Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In vivo imaging demonstrates a time‐line for new vessel formation in islet transplantation

Abstract: Vascularization of transplanted islets must be maintained to provide long‐term graft function. In vivo assessment of new vessel formation in islet grafts has been poorly documented. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether neovascularization was detectable in vivo in a Feridex‐labeled murine syngeneic subcapsular islet mass using DCE MRI over 180 days. Subcapsular transplants could be visualized at post‐transplant days three, seven, 14, and 28 using T2‐weighted MRI and at post‐transplant day 180 by immunohistochemistry. Injection of the contrast agent gadolinium (Gd)‐DTPA for DCE at three, seven, and 14 days showed increased signal in the transplant area consistent with new vessel formation. Areas under contrast enhancement curves suggested peak angiogenesis at 14 days. At 180 days, there was no observable change in signal intensity after contrast injection suggesting established vascularization or islet mass reduction. Immunohistochemistry confirmed MRI and DCE findings. These data suggest that islet angiogenesis occurs early after transplantation and is likely established after one month of transplantation. This study provides an in vivo time‐line of neovascularization in subcapsular islet grafts. We anticipate that contrast extravasation captured by MRI may provide useful monitoring of graft angiogenesis if reproduced in a clinically relevant intraportal model.
A 1.83 $\mu$J/Classification, 8-Channel, Patient-Specific Epileptic Seizure Classification SoC Using a Non-Linear Support Vector Machine

A non-linear support vector machine (NLSVM) seizure classification SoC with 8-channel EEG data acquisition and storage for epileptic patients is presented. The proposed SoC is the first work in literature that integrates a feature extraction (FE) engine, patient specific hardware-efficient NLSVM classification engine, 96 KB SRAM for EEG data storage and low-noise, high dynamic range readout circuits. To achieve on-chip integration of the NLSVM classification engine with minimum area and energy consumption, the FE engine utilizes time division multiplexing (TDM)-BPF architecture. The implemented log-linear Gaussian basis function (LL-GBF) NLSVM classifier exploits the linearization to achieve energy consumption of 0.39 μ J/operation and reduces the area by 28.2% compared to conventional GBF implementation. The readout circuits incorporate a chopper-stabilized DC servo loop to minimize the noise level elevation and achieve noise RTI of 0.81 μ Vrms for 0.5-100 Hz bandwidth with an NEF of 4.0. The 5 × 5 mm2 SoC is implemented in a 0.18 μm 1P6M CMOS process consuming 1.83 μ J/classification for 8-channel operation. SoC verification has been done with the Children's Hospital Boston-MIT EEG database, as well as with a specific rapid eye-blink pattern detection test, which results in an average detection rate, average false alarm rate and latency of 95.1%, 0.94% (0.27 false alarms/hour) and 2 s, respectively.
Research on path planning for mobile robot based on ACO

A planning method based on the expansion path of the ant colony optimization is proposed for path planning of mobile robot in a complicated environment. Introducing to time-varying characteristics of pheromone distribution, pheromone update strategy, inflection path optimization and local optimal path of expansion, and it is designed that inflection parameters and overall evaluation as the path evaluation criteria. The three algorithms were compared with each other by the simulation results and practical tests. The comparisons verified the expansion path of the ant colony optimization which shows better search performance, stronger searching ability and shorter path than the traditional ant colony algorithms and improved algorithms. The algorithm inhibits algorithm into local optimum and achieves search of mobile robot's optimal path. Mobile robot can avoid obstacles to reach the target point safely and quickly.
The Impact of Education and Simulation on Pediatric Novice Nurses’ Response and Recognition to Deteriorating

Adverse patient events related to preventable errors while hospitalized resulted in need for interventions to improve outcomes. One identified error is the lack of symptom recognition during patient deterioration. Pediatric patients’ symptoms during deterioration vary from their adult counterparts and often go unrecognized. A Pediatric Crisis Recognition and Management course was designed to assist the novice pediatric nurse to recognize and respond appropriately through the use of high-fidelity simulation enhancing their clinical skills and improving patient outcomes during a crisis.
Restoration of telomerase activity rescues chromosomal instability and premature aging in Terc−/− mice with short telomeres

Reconstitution of telomerase activity is proposed as a potential gene therapy to prevent, or rescue, age‐related diseases produced by critical telomere shortening. However, it is not known whether or not short telomeres are irreversibly damaged. We addressed this by re‐introducing telomerase in late generation telomerase‐deficient mice, Terc−/−, which have short telomeres and show severe proliferative defects. For this, we have crossed these mice with Terc+/− mice and analyzed telomere length, chromosomal instability and premature aging of the progeny. The Terc−/− progeny had one set of chromosomes with normal telomeres, whereas the other set remained with critically short telomeres; these mice presented chromosomal instability and premature aging. In contrast, Terc+/− progeny showed all chromosomes with detectable telomeres, and did not show chromosomal instability or premature aging. These results prove that critically short telomeres can be rescued by telomerase, and become fully functional, thus rescuing premature aging. This has important implications for the future design of telomerase‐based gene therapy of age‐related diseases.
Governing the conduct of conduct: are restraints inevitable?

BACKGROUND The purpose of this article is to provide an interpretation of how restraint use is maintained and legitimized despite negative reports on its efficacy and questions about its ethicality. My research examined the use of restraint on a patient requiring care in an acute teaching hospital in Australia. This article examines one case study that was part of a PhD research project. The literature reveals evidence of the harm that restraints cause, as well as their ineffectiveness as a safety measure. In addition, it indicates that the prevalence of restraint use is high. METHODS The study is framed by a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. This report is an in-depth case study including observations of the patient, interviews with members of the multidisciplinary team and analysis of medical, physiotherapy and nursing notation. FINDINGS Discourses from the health care team are identified by which restraint use is justified, and legitimized by staff. An important discursive practice is 'constituting the patient's inability to self govern' and their resulting marginalization from the services provided by the team. LIMITATIONS There are certain philosophical limitations including classical arguments about the position of postmodernism and specifically the ideas of Michel Foucault as opposed to other philosophy's ability to make sense of a phenomenon. The study was carried out in Australia and thus the discursive practices may be dissimilar in other countries. CONCLUSIONS Through these discursive practices we can understand how staff maintain a monopoly over the truth and perpetuate claims about the inevitability of restraint use.
HeartSense

Heart rate is one of the most important vital signals for personal health tracking. A number of smartphone-based heart rate estimation systems have been proposed over the years. However, they either depend on special hardware sensors or suffer from the high noise due to the weakness of the heart signals, affecting their accuracy in many practical scenarios. Inspired by medical studies about the heart motion mechanics, we propose the HeartSense heart rate estimation system. Specifically, we show that the gyroscope sensor is the most sensitive sensor for measuring the heart rate. To further counter noise and handle different practical scenarios, we introduce a novel quality metric that allows us to fuse the different gyroscope axes in a probabilistic framework to achieve a robust and accurate estimate. We have implemented and evaluated our system on different Android phones. Results using 836 experiments on different subjects in practical scenarios with a side-by-side comparison with other systems show that HeartSense can achieve 1.03 bpm median absolute error for heart rate estimation. This is better than the state-of-the-art by more than 147% in median error, highlighting HeartSense promise as a ubiquitous system for medical and personal well-being applications.
Uphill Capital Flows and the International Monetary System

Uphill capital flows constitute a key transmission channel through which reserve accumulation can distort the stability of the international monetary system. This paper examines and quantifies the importance of this transmission channel by examining how foreign official purchases of U.S. Treasuries influences the U.S. yield curve at different maturities. Our findings suggest that a percentage point increase in foreign official holdings relative to outstanding marketable securities reduces the term premium by 2.0–2.4 basis points at maturities of 2–3 years. These estimates are then used to gauge the role of a global policy in reducing excess reserve accumulation? e.g., a composite global reserve asset or through global liquidity facilities. Findings show that a policy that reduces the demand for Treasuries by $100 billion would increase yields by 1.5–1.8 basis points.
Variance Components Analysis for Genetic Linkage of Time to Onset for Disease

We compared two variance components methods for detecting genes that influence time to onset for a complex disease using simulated data. We first divided the extended families into nuclear families. The first method fitted variance components to the martingale residuals, which were obtained from first fitting a proportional hazards model to the time to onset data for the trait, allowing for the quantitative traits Q1–Q5, sex, age, and the environmental factor. The second method treated time to onset among the affected individuals as a quantitative trait adjusting for the same factors as in the first method. Power of these analyses were similar for either approach. However, we found an excess of false‐positive results when fitting the martingale residual model or the affected‐only model to identify genetic factors linked to chromosome 6. Applying a power transformation to the martingale residuals decreased the type I error rate and increased the power of tests for genetic linkage. We also found that robust variance correction lead to tests with a slightly lower type I error rate, perhaps because the robust variance correction adjusts for the fact that we did not specifically model the effects of the mitochondrial factor in our analysis. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Non-Binary LDPC Erasure Codes With Separated Low-Degree Variable Nodes

The code design of non-binary low-density paritycheck codes for the erasure channel, under maximum a posteriori decoding, is addressed. In particular, a partially structured ensemble of codes, characterized by a careful control of the amount and of the connectivity of the variable nodes of small degrees, is proposed. The identified ensemble of codes is analyzed in terms of asymptotic thresholds and weight distribution and it is shown that codes from the ensemble provide a remarkable trade-off between waterfall performance, error floor, and decoding complexity. As an example, the performance curve of a short (256,128) code on the memoryless 16-ary erasure channel tightly approaches the Singleton bound at least down to a codeword error rate of 10-9, at low decoding complexity.
Comparison between body fat measurements obtained by portable ultrasound and caliper in young adults

The objective of this study was to compare and correlate the Portable Ultra Sound (US) measuring technique to the skinfold measuring technique (SF) to estimate body fat percentage (%F) in young adults. Sixty military were evaluated, all males, divided in two groups: Group 1 (normal) composed by 30 military with Body Mass Index (BMI) until 24.99 kg/m2 and Group 2 (overweight) composed by 30 military with BMI >; 25 kg/m2. Weight, height, skinfolds and ultrasound were measured in 9 points (triceps, subscapular, biceps, chest, medium axillary, abdominal, suprailiac, thigh and calf). Body fat average values obtained by skinfold thickness and ultrasound measurements were 13.25 ± 6.32 % and 12.73 ± 5.95 % respectively. Despite significant differences in measurements of each anatomical site, it was possible to verify that the total final body fat percentage calculated by both techniques did not present significant differences and that overweight group presented greater similarity between the values obtained using caliper and ultrasound equipment.
PRODUCTIVITY DYNAMICS OF CHINESE MANUFACTURING FIRMS

China has experienced high-speed catch-up growth with an average annual rate of over 8% in per capita GDP in the past four decades. Using growth accounting, Zhu (Understanding China’s growth: Past, present, and future. Journal of Economics Perspectives, 26(4), 103–124) finds that the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) accounts for 77% of China’s per capita GDP growth during 1978–2007, and argues that China’s TFP growth is mainly driven by resource reallocation due to market liberalization and institutional reforms. This paper aims to estimate China’s aggregate productivity growth by applying three leading methods of estimating firm-level production function on Chinese manufacturing firms during 1998–2007, and quantify the contribution of resource reallocation to productivity growth. In addition, we also empirically compare the three estimation methods in this large data set.
Estimates of the virological benefit of antiretroviral therapy are both assay‐ and analysis‐dependent

Objective:To assess the potential discrepancies in reported changes in plasma viral load (PVL) depending on how values below the detection limit of the assay are handled in the data analysis phase of a randomized controlled clinical trial. Design:Data from a recently completed clinical trial comparing combinations of zidovudine, didanosine and nevirapine were analysed. In this trial, PVL was measured using an assay with a lower quantification limit of 400 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml initially. All PVL values less than 500 copies/ml were retested with a more sensitive assay with a lower quantification limit of 20 copies/ml. Methods:Several summary measures for assessing change in PVL were calculated using three different methods to adjust for PVL values less than the quantification limit of the assay. The differences between these measures were evaluated. Results:We found that the magnitude of the discrepancy between summary measures used to report changes in PVL depended on the proportion of subjects with PVL less than the quantification limit of the assay, how those observations were handled in the data analysis, and the relative difference between the quantification limits of the conventional and more sensitive assay. Conclusion:The lack of consensus in reporting of PVL data in the literature makes the interpretation of published trial results difficult. In the absence of agreement on the most appropriate summary measure of PVL data, we recommend that all summaries include information on the quantification limit of the assay used, the proportion of observations at or below the quantification limit and how these observations were handled in the data analysis.
Bone Mineralization and Turnover in Preterm Infants at 8–12 Years of Age: The Effect of Early Diet

Our previous studies raised two hypotheses: first that suboptimal early nutrition and second that human milk have enhancing effects on long‐term bone mineralization. To test these hypotheses experimentally, we measured whole body and regional bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD), using dual‐energy X‐ray absorptiometry and single‐photon absorptiometry, and bone turnover at 8–12 years in 244 preterm children (128 boys) who participated in a prospective randomized study of diet during the neonatal period. Dietary randomizations studied were: banked human milk (BBM, n = 87) versus preterm formula (PTF, n = 96) as the sole diet or as a supplement to mother's expressed breast milk (EBM); PTF (n = 25) versus term formula (TF, n = 36) as sole diet. Ninety‐five term children of the same age were also studied. First, preterm children were shorter and lighter than term children (height SD scores −0.49 (1.1) vs. +0.22 (0.9), weight SD scores −0.41 (1.2) vs. +0.38 (1.0) and had significantly lower whole‐body BMC than their peers; decrements were also evident at some regional sites. These differences disappeared after adjusting for bone area, body size, and pubertal status. Second, children previously randomized to BBM versus PTF or TF versus PTF showed no significant differences in anthropometry, BMC, BMD, or osteocalcin (OC). Third, there was no independent effect of the proportion of EBM on BMC, BMD, or OC and no interaction between randomized diet and the amount of EBM received. Fourth, plasma OC was significantly higher in preterm children than in term children (12.4 vs. 11.0 ng/ml, p < 0.005) and in preterm children who had received a low‐nutrient (BBM/TF) as opposed to a high‐nutrient diet (PTF) during the neonatal period (12.9 vs. 11.9 ng/ml, p = 0.03). In conclusion, preterm children are shorter, lighter, and have lower bone mass than their peers at age 8–12 years. The lower BMC is, however, appropriate for the bone and body size achieved. Despite large differences in early mineral intake, early diet does not affect bone mass in preterm children, and fresh human milk has no specific effect. However, poor nutrition during the neonatal period may result in higher bone formation rates during childhood.
"In vivo" and "in vitro" antitumoral action of Larrea divaricata Cav.

We previously reported that aqueous extract of Larrea divaricata Cav. had an antiproliferative activity upon tumoral lymphoid cells (BW 5147), without affecting normal immunity. To determine the probable mechanism of the inhibitory action of the extract upon cell growth, the participation of intracellular signals involved in the inhibition of cell proliferation, namely the activation of adenylate cyclase system was studied. The production of cyclic 3', 5 adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) in presence and absence of extract was analized. The extract increased the cAMP levels, but neither the cAMP production nor the inhibitory effect of the extract on proliferation were blocked by a beta adrenergic receptor antagonist (propranolol) or by histaminergic receptor antagonists (cimetidine and mepyramine). So, we concluded that the antiproliferative activity of the extract of BW 5147 cells would be mediated by an increase in cAMP intracellular levels no related to the activation of the membrane receptors here studied. In parallel, the extract was administered to a pregnant rat with a spontaneous mammarian carcinoma and "in vivo" antitumoral activity was found.
Public Innovation Capacity: Developing and Testing a Self-Assessment Survey Instrument

ABSTRACT Governments around the world are pressed to develop innovative solutions for the wicked problems they are facing. To develop these solutions, the public innovation capacity—defined as the capacity to develop and realize new ideas for societal problems—is of crucial importance. This article builds a model of the public innovation capacity on the basis of innovation systems theory and the literature on public innovation. Five functions—mobilizing, improvising, vitalizing, balancing, and coordinating—are identified and operationalized to construct a self-assessment survey instrument for governments. This instrument in tested by using it to self-assess the public innovation capacity of a Dutch municipality. This test highlights the validity of the instrument and shows that it helps to identify weaknesses in the public innovation capacity. This measurement can form the basis for a reflection on the government organization’s public innovation capacity as a basis for interventions to improve this capacity.
Anti‐obesity action of Salix matsudana leaves (Part 1). Anti‐obesity action by polyphenols of Salix matsudana in high fat‐diet treated rodent animals

In preliminary experiments, polyphenol fractions prepared from the leaves of Salix matsudana reduced the elevation of the rat plasma triacylglycerol level at 3 and 4 h after oral administration of a lipid emulsion containing corn oil, at a dose of 570 mg/kg. The present study examined the anti‐obesity action of polyphenol fractions of S. matsudana leaves by testing whether the polyphenol fractions prevented the obesity induced by feeding a high‐fat diet to female mice for 9 weeks. Body weights at 2–9 weeks and the ﬁnal parametrial adipose tissue weights were signiﬁcantly lower in mice fed the high‐fat diet with 5% polyphenols of S. matsudana leaves than in those fed the high‐fat diet alone. The polyphenols of S. matsudana leaves also signiﬁcantly reduced the hepatic total cholesterol content, which was elevated in mice fed the high‐fat diet alone. In addition, the polyphenol fractions of S. matsudana leaves inhibited palmitic acid uptake into brush border membrane vesicles prepared from rat jejunum and α‐amylase activity, and their fractions enhanced norepinephrine‐induced lipolysis in fat cells. In conclusion, it is suggested that the inhibitory effects of the ﬂavonoid glycoside fraction of S. matsudana leaves on high‐fat diet‐induced obesity might be due to the inhibition of carbohydrate and lipid absorption from small intestine through the inhibition of α‐amylase and palmitic acid uptake into small intestinal brush border membrane or by accelerating fat mobilization through enhancing norepinephrine‐induced lipolysis in fat cells. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Color Compressive Sensing Imaging of Arbitrary-Shaped Scatterers

The problem of imaging arbitrary-shaped targets is addressed through a methodological generalization of the compressive sensing (CS) paradigm. The <italic>Color CS</italic> (C-CS) methodology consists of a two-level hierarchical scheme where, at the first level and using a basis <italic>dictionary</italic>, several sparsity-regularized inversions are performed in parallel, while, at the second level, the retrieved expansion coefficients are compared to select the <italic>most reliable</italic> reconstruction according to a sparsity-rewarding criterion. Within the Born-approximated formulation of the microwave imaging problem, a Bayesian solver and a filtered <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-norm criterion are employed to implement the first and the second <italic>C-CS</italic> levels, respectively. Selected numerical results, representative of an extensive validation, are presented to illustrate the features, the advantages, and the limitations of <italic>C-CS</italic> also in comparison with some competitive state-of-the-art inversion techniques.