Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exemestane Loaded Self-Microemulsifying Drug Delivery System (SMEDDS): Development and Optimization

The purpose of this research work was to formulate and characterize self-micro emulsifying drug delivery system containing exemestane. The solubility of exemestane was determined in various vehicles. Pseudo ternary phase diagram was used to evaluate the micro-emulsification existence area. SMEDDS formulations were tested for micro-emulsifying properties, and the resultant formulations loaded with exemestane (ME1, ME2, ME3, ME4 and ME5) were investigated for clarity, phase separation, globule size and shape, zeta potential, effect of various diluents and dilutions, thermodynamic and thermal stability. From the results it is concluded that increase in droplet size is proportional to the concentration of oil in SMEDDS formulation. Minor difference in the droplet size and zeta potential was observed by varying the diluents (deionized water and 0.1 N HCl) and dilutions (1:10, 1:50 and 1:100). Formulations, which were found to be thermodynamically stable (ME1, ME2, ME3 and ME4), were subjected to stability studies as per International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines. No significant variations were observed in the formulations over a period of 3 months at accelerated and long-term conditions. TEM photographs of microemulsions formulations further conformed the spherical shape of globules. Among the various SMEDDS formulations, ME4 offer the advantages of good clarity systems at high oil content and thus offer good solubilization of exemestane. Thus this study indicates that the SMEDDS can be used as a potential drug carrier for dissolution enhancement of exemestane and other lipophilic drug(s).
Biodistribution and imaging with (123)I-ADAM: a serotonin transporter imaging agent.

UNLABELLED 2-((2-((Dimethylamino)methyl)phenyl)thio)-5-(123)I-iodophenylamine ((123)I-ADAM) is a new radiopharmaceutical that selectively binds the central nervous system serotonin transporters. The purpose of this study was to measure its whole-body biokinetics and estimate its radiation dosimetry in healthy human volunteers. The study was conducted within a regulatory framework that required its pharmacologic safety to be assessed simultaneously. METHODS The sample included 7 subjects ranging in age from 22 to 54 y old. An average of 12.7 whole-body scans were acquired sequentially on a dual-head camera for up to 50 h after the intravenous administration of 185 MBq (5 mCi) (123)I-ADAM. The fraction of the administered dose in 13 regions of interest (ROIs) was quantified from the attenuation-corrected geometric mean counts in conjugate views. Multiexponential functions were iteratively fit to each time-activity curve using a nonlinear, least-squares regression algorithm. These curves were numerically integrated to yield source organ residence times. Gender-specific radiation doses were then estimated with the MIRD technique. SPECT brain scans obtained 3 h after injection were evaluated using an ROI analysis to determine the range of values for the region to cerebellum. RESULTS There were no pharmacologic effects of the radiotracer on any of the subjects, including no change in heart rate, blood pressure, or laboratory results. Early planar images showed differentially increased activity in the lungs. SPECT images demonstrated that the radiopharmaceutical localized in the midbrain in a distribution that is consistent with selective transporter binding. The dose-limiting organ in both men and women was the distal colon, which received an average of 0.12 mGy/MBq (0.43 rad/mCi) (range, 0.098-0.15 mGy/MBq). The effective dose equivalent and effective dose for (123)I-ADAM were 0.037 +/- 0.003 mSv/MBq and 0.036 +/- 0.003 mSv/MBq, respectively. The mean adult male value of effective dose for (123)I-ADAM is similar in magnitude to that of (111)In-diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (0.035 mGy/MBq), half that of (111)In-pentetreotide (0.81 mGy/MBq), and approximately twice that of (123)I-inosine 5'-monophosphate (0.018 mGy/MBq). The differences in results between this study and a previous publication are most likely due to several factors, the most prominent being this dataset used attenuation correction of the scintigraphic data. Region-to-cerebellum ratios for the brain SPECT scans were 1.95 +/- 0.13 for the midbrain, 1.27 +/- 0.10 for the medial temporal regions, and 1.11 +/- 0.07 for the striatum. CONCLUSION (123)I-ADAM may be a safe and effective radiotracer for imaging serotonin transporters in the brain and the body.
Pathway Analysis in Microarray Data: A Comparison of Two Different Pathway Analysis Devices in the Same Data Set

Oligonucleotide microarray technology has been developed to a very powerful and favorable biotechnique. However, it is an explicit challenge to judge the potential biological meaning of such extensive amounts of data. There are various-commercially available or free-software applications for pathway analyses on microarray data on the market. The aim of the present study was to test whether pathway analyses on the same data set using different commercially available devices lead to roughly comparable or massively diverging results and, if so, to give potential explanations. Two different commercially available pathway analysis programs (GeneGo and Pathway Studio 6) have been elected. The programs have been compared concerning their different analyses tools, underlying databases, database constructions, and network-building algorithms. The same data set has been uploaded into two different programs. Pathway analysis was performed according to the following three criteria: the five top networks, the five top diseases, and the five top canonical networks that are associated with the uploaded gene list. The different programs differ in extracting their information from the literature, in database construction, and network-building algorithms. The "top networks," as suggested by the programs as to be "most important," substantially differ from each other and share only one same gene. Concerning the most represented diseases in the data set, there are certain overlaps but no uniform results in the different applications. Pathway analyses of microarray data using preformed software devices offer valuable options for investigating on the biological relevance and function of a focus gene set. However, there is no standard in constructing such programs. This leads to substantial differences when investigating on the same data set using different devices. The intention of this work is to sensitize for the potentialities and also pitfalls doing pathway analysis using automated software tools.
A design of multi-core system based on Avalon bus

With the development of a large scale integrated circuit and semiconductor production process, multi-processor on-chip system provides a feasible solution for the highly parallel computation and communications. In this paper, taking JPEG decoding as the starting point, a decoding system with multi-core processors based on the Avalon bus is presented. The paper also introduced the principle of JPEG decoding briefly and the hardware architecture of this system. And we also analyze the parallel process of JPEG decoding. Based on it, to verify the resource comparison, it is compared with the JPEG decoding system based on the AHB bus with 4-core on the EP2S180 FPGA development board. According to the experiments, the JPEG decoding system based on the Avalon bus with multi-core takes up less resource, and compared with the system based on the Avalon BUS with single-core, the total decoding time of the same four pictures of this system saves about 66.7%.
Frontal hyperintensities on HF with depression Late-life depression , heart failure and frontal white matter hyperintensity : a structural magnetic resonance imaging study

The relevance of the relationship between cardiac disease and depressive symptoms is well established. White matter hyperintensity, a bright signal area in the brain on T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging scans, has been separately associated with cardiovascular risk factors, cardiac disease and late-life depression. However, no study has directly investigated the association between heart failure, major depressive symptoms and the presence of hyperintensities. Using a visual assessment scale, we have investigated the frequency and severity of white matter hyperintensities identified by magnetic resonance imaging in eight patients with late-life depression and heart failure, ten patients with heart failure without depression, and fourteen healthy elderly volunteers. Since the frontal lobe has been the proposed site for the preferential location of white matter hyperintensities in patients with late-life depression, we focused our investigation specifically on this brain region. Although there were no significant group differences in white matter hyperintensities in the frontal region, a significant direct correlation emerged between the severity of frontal periventricular white matter hyperintensity and scores on the Hamilton scale for depression in the group with heart failure and depression (P = 0.016, controlled for the confounding influence of age). There were no significant findings in any other areas of the brain. This pattern of results adds support to a relationship between cardiovascular risk factors and depressive symptoms, and provides preliminary evidence that the presence of white matter hyperintensities specifically in frontal regions may contribute to the severity of depressive symptoms in cardiac disease. Correspondence
A solution to extractive summarization based on document type and a new measure for sentence similarity

The Internet is a enormous and fast growing digital repository encompassing billions of documents in a diversity of subjects, quality, reliability, etc. It is increasingly difficult to scavenge useful information from it. Thus, it is necessary to provide automatically techniques that allowing users to save time and resources. Automatic text summarization techniques may offer a way out to this problem. Text summarization (TS) aims at automatically compress one or more documents to present their main ideas in less space. TS platforms receive one or more documents as input to generate a summary. In recent years, a variety of text summarization methods has been proposed. However, due to the different document types (such as news, blogs, and scientific articles) it became difficult to create a general TS application to create expressive summaries for each type. Another related relevant problem is measuring the degree of similarity between sentences, which is used in applications, such as: text summarization, information retrieval, image retrieval, text categorization, and machine translation. Recent works report several efforts to evaluate sentence similarity by representing sentences using vectors of bag of words or a tree of the syntactic information among words. However, most of these approaches do not take in consideration the sentence meaning and the words order. This thesis proposes: (i) a new text summarization solution which identifies the document type before perform the summarization, (ii) the creation of a new sentence similarity measure based on lexical, syntactic and semantic evaluation to deal with meaning and word order problems. The previous identification of the document types allows the summarization solution to select the methods that is more suitable to each type of text. This thesis also perform a detailed assessment with the most used text summarization methods to selects which create more informative summaries for news, blogs and scientific articles contexts.The sentence similarity measure proposed is completely unsupervised and reaches results similar to humans annotator using the dataset proposed by Li et al. The proposed measure was satisfactorily applied to evaluate the similarity between summaries and to eliminate redundancy in multi-document summarization.
Development and Validation of a Risk Model for Prediction of Hazardous Alcohol Consumption in General Practice Attendees: The PredictAL Study

Background Little is known about the risk of progression to hazardous alcohol use in people currently drinking at safe limits. We aimed to develop a prediction model (predictAL) for the development of hazardous drinking in safe drinkers. Methods A prospective cohort study of adult general practice attendees in six European countries and Chile followed up over 6 months. We recruited 10,045 attendees between April 2003 to February 2005. 6193 European and 2462 Chilean attendees recorded AUDIT scores below 8 in men and 5 in women at recruitment and were used in modelling risk. 38 risk factors were measured to construct a risk model for the development of hazardous drinking using stepwise logistic regression. The model was corrected for over fitting and tested in an external population. The main outcome was hazardous drinking defined by an AUDIT score ≥8 in men and ≥5 in women. Results 69.0% of attendees were recruited, of whom 89.5% participated again after six months. The risk factors in the final predictAL model were sex, age, country, baseline AUDIT score, panic syndrome and lifetime alcohol problem. The predictAL model's average c-index across all six European countries was 0.839 (95% CI 0.805, 0.873). The Hedge's g effect size for the difference in log odds of predicted probability between safe drinkers in Europe who subsequently developed hazardous alcohol use and those who did not was 1.38 (95% CI 1.25, 1.51). External validation of the algorithm in Chilean safe drinkers resulted in a c-index of 0.781 (95% CI 0.717, 0.846) and Hedge's g of 0.68 (95% CI 0.57, 0.78). Conclusions The predictAL risk model for development of hazardous consumption in safe drinkers compares favourably with risk algorithms for disorders in other medical settings and can be a useful first step in prevention of alcohol misuse.
CyberDome: PC Clustered Hemi Spherical Immersive Projection Display

This paper aims at introducing 'CyberDome', a PCClustered Projection Based VR Display, where the illusion of immersion is realized by projecting stereo images into a hemi-spherical screen. With the help of our developed distortion correction software, the system is capable of displaying life size, stereoscopic, distortion free images on the screen with a wide field of view. Dome software is designed such that it could take positions of projectors, eye point of user, and diameter of hemi-spherical screen as parameters, which in turn makes it possible to have 'Scalable CyberDome Systems' with arbitrary size of hemi-spherical screens. Focus of the paper is the description of two such developed Systems, CyberDome1800 and CyberDome8500
Partitioning variables across register windows to reduce spill code in a low-power processor

Low-power embedded processors utilize compact instruction encodings to achieve small code size. Such encodings place tight restrictions on the number of bits available to encode operand specifiers and, thus, on the number of architected registers. As a result, performance and power are often sacrificed as the burden of operand supply is shifted from the register file to the memory due to the limited number of registers. In this paper, we investigate the use of a windowed register file to address this problem by providing more registers than allowed in the encoding. The registers are organized as a set of identical register windows where, at each point in the execution, there is a single active window. Special window management instructions are used to change the active window and to transfer values between windows. This design gives the appearance of a large register file without compromising the instruction encoding. To support the windowed register file, we designed and implemented a graph partitioning-based compiler algorithm that partitions program variables and temporaries referenced within a procedure across multiple windows. On a 16-bit embedded processor, an average of 11 percent improvement in application performance and 25 percent reduction in system power was achieved as an 8-register design was scaled from one to two windows.
Low Cell Motility Induced by hsp27 Overexpression Decreases Osteolytic Bone Metastases of Human Breast Cancer Cells In Vivo

The mechanisms controlling the formation of osteolytic bone metastases in patients with breast cancer are still poorly understood. To explore the role of motility in the establishment of osteolytic bone metastases, we have used a model of bone metastasis in which MDA‐MB‐231 breast cancer cells exhibiting low (hsp27‐transfectants) and high (control‐transfectant) endogenous cell motility were compared. We found that MDA‐MB‐231 cells exhibiting low cell motility were less capable of establishing osteolytic lesions. The number and the area of the osteolytic lesions in mice inoculated with low motility cells were both significantly smaller. Histomorphometry of bone lesions also demonstrated less tumor area in mice bearing hsp27 transfectants although there was no difference in the osteoclast number per square millimeter of tumor–bone interface. These data suggest that cell motility may be an important mechanism in the metastatic cascade of breast cancer cells to the bone and that controlling cell motility may be a useful target to prevent the establishment of osteolytic bone metastases.
A Special Section on Dam Removal and River Restoration

Articles H uman activities have degraded many of the world's ecosystems, which has created an urgent need for strategies that can restore their ecological integrity. This need is accompanied by many scientific challenges, however. In particular , ecosystems are among the most complex entities in the hierarchy of life, and the successful repair of damaged systems will require a deep understanding of the processes that determine their structure and function. Biologists have a critical role to play in creating this knowledge because of their expertise in such varied phenomena as the role of microbes in detoxifying anthropogenic contaminants, the effects of disturbance on population persistence, and the factors influencing competitive interactions between native and exotic species. By itself, however, biological knowledge is not sufficient for restoring degraded ecosystems. Two other types of expertise are also needed for developing integrated restoration solutions. First, because ecosystems are composed of many interacting abiotic and biotic components, biologists must collaborate with their colleagues in the physical sciences to learn how these systems work. Second, because humans are such strong in-teractors in these complex systems, we need to work with experts who can help us understand how human attitudes, institutions , and technologies influence the condition and management of ecosystems. Such enhanced interdisciplinary dialogue and unified approaches are essential for creating public policies that can sustain the planet's life support systems (Lubchenco 1998, Covich 2000, Ludwig et al. 2001). Proposals to restore rivers via dam removal raise many issues that require broad discussion and teamwork. This approach to river restoration derives from the growing recognition that dams often disrupt the structure and function of river ecosystems by modifying flow regimes, disrupting sediment transport, altering water quality, and severing their biological continuity (Ward and Stanford 1979, Petts 1984, Collier et al. 1996). Future dam removal decisions can be enhanced by developing a more complete scientific understanding of the processes that determine how rivers are affected by different types of dams and how they respond to dam removal. There is an equally important need to understand the social, economic, engineering, and legal factors that influence dam removal decisions. Assembling a diverse array of experts to explore these different facets of dam removal was an exciting challenge for us. Listening to and participating in the dialogue that took place when those experts gathered at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in August 2001 was even …
Sox9 mediates Notch1-induced mesenchymal features in lung adenocarcinoma

Sox9 has gained increasing importance both functionally and as a prognostic factor in cancer. We demonstrate a functional role for Sox9 in inducing a mesenchymal phenotype in lung ADC. We show that Sox9 mRNA and protein are overexpressed in lung ADC, particularly those with KRAS mutations. Sox9 expression correlated with the Notch target gene Hes1, and numerous other Notch pathway components. We observed that Sox9 is a potent inducer of lung cancer cell motility and invasion, and a negative regulator of E-cadherin, a key protein that is lost during epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Moreover, we show that Notch1 signaling directly regulates Sox9 expression through a SOX9 promoter binding site, independently of the TGF-β pathway, and that Sox9 participates in Notch-1 induced cell motility, cell invasion, and loss of E-cadherin expression. Together, the results identify a new functional role for a Notch1-Sox9 signaling axis in lung ADC that may explain the correlation of Sox9 with tumor progression, higher tumor grade, and poor lung cancer survival. In addition to Notch and TGF-β, Sox9 also acts downstream of NF-κB and Wnt/β-catenin signaling. Thus, Sox9 could potentially act as a hub to mediate cross-talk among key oncogenic pathways in lung ADC. Targeting Sox9 expression or transcriptional activity could potentially reduce resistance to targeted therapy for lung ADC caused by pathway redundancy.
Nursing activities, nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes as perceived by hospital nurses.

AIM To investigate the relationships between nursing activities, nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes in hospital settings as perceived by registered nurses in Finland and the Netherlands and to compare the results obtained in the two countries. BACKGROUND Previous research indicates that a higher proportion of registered nurses in the staff mix results in better patient outcomes. Knowledge of the relationship between nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes is crucial to optimise the management of professional nursing resources and patient care. DESIGN A cross-sectional, descriptive questionnaire survey. METHODS Registered nurses employed in hospitals in Finland (n = 535) and the Netherlands (n = 334), with overall response rates of 44·9% and 33·4%, respectively, participated. RESULTS The patient-to-nurse ratio was on average 8·74:1 and did not vary significantly between the countries. However, there were fewer registered nurses and significantly more licensed practical nurses among the Dutch hospital staff than the Finnish staff. In addition, Finnish nurses performed non-nursing and administrative activities more frequently than the Dutch nurses and reported more dissatisfaction with the availability of support services. Frequencies of patient falls were related to the patient-to-nurse ratio in both countries. Finnish participants reported the occurrence of adverse patient outcomes more frequently. CONCLUSIONS Significant associations were found between nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes in hospital settings. Compared with the Netherlands, in Finland, nurses appear to have higher workloads, there are higher patient-to-nurse ratios, and these adverse staffing conditions are associated with higher rates of adverse patient outcomes. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE The findings provide valuable insights into the potential effects of major changes or reductions in nursing staff on the occurrence of adverse patient outcomes in hospital settings.