refugee children using information from several sources. The qualitative research provides illustrative individual experiences of child refugees and facilitates the formulation of hypotheses of settlement trajectories on risks of deportation and being killed, which are then tested using a quantitative approach. Gathering information into a database allows us to estimate the risk associated the living situation and place in the Netherlands. Among 863 Kindertransport children staying in the Netherlands in July 1942, 74 percent were deported and of those deported 81 percent were killed. Differences in settlement trajectories resulted in different risks of deportation and death. Children living with family or relatives had a higher risk of being deported than those living with foster parents or in institutions. Children living with foster parents had a similar risk of deportation to those living in institutions. Changing household type did not alter risk of deportation, while moving places increased this risk. Children deported from foster parents’ households had an increased risk of death after deportation compared to those deported from institutions, indicating an enduring effect of household type.
In Vivo 31P Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Measurements in Canine Heart Using a Catheter‐Coil

We have developed a new method of obtaining high resolution 31P nuclear magnetic resonance spectra from canine heart without the need for major surgery. This is done by passing an elliptical nuclear magnetic resonance receiver coil through a peripheral blood vessel into the right or left ventricle. This technique enables spectra to be obtained from a defined region of myocardium in less than 7 minutes (for the right ventricle) with a signal:noise ratio of greater than 9:1. With this catheter-coil, useful cardiac metabolic information will be obtainable, not only from specified regions of the heart, but also from various layers of myocardium.
Methods used to examine compartmentalization of viral populations between the genital tract and peripheral blood.

To the Editor—In a recent Journal publication , hepatitis C virus (HCV) from the genital tract of persons coinfected with HIV-1 were reported to differ, or appear compartmentalized, from viruses within the peripheral blood [1]. Phylogenetic analyses showed that certain individuals had multiple identical E2 sequences within the genital tract or blood that were distinct from sequences in their other tissue. Furthermore , the genetic diversity of the highly variable region–1 (HVR-1) of HCV in some participants' genital tract or blood was as low as ! 0.001 nucleotide substitutions per site (see table 3 in [1]), considerably lower than previously reported for acute [2] or chronic HCV infections [3]. These observations, we suspect, are likely to be an artifact of resampling the same viral templates, resulting in the erroneous reporting of multiple identical sequences and very low viral diversity. Knowledge of the amount of viral nucleic acid template used for amplification and cloning of sequences is crucial for assessing this likelihood [4]. Minosse et al. report neither the amount of RNA that was subjected to reverse transcription nor the efficiency of this polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay, compared with that of the Roche Amplicor assay used to quantify viral RNA. Thus, it is not possible to ascertain the number of viral templates used to derive the stated number of clones and whether these laboratory protocols may have resulted in resampling of viral templates. If resampling occurred, this would lead mistakenly to the conclusions that HCV populations had low levels of viral diversity and were compartmentalized between tissues. Several strategies have been used by others to reduce or eliminate the chance of resampling of the same virus after PCR, including generation of one clone from each PCR [5], dilution of specimens to end point followed by multiple PCRs with direct sequencing [5, 6], and amplification of sufficient templates relative to the number of clones generated to make resam-pling unlikely [2, 4, 6]. Contamination of PCR amplicons between tubes is another cause of identical or similar genotypes that can be minimized by extraction of nucleic acids and PCR from each tissue being performed on different days or in different laboratories [7]. The sequence data in the Minnose et al. article appear to have been evaluated for viral compartmentalization using a subjective assessment of neighbor-joining trees and by differences in genetic diversity between tissues. Statistical methods based on those developed by Slatkin and Maddison …
Dexamethasone Pretreatment Alleviates Isoniazid/Lipopolysaccharide Hepatotoxicity: Inhibition of Inflammatory and Oxidative Stress

Isoniazid (INH) remains a cornerstone key constitute of the current tuberculosis management strategy, but its hepatotoxic potentiality remains a significant clinical problem. Our previous findings succeed to establish a rat model of INH hepatotoxicity employing the inflammatory stress theory in which non-injurious doses of inflammatory-mediating agent bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) augmented the toxicity of INH that assist to uncover the mechanisms behind INH hepatotoxicity. Following LPS exposure, several inflammatory cells are activated and it is likely that the consequences of this activation rather than direct hepatocellular effects of LPS underlie the ability of LPS to augment toxic responses. In this study, we investigated the potential protective role of the anti-inflammatory agent dexamethasone (DEX), a potent synthetic glucocorticoid, in INH/LPS hepatotoxic rat model. DEX pre-treatment successfully eliminates the components of the inflammatory stress as shown through analysis of blood biochemistry and liver histopathology. DEX potentiated hepatic anti-oxidant mechanisms while serum and hepatic lipid profiles were reduced. However, DEX administration was not able to revoke the principal effects of cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) in INH/LPS-induced liver damage. In conclusion, this study illustrated the DEX-preventive capabilities on INH/LPS-induced hepatotoxicity model through DEX-induced potent anti-inflammatory activity whereas the partial toxicity seen in the model could be attributed to the expression of hepatic CYP2E1. These findings potentiate the clinical applications of DEX co-administration with INH therapy in order to reduce the potential incidences of hepatotoxicity.
Measurement of Reactive Power in Three-Phase Electric Power Systems by Use of Walsh Functions

This paper presents a new method for measuring of three-phase reactive power (RP) in three-phase systems. Extraction of three-phase reactive power RP from entire instantaneous power signal is achieved by multiplication the phase instantaneous powers with the Walsh function(WF). This method simplifies the multiplication procedure required for the evaluation the tree-phase reactive power components due to the use of the peculiar properties of the WF. In contrast to the existing methods involving phase shift operation between the input voltage and current signals proposed measurement approach does not require the phase shift of the phase current signals to the 2 / π with respect to the voltage signals. Limitations and proposals for future performance enhancements of the suggested method are also discussed. Validity and effectiveness of the suggested method have been tested by use of a simulation tools developed on the base of "Matlab 6.5". The results obtained demonstrate that the computational demands can be substantially reduced by using the proposed method.
Multi-lane detection based on accurate geometric lane estimation in highway scenarios

Multi-lane detection algorithms have been required for various vehicle safety-related applications. In most of the previous study, visual features are fundamental clues for multi-lane detection. However, since visual features vary with the illumination, weather condition and distance of the region, feature-based algorithm is restricted to the illuminant variation and laterally adjacent regions. On the other hand, conventional geometric estimation-based approaches, not relying on visual features, are inaccurate and susceptible to pitch or lateral movement. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-lane detection algorithm based on the accurate geometric estimation in highway scenarios. With the steps of adjacent lanes hypothesis generation (HG) and hypothesis verification (HV), the algorithm detects successfully independent of environmental changes. For accurate adjacent lane HG, we adopt the `cross ratio' and propose `dynamic homography matrix estimation. ' Our approach is independent of the calibration, pitch angle changes and additional vehicle sensors. In addition, the proposed algorithm can covers six lanes including the driving lane and adjacent lanes that two-lanes away from the driving lane. We demonstrate robustness on the illumination variance including daytime, rainy and sunset by using trough simulations and video sequences with a resolution of 752 × 480.
The Massachusetts Health Plan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In spring 2006, Massachusetts enacted legislation to ensure universal health insurance coverage to all residents. The legislation was a hybrid of ideas from across the political spectrum, promoted by a moderately conservative Republican governor with national political aspirations, and passed by a liberal Democratic state House and Senate. Groups from across the political spectrum supported the plan, from the Heritage Foundation on the right to Families USA on the left, although the plan had detractors from across the political spectrum as well.This study briefly describes the basic structure of the Massachusetts plan and identifies the good, the bad, and the ugly. Although the legislation, as Stuart Altman put it, is not a typical Massachusetts-Taxachusetts, oh-just-crazy-liberal plan, there is enough bad and ugly in the mix to raise serious concerns, particularly when the desire to overregulate the health insurance market appears to be hard-wired into Massachusetts policymakers' DNA.If we want to make health insurance more affordable and avoid the bad and the ugly of the Massachusetts plan, Congress - or, barring that, individual states - should consider a regulatory federalism approach. Under such an approach, insurers and insurance purchasers would be required to subject themselves to the laws and regulations of a single state but allowed to select the state. As with corporate charters, this system would allow employers and insurers to select the regulatory regime that most efficiently and cost-effectively matches the needs of their risk pools. The ability of purchasers and insurers to exit from the state's regulatory oversight (taking their premium taxes with them) would temper opportunistic behavior by legislators and regulators, including the temptation to impose inefficient mandates and otherwise overregulate.
A Semantically Structured Language Model

In this paper we propose a semantically structured language (SSLM) model that significantly reduces the authoring load required over the traditional manually derived grammar when developing a spoken language system. At the same time, the SSLM results in an understanding error rate which is roughly half as large as that of the manually authored grammar. The proposed model combines the advantages of both statistical word n-grams and context-free grammars. When the SSLM directly acts as the recognizer’s language model there’s a significant reduction in understanding error rate over the case where it is applied only at the output of a recognizer driven by an word n-gram language model.
Magnetic acceleration of ultrarelativistic jets in gamma-ray burst sources

We present numerical simulations of axi symmetric, magnetically driven outflows that reproduce the inferred properties of ultrarelativistic gamma-ray burst (GRB) jets. These results extend our previous simulations of outflows accelerated to moderately relativistic speeds, which are applicable to jets of active galactic nuclei. In contrast to several recent investigations, which have employed the magnetodynamics approximation, our numerical scheme solves the full set of equations of special relativistic, ideal magnetohydrodynamics, which enables us to explicitly calculate the jet velocity and magnetic-to-kinetic energy conversion efficiency - key parameters of interest for astrophysical applications. We confirm that the magnetic acceleration scheme remains robust into the ultrarelativistic regime, as previously indicated by semi-analytic self-similar solutions. We find that all current-carrying outflows exhibit self-collimation and consequent acceleration near the rotation axis, but that unconfined outflows lose causal connectivity across the jet and therefore do not collimate or accelerate efficiently in their outer regions. We show that magnetically accelerated jets confined by an external pressure that varies as z -α (0 1), and we obtain analytic expressions for the one-to-one correspondence between the pressure distribution and the asymptotic jet shape. We demonstrate that the acceleration efficiency of jets with paraboloidal streamlines is ≥50 per cent, with the numerical value being higher the lower the initial magnetization. We derive asymptotic analytic expressions for the acceleration of initially cold outflows along paraboloidal streamlines and verify that they provide good descriptions of the simulated flows. Our modelled jets (corresponding to 3/2 < a < 3) attain Lorentz factors Γ ≥ 10 2 on scales ∼ 10 10 -10 12 cm, consistent with the possibility that long/soft GRB jets are accelerated within envelopes of collapsing massive stars, and r ≥ 30 on scales ∼9 x 10 8 -3 x 10 10 cm, consistent with the possibility that short/hard GRB jets are accelerated on scales where they can be confined by moderately relativistic winds from accretion discs. We also find that Γθ v ∼ 1 for outflows that undergo an efficient magnetic-to-kinetic energy conversion, where θ v is the opening half-angle of the poloidal streamlines. This relation implies that the γ-ray emitting components of GRB outflows accelerated in this way are very narrow, with θ v ≤ 1° in regions where Γ ≥ 100, and that the afterglow light curves of these components would either exhibit a very early jet break or show no jet break at all.
The Histone Demethylase Jarid1b Ensures Faithful Mouse Development by Protecting Developmental Genes from Aberrant H3K4me3

Embryonic development is tightly regulated by transcription factors and chromatin-associated proteins. H3K4me3 is associated with active transcription and H3K27me3 with gene repression, while the combination of both keeps genes required for development in a plastic state. Here we show that deletion of the H3K4me2/3 histone demethylase Jarid1b (Kdm5b/Plu1) results in major neonatal lethality due to respiratory failure. Jarid1b knockout embryos have several neural defects including disorganized cranial nerves, defects in eye development, and increased incidences of exencephaly. Moreover, in line with an overlap of Jarid1b and Polycomb target genes, Jarid1b knockout embryos display homeotic skeletal transformations typical for Polycomb mutants, supporting a functional interplay between Polycomb proteins and Jarid1b. To understand how Jarid1b regulates mouse development, we performed a genome-wide analysis of histone modifications, which demonstrated that normally inactive genes encoding developmental regulators acquire aberrant H3K4me3 during early embryogenesis in Jarid1b knockout embryos. H3K4me3 accumulates as embryonic development proceeds, leading to increased expression of neural master regulators like Pax6 and Otx2 in Jarid1b knockout brains. Taken together, these results suggest that Jarid1b regulates mouse development by protecting developmental genes from inappropriate acquisition of active histone modifications.
Communication of dependent messages over degraded compound channels

In the communication of source-coded messages, certain dependency structures often exist among the messages, where a source model is proposed to model arbitrary dependency structure of such kind. Under a message-dependency model, the problem of communicating dependent messages subject to certain delay constraint is formulated as the problem of maximizing the average utility at the receiver. In this paper we derive the maximal achievable utilities for superposition codes and conventional channel codes over degraded compound channels. Analytic and numerical results are presented.
Full-reference video quality assessment on high-definition video content

The paper provided herein aims at investigating two state-of-the-art publicly available full-reference video quality assessment metrics, particularly with regard to high-definition video data. Concretely, we will concentrate on the performance of the Multi-Scale Structural Similarity index (MS-SSIM) and the NTIA General Video Quality Metric (VQM) compared to the still widely used Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) to answer the question which metric is better suited to automatically assess the quality of a given video. Evaluation is done on progressive video material of three different video quality databases. The paper also performs a detailed examination of the evaluation methodology of objective video quality metrics itself aiming at a better reproducibility and comparability of results.
The lack of CD34 expression in gastrointestinal stromal tumors is related to cystic degeneration following imatinib use.

OBJECTIVE We evaluated the characteristics of the gastrointestinal stromal tumors that showed discrepancies between their assessment using the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumor (RECIST) and Choi's criteria. We also investigated the clinical applicability of Choi's criteria to Korean gastrointestinal stromal tumor patients undergoing imatinib therapy. METHODS Patients with advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors treated with frontline imatinib were analyzed. Computed tomography images of these patients were reviewed and genotyping for the KIT and PDGFRA genes was performed. Immunohistochemical staining of c-KIT, CD34, platelet derived growth factor receptor-alpha, platelet derived growth factor receptor-beta, AKT, P-ERK and vascular endothelial growth factor was followed. RESULTS Ninety-five patients were enrolled. When using Choi's criteria to evaluate the 61 patients who achieved at least partial response by Choi's criteria, 27 patients showed discrepancies in their response to treatment between these two sets of criteria. A lack of CD34 expression in tumors was found to be related to cystic degeneration after imatinib treatment (P=0.001). Patients who showed partial response by Choi's criteria but stable disease by RECIST criteria had a similar progression-free survival to cases who showed a partial response under both systems (P=0.951). CONCLUSIONS Gastrointestinal stromal tumors showing cystic degeneration after imatinib treatment lack CD34 expression. Choi's criteria have a clinical value in terms of the progression-free survival in Korean patients treated with imatinib.
Multi-paradigm design with feature modeling

In this article, a method for selecting paradigms, viewed as solution domain concepts, appropriate for given application domain concepts is proposed. In this method, denoted as multi-paradigm design with feature modeling, both application and solution domain are modeled using feature modeling. The selection of paradigms is performed in the process of feature modeling based transformational analysis as a paradigm instantiation over application domain concepts. The output of transformational analysis is a set of paradigm instances annotated with the information about the corresponding application domain concepts and features. According to these paradigm instances, the code skeleton is being designed. The approach is presented in conjunction with its specialization to AspectJ programming language. Transformational analysis performed according to the AspectJ paradigm model enables an early aspect identification.