Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Group V allergens in grass pollens. II. Investigation of group V allergens in pollens from 10 grasses

In an earlier study an allergen from Phleum pratense (timothy) pollen. Phl p V. has been isolated and physicochemically characterized. In this study Phl p V and immunochemically simitar components from other grass pollens (group V allergens) have been investigated using immunoelectrophoretic techniques. To study the allergenic importance of the group V allergens, the allergenic compositions of 10 grass pollen extracts were investigated in crossed radioimmunoelectrophoresis (CRIE) using 20 sera from grass pollen‐allergic donors. Group V allergens were identified using monospecific rabbit antibodies raised against Phl p V, anti‐phl p V, which react with other group V allergens usually producing dense precipitates in immunoelectrophoresis. In this way group V allergens were identified in eight extracts, and when present the precipitate corresponding to the group V allergen was the dominant IgE binding precipitate. All identified group V allergens bound IgE in at least 17 of the 20 investigated sera. Monospecific rabbit antibodies raised against the group I allergen of Lolium perenne (rye grass), anit‐Lol p I. do not precipitate group V allergens, indicating that there are no immunochemical similarities between group I and group V allergens. In SDS‐PAGE anti‐Phl p V identifies IgE‐binding components with molecular weights between 26 and 33 kD. In contrast, anti‐Lol p I binds to components of slightly higher molecular weight. Apparently, the group V components are allergens that are physicochemically and immunochemically distinct from group I allergens.
Life After Death: The Aftermath of Perioperative Catastrophes

Most anesthesiologists will experience the perioperative death of a patient or a major perioperative catastrophe in the course of their careers. Anesthesia training, however, does not prepare individuals to handle the aftermath of such a stressful event. Multiple surveys have shown that the death of a patient has a major emotional impact on up to 75% of health care providers involved, regardless of whether the death was expected or whether the patient was well known to the practitioner. Psychological recovery often takes weeks or months and is hampered by lack of emotional and professional support. Data indicate that the majority of anesthesiologists would prefer a more formal support structure, including the option to take time off from clinical work. Although a formal assessment of professional functioning after a perioperative catastrophe has not been done, the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland instituted guidelines recommending support at multiple levels, and the “Adverse Event Protocol” available on the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation website provides a suggested series of steps to minimize patient injury and identify the cause of an adverse anesthesia event after it occurs. The negative consequences of failure to cope well after these events are significant to individuals and health care systems alike. Further study into the short-term and long-term impact of perioperative catastrophes on providers and health systems is needed. Additionally, education on how to handle the aftermath of perioperative catastrophes and formal support structures should be provided to practitioners at all levels of training.
Cardiac shear-wave elastography using a transesophageal transducer: application to the mapping of thermal lesions in ultrasound transesophageal cardiac ablation

Heart rhythm disorders, such as atrial fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia can be treated by catheter-based thermal ablation. However, clinically available systems based on radio-frequency or cryothermal ablation suffer from limited energy penetration and the lack of lesion’s extent monitoring. An ultrasound-guided transesophageal device has recently successfully been used to perform High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) ablation in targeted regions of the heart in vivo. In this study we investigate the feasibility of a dual therapy and imaging approach on the same transesophageal device. We demonstrate in vivo that quantitative cardiac shear-wave elastography (SWE) can be performed with the device and we show on ex vivo samples that transesophageal SWE can map the extent of the HIFU lesions. First, SWE was validated with the transesophageal endoscope in one sheep in vivo. The stiffness of normal atrial and ventricular tissues has been assessed during the cardiac cycle (n=11 ? >) and mapped (n= 7 ? >). Second, HIFU ablation has been performed with the therapy-imaging transesophageal device in ex vivo chicken breast samples (n = 3), then atrial (left, n= 2 ? >) and ventricular (left n=1 ? >, right n=1 ? >) porcine heart tissues. SWE provided stiffness maps of the tissues before and after ablation. Areas of the lesions were obtained by tissue color change with gross pathology and compared to SWE. During the cardiac cycle stiffness varied from 0.5 ± 0.1 kPa to 6.0 ± 0.3 kPa in the atrium and from 1.3 ± 0.3 kPa to 13.5 ± 9.1 kPa in the ventricles. The thermal lesions were visible on all SWE maps performed after ablation. Shear modulus of the ablated zones increased to 16.3 ± 5.5 kPa (versus 4.4 ± 1.6 kPa before ablation) in the chicken breast, to 30.3 ± 10.3 kPa (versus 12.2 ± 4.3 kPa) in the atria and to 73.8 ± 13.9 kPa (versus 21.2 ± 3.3 kPa) in the ventricles. On gross pathology, the size of the lesions ranged from 0.1 to 1.5 cm2 in the imaging plane area. Elasticity-estimated depths and widths of the lesions differed respectively with a median of 0.2 mm (first quartile Q1: −0.8 mm; third quartile Q3: 2.6 mm) for a mean squared error (MSE) of 5.1 mm2 and a median of 0.2 mm (Q1: −2.7 mm; Q3: 2.7 mm) for a MSE of 11.1 mm2 from gross pathology. We have demonstrated the feasibility of the HIFU thermal ablation monitoring using a dual therapy and imaging transesophageal device. The combination of HIFU, ultrasound imaging and SWE on the same transesophageal system could lead to a new clinical device for a safer and controlled treatment of a wide variety of cardiac arrhythmias.
Long-Term Tracking by Decision Making

Author(s): Supancic III, James Steven | Advisor(s): Ramanan, Deva K | Abstract: Cameras can naturally capture sequences of images, or videos, and for computers to understand videos, they must track to connect the past with the present. We focus on two problems which challenge current state-of-the-art trackers. First, we address the challenge of long-term occlusion. For this challenge, a tracker must know when it has lost track and how to reinitialize tracking when the target reappears. We tackle reinitialization by building good appearance models for humans and hands, with a particular emphasis on robustness and occlusion. For the second challenge, appearance variation, the tracker must know when and how to re-learn (or update) an appearance model. Common solutions to this challenge encounter the classic problem of drift: aggressively learning putative appearance changes allows small errors to compound, as elements of the background environment pollute the appearance model. We propose two solutions. First, we consider self-paced learning, wherein a tracker begins by learning from frames it finds easy. As the tracker becomes better at recognizing the target, it begins to learn from harder frames. We also develop a data-driven approach in which we train a tracking policy to decide when and how to update an appearance model. To take this direct approach to “learning when to learn”, we exploit large-scale Internet data through reinforcement learning. We interpret the resulting policy and conclude with extensions for tracking multiple objects. By solving these tracking challenges, we advance applications in augmented reality, vehicle automation, healthcare, and security.
Eco-control change and environmental performance: a longitudinal perspective

Purpose The aim of this longitudinal study is to quantitatively examine the impact of changes in the mix of eco-controls. More specifically, the purpose of this study is twofold. First, it investigates the nature of change occurring in eco-controls by analyzing three attributes of change, namely, direction of change, scope of change and scale of change. Second, this study investigates the impact of changes in eco-controls by examining to what extent the three attributes of change specifically explain environmental performance. Design/methodology/approach Longitudinal survey approach is used to collect data from a sample of manufacturing firms at two points in time. Findings The results suggest three main conclusions: changes leading to more (less) importance devoted to eco-controls within the organization contribute positively (negatively) to environmental performance; concerted changes on all aspects of the mix of eco-controls contribute more to environmental performance than piecemeal changes on specific aspects of the mix; and the aspect which contributes to environmental performance is not the scale of that change but the mere presence of a credible signal which reflects the seriousness of the intentions. Originality/value This paper contributes to management accounting change literature by breaking down the nature of change of management control practices in attributes (direction, scope and scale) and examining their specific impact on performance.
Role-aware Conformity Influence Analysis in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems play an important role in providing personalized information to users and helping address the information overload problem. Recent research has considered social theories and studied the importance of social influence in social recommendation systems. However, many publications ignored the users' roles information or just considered some single roles. In fact, users often have many different roles. Besides, different types of users (users with different roles) might have different conformity tendency. Thus, this inspires us to study how conformity tendency changes with users' roles in recommender systems. We firstly formalize conformity influence by defining a utility function and then propose a probabilistic graphical model integrating both users' roles and conformity tendency, named as Role Conformity Recommender Systems (RCRS). We evaluate the proposed model on several real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Presence of online reader comments lowers news site credibility

The authors raise questions about the effects of reader comments on online news credibility, and among their findings is that the same feature—readers’ comments—that makes online news more appealing also decreases the credibility of the news outlet. The commenting system and the way comments are moderated do not appear to affect a news outlet’s credibility.
Zinc Salts Inactivate Clinical Isolates of Herpes Simplex Virus In Vitro

ABSTRACT Using a standard plaque assay and clinical isolates of herpes simplex virus (HSV), we have tested the ability of zinc salts to inactivate HSV. Virus was treated by incubation at 37°C with zinc salts in morpholinepropanesulfonic acid-buffered culture medium and was then diluted and plated onto CV-1 cells for detection and quantitation of remaining infectious virus. Of 10 randomly chosen clinical isolates (five HSV type 1 [HSV-1] isolates and five HSV-2 isolates), seven were inactivated >98% by treatment in vitro with 50 mM zinc gluconate for 2 h and nine were inactivated >97% by treatment with zinc lactate. The effect was concentration dependent. With an HSV-1 isolate, 50 mM zinc gluconate or zinc lactate caused 100% inactivation, 15 mM caused 98 to 99% inactivation, and 5 mM caused 63 to 86% inactivation. With an HSV-2 isolate, 50 and 15 mM zinc gluconate caused 30% inactivation and 5 and 1 mM caused less than 9% inactivation, whereas 50 and 15 mM zinc lactate caused greater than 92% inactivation and 5 and 1 mM caused 37 and 26% inactivation, respectively. The ability of the zinc salts to inactivate HSV was not related to pH in the pH range of 6.1 to 7.6 since inactivation by zinc gluconate or zinc lactate in that pH range was 99.7 to 100% with a 2-h treatment with 50 mM zinc salt. Short (5-min) treatments of selected isolates with zinc gluconate, zinc lactate, zinc acetate, or zinc sulfate yielded inactivation rates of 0 to 55%.
Association of plasma miR-223 and platelet reactivity in patients with coronary artery disease on dual antiplatelet therapy: A preliminary report

Abstract Decreased plasma levels of microRNA-223 (miR-223), predominantly of platelet origin, were proposed as a surrogate marker of efficacy of antiplatelet therapy. However, higher on-treatment platelet reactivity was associated with lower plasma miR-223 in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) on dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) including clopidogrel and aspirin. Our aim was to compare plasma miR-223 and platelet reactivity in CAD patients on DAPT with newer P2Y12 antagonists vs. clopidogrel. We studied 21 men with CAD admitted to our centre owing to a non-ST-elevation acute coronary syndrome, and with an uncomplicated hospital course. From the day of admission, the patients were receiving either clopidogrel (n = 11) or prasugrel/ticagrelor (n = 10) in addition to aspirin. Before discharge, miR-223 expression in plasma was estimated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction using the comparative Ct method relative to miR-16 as an endogenous control. Multiple electrode aggregometry was used to assess platelet aggregation in response to adenosine diphosphate (ADP). ADP-induced platelet reactivity was decreased in the patients treated with prasugrel or ticagrelor compared with those on clopidogrel (mean ± SD: 139 ± 71 vs. 313 ± 162 arbitrary units [AU]*min, p = 0.006), due to a more potent antiplatelet activity of the novel P2Y12 antagonists. Consequently, six out of seven patients in the lower tertile of the ADP-induced platelet aggregation were treated with the newer P2Y12 blockers, whereas six out of seven patients in the upper tertile were on clopidogrel. Plasma miR-223 was elevated with decreasing platelet reactivity (Spearman’s rho = –0.52; p = 0.015 for trend), being significantly higher in the lower tertile of the ADP-induced platelet aggregation (median [range]: 1.06 [0.25–2.31]) vs. the upper tertile (0.20 [0.13–2.30]) (p = 0.04). In conclusion, our preliminary results argue against the notion of low plasma miR-223 as a marker of platelet responsiveness to DAPT. On the contrary, more potent platelet inhibition associated mainly with newer P2Y12 antagonists appears to coincide with higher miR-223 relative to the subjects with attenuated responsiveness to DAPT.
Ag-NOR technique in fine needle aspiration cytology of salivary gland masses.

Because of their complexity, salivary gland lesions are often difficult to identify correctly with fine needle aspiration cytology. To see whether the Ag-NOR staining technique for nucleolar organizer regions would be useful in this respect, we studied a series of smears from benign and malignant salivary gland lesions. The smears, previously treated with Papanicolaou and May-Grünwald-Giemsa stain, were destained and restained with Ag-NOR silver. The correlation between the cytologic-histologic diagnosis and the number of Ag-NORs in benign (sialadenitis, pleomorphic adenoma, oncocytoma and Warthin's tumor) and malignant lesions (adenoid cystic carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, carcinoma ex pleomorphic adenoma and squamous carcinoma) was statistically significant (P = less than .05). The Ag-NOR technique appears useful in the diagnosis of salivary gland lesions. One great advantage is that previously stained slides can be reused for silver staining, thus providing an excellent guide to the diagnosis, especially in doubtful cases and when corresponding histologic specimens or extra unstained slides are unavailable.
Skeletal Effects of Raloxifene After 8 Years: Results from the Continuing Outcomes Relevant to Evista (CORE) Study

In the CORE breast cancer trial of 4011 women continuing from MORE, the incidence of nonvertebral fractures at 8 years was similar between placebo and raloxifene 60 mg/day. CORE had limitations for assessing fracture risk. In a subset of 386 women, 7 years of raloxifene treatment significantly increased lumbar spine and femoral neck BMD compared from the baseline of MORE.
On Favorable Propagation in Massive MIMO Systems and Different Antenna Configurations

Asymptotic orthogonality of channel vectors, also called favorable propagation (FP), plays a key role in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, allowing linear processing to achieve optimality and maximize the information rate. Much research on the FP condition emerges under different assumptions, most of which has been proved to satisfy the FP condition for some massive MIMO implementations. A generic channel model without mutual coupling is proposed to study more general implementations than previously investigated. Two theorems establish: 1) conditions on the steering matrix alone that are sufficient to guarantee the FP condition holds and 2) that a simple condition on the steering matrix alone is sufficient to guarantee FP for all practical massive MIMO implementations. Then the uniform linear array, uniform planar array (UPA), and uniform circular array (UCA) antenna configurations are studied. Theoretical analyses indicate how close and how fast the inner product of different steering vectors converges to zero for a finite number of base station (BS) antennas, and prove that the FP condition is satisfied for the antenna configuration considered for an unlimited number of BS antennas only if the antenna spacing is not proportional to the reciprocal of the number of antennas. The analysis shows that the UCA has the shortest distance from the FP condition among the three antenna structures, while the UPA is especially suitable for massive MIMO systems for 5G owing to its good FP performance and compact physical size. Simulation results validate the theory.
Inter - Relatedness of Stock Markets: A Spectral Investgation of USA, Japanese, and Indian Markets - A Note

As a recurrent theme in the investigation of the existence of internationl portfolio diversification. (Grubel, 1968), several studies have sought to examine the extent of the inter-temporal relationship amongst national stock price indices in an effort to discover the degree to which national capital markets are integrated (Granger and Morgenstern, 1910, Hilliard, 1979, Agmon 1974).
Monosomy of chromosome 3 and an inflammatory phenotype occur together in uveal melanoma.

PURPOSE In uveal melanoma, different predictors of poor prognosis have been identified, including monosomy of chromosome 3, HLA expression, and the presence of infiltrating leukocytes and macrophages. Each of these parameters can be used to differentiate prognostically the favorable tumors from the unfavorable ones, and thus the hypothesis for the present study was that they are related, and that monosomy of chromosome 3 occurs in the same tumors as the unfavorable inflammatory phenotype. METHODS Tumor tissue was obtained from 50 cases of uveal melanoma treated between 1999 and 2004. After enucleation, nuclei were isolated from paraffin-embedded tissue for fluorescence in situ hybridization, to determine the chromosome 3 copy number. Each tumor-containing globe was further processed for conventional histopathologic examination and for immunohistochemical analysis with HLA class I and II-specific antibodies and with macrophage marker CD68. RESULTS Of 50 uveal melanomas, 62% (31/50) were categorized as having monosomy of chromosome 3. Monosomy 3 was associated with the presence of epithelioid cells, an increased density of tumor-infiltrating macrophages, and a higher HLA class I and II expression. Survival analyses showed a correlation between monosomy 3 and decreased survival and identified monosomy 3, ciliary body involvement, and largest basal tumor diameter as the best prognostic markers. CONCLUSIONS Monosomy 3 in uveal melanoma is associated with the presence of an inflammatory phenotype, consisting of a high HLA class I and II expression as well as an increased number of tumor-infiltrating macrophages. In a multivariate Cox regression analysis, the presence of monosomy 3 was one of the best prognostic markers of metastatic disease and survival, although the follow-up time was short.
Expanding the boundary of brand extensions through brand relationship quality

Research on brand extensions identifies the concept of perceived fit as the prime determinant of success. Yet, it is not difficult to find examples of brands that have been extended successfully into “perceptually distant” domains. In an attempt to resolve this discrepancy between research insights and practical experiences, the study investigates the role of Brand Relationship Quality (BRQ) as a critical factor determining consumer responses to brand extensions. The proposed model is tested separately in the context of three different fit scenarios (high, moderate, and low) with data from 502 consumers. The results indicate that BRQ and perceived fit exert independent effects on consumer responses and complement each other as they jointly influence evaluations of brand extensions. The study therefore extends existing theory by providing evidence that the brand extension phenomenon cannot be explained justly without including constructs that portray personal relationships consumers develop with brands and provides insights for marketers and researchers as to how such relationships can be integrated in formulations of successful brand extension strategies.
The two-way mixed model: a long and winding controversy.

BACKGROUND With the 2-way mixed model, one a fixed factor and the other random, the procedure followed to test statistical significance of the random factor has been the focus of a heated controversy in theoretical and applied statistics, and the debating continues even now. One of the main consequences of this controversy is that the position defended in the classical ANOVA texts on the hypothesis of the significance of the random effect is not the same as that defended in almost all of the professional statistical software programs. METHOD In this paper, we deal with a detailed analysis about the controversy of mixed model and the decision about one of two basic options, the non restrictive and the restrictive model. RESULTS Three key questions we consider to go beyond the controversy are: (1) the two classical models are equivalent, (2) the marginality principle do not allow to test main effects in presence of interactive significant effects and (3) the relevance of linear mixed approach to analyze models with fixed and random effects. CONCLUSIONS We propose the simple solution of using the mixed linear approach with REML estimation instead of the classical linear approach, which is really unapplicable in this context.