Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perioperative interventions and postoperative outcomes

Background: Postoperative complications are frequent causes of postoperative mortality. Such complications may also lead to a prolonged period with decreased functional and cognitive status. Perioperative care is a factor in postoperative morbidity and mortality. Until now no common international definitions and classifications of postoperative complications have been established. The group of surgical patients with the highest risk of postoperative complications accounts for perhaps 80% of intra-hospital deaths. With the high volume of surgery performed worldwide, even a slight reduction in complications would result in a lower number of preventable deaths. There are several theories on how to decrease postoperative complications and improve patient safety and patient care. Two factors, checklists and perioperative fluid balance, are investigated in this thesis. The overall aim of this thesis is twofold: 1. To study perioperative complications and outcome after major surgery Paper I aimed at creating standard definitions of outcome measures for use in pragmatic large perioperative clinical trials. Paper II aimed at providing data on perioperative mortality after non-cardiac surgery across Europe. 2. To contribute in finding ways to reduce complications after major surgery Paper III aimed at identifying the prevalence of surgical checklist use and possible relationship with mortality. Paper IV aimed at evaluating the effect of perioperative goal directed fluid therapy guided by ScvO2 in open colorectal surgery. Result: Paper I was a literature review to assess the current state of knowledge about surgical outcome definitions. A standardized list was created for use in perioperative research and clinical audition. The outcome measures described are organized into four different categories: Individual adverse events, Composite outcomes, Grading of complications and Health related quality of life.
Could insecticide‐treated cattle reduce Afrotropical malaria transmission? Effects of deltamethrin‐treated Zebu on Anopheles arabiensis behaviour and survival in Ethiopia

Abstract. Anopheles arabiensis Patton (Diptera: Culicidae) is the most widespread vector of malaria in the Afrotropical Region. Because An. arabiensis feeds readily on cattle as well as humans, the insecticide‐treatment of cattle – as employed to control tsetse (Diptera: Glossinidae) and ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) – might simultaneously affect the malaria vectorial capacity of this mosquito. Therefore, we conducted field experiments in southern Ethiopia to establish whether Zebu cattle (Bos indicus L.) treated with a pour‐on pyrethroid formulation of 1% deltamethrin, widely used to control ticks and tsetse, would be effective against An. arabiensis or cause the female mosquitoes to feed more frequently on humans, due to behavioural avoidance of insecticide‐treated cattle. Contact bioassays (3 min exposure) showed that the insecticide remained effective for about 1 month (kill rate > 50%) against mosquitoes feeding on the flanks of treated cattle. A novel behavioural assay demonstrated that An. arabiensis readily fed on insecticide‐treated cattle and were not deflected to human hosts in the presence of treated cattle. DNA‐fingerprinting of bloodmeals revealed that An. arabiensis naturally feeds most frequently on older animals, consistent with the established practice of applying insecticide only to older cattle, while allowing younger untreated animals to gain immunity against infections transmitted by ticks. These encouraging results were tempered by finding that > 90% of An. arabiensis, An. pharoensis and An. tenebrosus females feed on the legs of cattle, farthest from the site of pour‐on application along the animal's back and where the treatment may be least residual due to weathering. Observations of mosquitoes feeding naturally on insecticide‐treated cattle showed that the majority of wild female anophelines alighted on the host animal for less than 1 min to feed, with significantly shorter mean duration of feeding bouts on insecticide‐treated animals, and the effective life of the insecticide was only 1 week. Thus the monthly application of deltamethrin to cattle, typically used to control tsetse and ticks, is unlikely to be effective against An. arabiensis populations or their vectorial capacity. Even so, it seems likely that far greater impact on anopheline mosquitoes could be achieved by applying insecticide selectively to the legs of cattle.
Verification of the CoreNet Fabric with SystemVerilog

The Freescale QorIQ™ communication platforms are system-on-chip (SoC) processors containing single, dual and many cores and enable the next era of networking by offering advanced levels of performance, power-efficiency and programmability. The QorIQ P4080 communications processor, the signature member of the product line, integrates eight enhanced Freescale Power Architecture® processors, a tri-level cache hierarchy, and innovative high-speed CoreNet™ fabric and data path acceleration. The CoreNet fabric is an interconnect architecture suitable for scalable on-chip network to connect multiple Power Architecture processing cores with caches, stand-alone caches and memory subsystems. The CoreNet fabric was designed to provide a coherent multicore migration solution enabling the move to multicore. This paper focuses on the verification challenges and solutions associated with verifying the CoreNet platform using SystemVerilog (SV).
Serum High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Levels and Mortality in Frail, Community-Living Elderly

Background: High-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol has been hypothesized to be a reliable marker of frailty and poor prognosis among the oldest elderly. Objective: In the present study, we evaluate the impact of HDL cholesterol on the risk of all-cause mortality in a large population of frail octogenarians and nonagenarians living in a community. Methods: We analyzed data from the Aging and Longevity Study in the Sirente geographic area (ilSIRENTE Study), a prospective cohort study that collected data on all subjects aged 80 year and older living in a mountain community (n = 359). The main outcome measure was the relative hazard ratio of death after 2 years of follow-up for different levels of HDL cholesterol. Results: A total of 86 deaths (30 men and 56 women) occurred during 2 years of follow-up. Among men the mean HDL cholesterol level was 36.7 ± 7.6 mg/dl among those who died as compared with 43.4 ± 10.3 mg/dl among survivors (p = 0.001). Similarly, among women, the mean HDL cholesterol level was 42.2 ± 11.5 mg/dl among those who died as compared with 49.3 ± 14.9 mg/dl among survivors (p = 0.001). Adjusting for potential confounders, including markers of frailty, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides, somewhat reduced the strength of the association between HDL cholesterol levels and mortality, but it remained statistically significant. Conclusions: Our results obtained from a representative sample of very old and frail elderly subjects expand the knowledge that high levels of HDL cholesterol are associated with better survival. These findings support the hypothesis of a strong implication of the lipoprotein metabolism in the process of living an extremely long life.
Black Raspberries Enhance Natural Killer Cell Infiltration into the Colon and Suppress the Progression of Colorectal Cancer

Natural killer (NK) cells are an essential component of innate immunity against cancer development. Many studies have been conducted to evaluate immune-modulating effects using dietary compounds. Our laboratory has been investigating the chemopreventive potential of black raspberries (BRBs) and previously demonstrated their beneficial modulation of genetic and epigenetic biomarkers in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). The current study investigated their potential on modulating NK cells. To avoid the excessive inflammation caused by the dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) treatment that leads to colitis, we treated the mice with overnight DSS so that it would slightly irritate the colon but still promote colon carcinogenesis with 100% incidence in both the ApcMin/+ mice and azoxymethane (AOM)-treated mice. A significant decrease of tissue-infiltrating NK cells along the progression of microadenoma-to-adenoma and adenoma-to-adenocarcinoma was observed in the ApcMin/+/DSS and AOM/DSS mice, respectively. Depletion of NK cells significantly promoted the development of CRC, suggesting a critical role of NK cells in combating CRC progression. BRBs significantly suppressed the CRC progression and increased the number of tissue-infiltrating NK cells in both mouse models. Moreover, we further determined BRBs’ effects on NK cells in the human biopsy specimens collected from our previously completed clinical trial, in which CRC patients consumed BRBs for an average of 4 weeks during a presurgical window. We observed an increased number and an enhanced cytotoxicity of NK cells by BRB intervention. The current study provides evidence that BRBs have the potential to enhance the tumor immunesurveillance of NK cells that can be beneficial in the setting of CRC prevention and treatment.
La comunicación de la nutrición en España

La presente tesis doctoral busca establecer una conexion entre dos realidades aparentemente alejadas entre si, como son la Nutricion y la Comunicacion. Ambas disciplinas pertenecen a unos ambitos de estudio muy alejados entre si, como son las ciencias de la alimentacion y la salud y las ciencias sociales. En las ultimas decadas, se ha observado como los medios de comunicacion ejercen una creciente influencia en la configuracion de los habitos alimentarios de las personas a traves de la transmision de la informacion nutricional. Los medios de comunicacion despliegan todas las herramientas que tienen a su alcance para ejercer el periodismo especializado en nutricion, como subespecialidad del periodismo especializado en salud. Estos actores de la comunicacion de la nutricion hacen un uso eficaz de los diferentes generos periodisticos, como son la noticia, el reportaje, el editorial, el articulo de opinion o la cronica, para trasmitir a la poblacion la informacion nutricional de una manera atractiva y eficaz.
Annotating and visualizing location data in geospatial web applications

This paper presents the IDIOM Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a prototypical implementation of an environmental portal that emphasizes the importance of location data for advanced Web applications. The introductory section outlines the process of retrofitting existing knowledge repositories with geographical context information, a process also referred to as geotagging. The paper then describes the portal's functionality, which aggregates, annotates and visualizes environmental articles from 150 Anglo-American news media sites. From 300,000 news media articles gathered in weekly intervals, the system selects about 10,000 focusing on environmental issues. The crawled data is indexed and stored in a central repository. Geographic location represents a central aspect of the application, but not the only dimension used to organize and filter content. Applying the concepts of location and topography to semantic similarity, the paper concludes with discussing information landscapes as alternative interface metaphor for accessing large Web repositories.
Biomechanical properties of soft tissue measurement using optical coherence elastography

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) provides images at near histological resolution, which allows for the identification of micron sized morphological tissue structures. Optical coherence elastography (OCE) measures tissue displacement and utilizes the high resolution of OCT to generate high-resolution stiffness maps. In this work, we explored the potential of measuring shear wave propagation using OCE. A swept-source OCT system was used in this study. The laser had a center wavelength of 1310 nm and a bandwidth of ~110 nm. The lateral resolution was approximately 13 μm in the samples. Acoustic radiation force was applied to two different phantoms using a 20 MHz circular 8.5 mm diameter piezoelectric transducer element (PZT, f-number 2.35) transmitting sine-wave bursts of 400 μs. The first phantom consisted of a 355 μm glass sphere (dark) embedded in gelatin that was used to characterize the ultrasound pushing beam. The second consisted of gelatin mixed with titanium dioxide, which provided uniform acoustic and optical scattering. The OCT signal from this second set of phantoms was used for the measurement of the shear wave speed and viscosity. For both sets of experiments phase analysis was applied to B-mode and M-mode OCT images which were obtained while the ultrasound transducer was generating the "push" in the phantom. The experiments are the first step towards imaging shear wave propagation in tissue and characterization of tissue mechanical properties using OCE, with the eventual goal of developing OCE as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of pathological lesions with different mechanical tissue property.
Discharge characteristics of composite insulation system with floating electrode and solid insulator in vacuum

For the development of vacuum interrupters for their higher voltage application in power transmission systems, it is necessary to clarify the discharge characteristics of composite insulation systems with a shield (floating electrode) and a solid insulator in vacuum. In this paper, we focus on the composite discharge patterns via the shield and the solid insulator. For cathode-shield-insulator-anode (c-s-i-a) and cathode-insulator-shield-anode (c-i-s-a) electrode configurations, the discharge can be classified into two independent processes: breakdown in vacuum gap and surface flashover on the solid insulator. Furthermore, we have found that the breakdown development time increases with the increase in the gap length and the surface flashover development time depends on the voltage peak after flashover inception, which are consistent with discharge development characteristics for individual gap breakdown and surface flashover, respectively. These results are significant to understanding and discriminating the composite discharge patterns and discharge path in vacuum interrupters.
Identification of the New Isoforms of Mouse Myelin Basic Protein: The Existence of Exon 5a

Abstract: Myelin basic protein (MBP) is a major constituent in the myelin of the CNS. In mice, five forms of MBPs (14 kDa, two types of 17 kDa, 18.5 kDa, and 21.5 kDa) encoded by separate mRNAs have been identified based on cDNA cloning studies. These mRNAs are considered to be produced by alternative splicing from a single gene composed of seven exons. Here we report the existence of two novel MBP mRNAs encoding 19.7‐kDa and 21‐kDa MBPs identified by cDNA cloning using the polymerase chain reaction. Both of these MBPs contain a sequence of a previously unidentified exon of 66 nucleotides, which was mapped to be just 5’of exon 5 in the MBP gene. MBP mRNAs containing this novel exon (exon 5a) belong to a minor population in the whole brain and PNS and are somewhat enriched in the spinal cord. Exon 5a encodes a very hydrophobic segment rich in valine residues, which presumably forms a β‐pleated sheet.
Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology Error-Rate and Decision-Theoretic Methods of Multiple Testing : Which Genes Have High Objective Probabilities of Differential Expression ?

Given a multiple testing situation, the null hypotheses that appear to have sufficiently low probabilities of truth may be rejected using a simple, nonparametric method based on decision theory. This applies not only to posterior levels of belief, but also to conditional probabilities in the sense of relative frequencies, as seen from their equality to local false discovery rates (dFDRs). This approach neither requires the estimation of probability densities, nor of their ratios. Decision theory can also inform the selection of false discovery rate weights. An application to gene expression microarrays is presented with a discussion of the applicability of the assumption of "clumpy dependence. "
Classifying the Severity of COPD: Are We There Yet? Editorial for “Coton, S. et al. Severity of Airflow Obstruction in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD): Proposal for a New Classification”

The forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) is the bedrock of objective measures of lung function. Spirometry, which for this discussion I will limit to measurement of FEV1, Forced Vital Capacity (FVC) and the ratio of FEV1/FVC, is, or should be, widely used for the objective assessment of wide range of disorders (1) and in clinic it can be used as general assessment of overall health or even screening (2, 3). The indices obtained from the spirogram, especially the FEV1, have long been shown to be predictive or diagnostic of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (4), asthma, cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and even heart disease (5). FEV1 is predictive and prognostic of the decline in lung function in patients with COPD (6), risk of lung cancer in smokers with COPD (7) and even more remarkably, premature death (8–11). Indeed, one could easily come to the not unreasonable conclusion that the FEV1 is perhaps the most useful measurement made in the clinic. So why does the FEV1, and by extension, FVC and FEV1/FVC perform so well? It may be because the FEV1 is basically similar to well-performing composite questionnaires like the Asthma Control Test or St. George Respiratory questionnaire. These questionnaires are composed of multiple questions that seek to capture various aspects or domains of the impact of disease on the patient. An ideal questionnaire captures all the varied aspects of the disease process in a way that the person affected can reliably assess and report a response. Spirometry, while developed in the 1800s, was advanced by consideration of the flow-volume relationship in 1958 (12) when Hyatt and Fry were the first to recognize that the shape of the curve held important information, especially when they considered flow-volume loops from patients with COPD. Since then, we have come to a better understanding of the flow and volume relationship, which informs our interpretation about decreases in FEV1. Like the composite questionnaire, FEV1 and FVC are effected by an array of factors; if we just consider maximal expiration, it is effected by respiratory muscle strength, the elastance of the chest wall, central airway caliber at high flow rates and smaller airway caliber at lower flow rates, elastic recoil and forced vital capacity. As a result, one cannot make definitive mechanistic conclusions from an isolated measure of FEV1, FVC, or even FEV1/FVC; yet the FEV1 or FVC detects lung dysfunction
Utilizing Online Social Network and Location-Based Data to Recommend Items in an Online Marketplace

Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for recommendations. While most of the research focused on enhancing a traditional source of data (e.g., ratings, implicit feedback, or tags) with some type o f social information, little is known about how different sources of social data can be combined with other types of information relevant for recommendation. To contribute to this sparse field of resear ch, in this paper we exploit users’ interactions along three dimen sions of relevance (social, transactional, and location) to assess their performance in a barely studied domain: recommending items to people in an online marketplace environment. To that and we defined s ets of user similarity measures for each dimension of relevance and studied them isolated and in combination via hybrid recommender approaches, to assess which one provides the best recommendation performance. Interestingly, in our experiments conducted on a rich dataset collected from SecondLife, a popular online virtual world, we found that recommenders relying on similarity measures obtained from the social network yielded better results than those inferred directly from the marketplace data.
Longitudinal investigation of methamphetamine use among gay and bisexual men in New York City: Findings from project BUMPS

In recent years, methamphetamine has become a drug more commonly used among gay and bisexual men in New York City. Part of a longitudinal investigation of drug abuse in this population involved assessing the patterns and context of methamphetamine use during the course of 1 year. Findings indicate that among self-identified club-drug-using men, methamphetamine is widely used by men across age groups, educational level, racelethnicity, and HIV status. Participants reported use of methamphetamine in combination with numerous other illicit and prescribed substances and in a variety of contexts outside the “club scene. ” Reasons for and contexts of use are related to HIV status, with HIV-positive men indicating a greater likelihood of use to avoid conflict, unpleasant emotions, and social pressures, and reporting higher levels of use in enviroments such as bathhouses and “sex parties. ” These patterns and relationships are consistent across time and suggest a complex interaction between person level factors, environmental factors, and HIV. Findings indicate that treatment of methamphetamine addiction among gay and bisexual men must take into account the complex interrelationships between mental health, drug use, sexual risk taking, and HIV.
The Photorespiratory Arabidopsis shm 1 Mutant Is Deficient in SHM 1 1 [ W ] [ OA ]

Mitochondrial serine hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT), combined with glycine decarboxylase, catalyzes an essential sequence of the photorespiratory C2 cycle, namely, the conversion of two molecules of glycine into one molecule each of CO2, NH4 , and serine. The Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) mutant shm (now designated shm1-1) is defective in mitochondrial SHMT activity and displays a lethal photorespiratory phenotype when grown at ambient CO2, but is virtually unaffected at elevated CO2. The Arabidopsis genome harbors seven putative SHM genes, two of which (SHM1 and SHM2) feature predicted mitochondrial targeting signals. We have mapped shm1-1 to the position of the SHM1 gene (At4g37930). The mutation is due to a G / A transition at the 5# splice site of intron 6 of SHM1, causing aberrant splicing and a premature termination of translation. A T-DNA insertion allele of SHM1, shm1-2, and the F1 progeny of a genetic cross between shm1-1 and shm1-2 displayed the same conditional lethal phenotype as shm1-1. Expression of wild-type SHM1 under the control of either the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S or the SHM1 promoter in shm1-1 abrogated the photorespiratory phenotype of the shm mutant, whereas overexpression of SHM2 or expression of SHM1 under the control of the SHM2 promoter did not rescue the mutant phenotype. Promoter-b-glucuronidase analyses revealed that SHM1 is predominantly expressed in leaves, whereas SHM2 is mainly transcribed in the shoot apical meristem and roots. Our findings establish SHM1 as the defective gene in the Arabidopsis shm1-1 mutant.