Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Daily and seasonal variations in plasma LH and testosterone concentrations in the adult male hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus).

A double-antibody heterologous radioimmunoassay (RIA) was developed to measure plasma LH values in hedgehogs. This RIA system used anti-rat LH serum and rabbit LH (AFP-559B) for radioiodination and as standard. The accuracy of the method was evaluated and indicated the ability to detect various relative concentrations of LH in plasma. The minimum detectable dose was 0.2 ng/ml. The intra- and inter-assay coefficients of variation were 4.2 and 7.9% respectively. Biological tests, e.g. effect of castration, effect of castration + testosterone implant and GnRH administration, confirmed that this method was suitable to determine subsequent changes in pituitary gonadotrophic activity in the hedgehog. LH concentrations were determined in blood samples obtained during 1 year: (a) each month, at 4-h intervals during 24 h, from different groups of unanaesthetized animals fitted with a catheter and (b) twice a month, under a light anaesthesia, from the same group of 6 animals. During the year: (1) the range of LH change was narrow (minimum values congruent to 0.25 ng/ml and maximum values congruent to 2.00 ng/ml); (2) the 24-h LH patterns did not exhibit any daily rhythm; (3) a clear annual rhythm was observed with the highest values from February to April and the lowest values in October and November. LH decreased rapidly at the end of summer and increased progressively from December to February, during hibernation. In these experiments, it was not possible to determine the characteristics of LH release patterns in the hedgehog but individual profiles indicated clearly the episodic secretion of LH, particularly during the highest pituitary activity period. During the year, a close relationship between the seasonal cycles of plasma LH and testosterone was observed.
Rapid Induction of Messenger RNA for Nitric Oxide Synthase II in Rat Neutrophils In Vivo by Endotoxin and its Suppression by Prednisolone

Abstract Nitric oxide is believed to participate in nonspecific cellular immunity. Gram negative bacterial endotoxins increase the production of reactive nitrogen intermediates (RNI) in phagocytic cells by inducing the enzyme nitric oxide synthase II (NOSII). Anti-inflammatory glucocorticoids attenuate endotoxin-induced increases in RNI. This study evaluated the effect of in vivo administration of prednisolone on Escherichia coli lipopolysaccharide endotoxin (LPS)-induced increases in plasma RNI and neutrophil mRNA for NOS II and production of RNI in the rat. We show that LPS rapidly induces mRNA for NOS II and production of RNI (NO2- and NO3- anion) in rat neutrophils within 2 hr after in vivo administration of a sublethal dose of 0.5 mg/kg, iv. A pharmacologic dose of prednisolone (50 μg/kg, im) given 15 min before LPS-attenuated production of NO2- and NO3- by neutrophils and suppressed LPS-stimulated mRNA for NOS II. 3-Amino, 1,2,4-triazine inhibited NO2- and NO3- production without affecting gene expression for NOS II. These data demonstrate that LPS rapidly induces functional gene expression for NOS II and prednisolone prevents induction of NOS II activity by inhibiting transcription of its mRNA.
Miniaturized Circularly Polarized Loop Antenna for Biomedical Applications

A novel circularly polarized antenna is proposed at 2.42-2.48 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical band for implantable applications. By properly positioning the feed and shorts, either right-hand circular polarization property or lefthand circular polarization property can be realized. Slow wave concept is utilized by loading patches to the radiated loop antenna to achieve miniaturization. Thus, a compact size of 13 mm 13 mm 1.27 mm is obtained. Compared to the unloaded loop antenna of the same size, the centre frequency shifts from 1.93 GHz to 882.5 MHz, which suggests a miniaturization of 54.4%. The simulated results show that a wide bandwidth of 18.2% can be realized with |S11| below -10dB and axial ratio below 3 dB. The simulated realized gain is -32 dBi at 2.45 GHz. The measurement is carried out in both skin-mimicking gel and pork, and a bandwidth of 27.8% and 29.4% can be achieved with |S11| below dB, respectively. The measurement of |S21|reveals that circular polarization can be obtained for the proposed configuration.
Arc-Hybrid Non-Projective Dependency Parsing with a Static-Dynamic Oracle

In this paper, we extend the arc-hybrid system for transition-based parsing with a swap transition that enables reordering of the words and construction of non-projective trees. Although this extension breaks the arc-decomposability of the transition system, we show how the existing dynamic oracle for this system can be modified and combined with a static oracle only for the swap transition. Experiments on 5 languages show that the new system gives competitive accuracy and is significantly better than a system trained with a purely static oracle.
Diabetic neuropathy – a continuing enigma

In this article we will review the clinical signs and symptoms of diabetic somatic polyneuropathy (DPN), its prevalence and clinical management. Staging and classification of DPN will be exemplified by various staging paradigms of varied sophistication. The results of therapeutic clinical trials will be summarized. The pathogenesis of diabetic neuropathy reviews an extremely complex issue that is still not fully understood. Various recent advances in the understanding of the disease will be discussed, particularly with respect to the differences between neuropathy in the two major types of diabetes. The neuropathology and natural history of diabetic neuropathy will be discussed pointing out the heterogeneities of the disease. Finally, the various prospective therapeutic avenues will be dealt with and discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Know Thyself: A Theory of the Self for Personal Informatics

Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.
Characterization of the Multidrug-Resistant Acinetobacter species Causing a Nosocomial Outbreak at Intensive Care Units in a Korean Teaching Hospital: Suggesting the Correlations with the Clinical and Environmental Samples, Including Respiratory Tract-related Instruments

Background: Acinetobacter spp. is an important nosocomial pathogen for which increasing resistance to multiple antimicrobial agents has been observed. Prevalence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Acinetobacter spp. in the intensive care unit (ICU) at a teaching hospital in Korea started to increase in 2008. The aim of this study was to determine the source of pathogen spread and to characterize the emerging strains at an early stage of outbreak. Methods: Samples from respiratory instruments and fomites in the ICUs, as well as from the healthcare workers, were cultured to identify the sources of MDR Acinetobacter spp. Antimicrobial susceptibility was determined by the CLSI disk diffusion method. Pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) was performed for clinical and environmental isolates in order to determine clonality. Carbapenemase genes were detected by multiplex PCR. Infection control measures including peer-monitoring of hand washing, environmental cleaning and standard precautions were enforced. Results: Among the samples from the ICU tools (105) and healthcare worker’s hands (44), 31 (30%) and 2 (5%) respective samples yielded MDR Acinetobacter spp. Among the environmental samples, 90% were from respiratory-related equipment. The majority of clinical and environmental MDR Acinetobacter spp. (44/55) belonged to the pulsotype A. baumannii and carried both blaOXA-51-like and blaOXA-23-like genes. Even though infection-control measures were enforced, prevalence of MDR Acinetobacter spp. continues to increase. Conclusion: An outbreak of MDR Acinetobacter spp. in a Korean hospital was caused by A. baumannii carrying the blaOXA-23-gene and was correlated with contaminated respiratory-related instruments in the ICUs. More intensive measures for nosocomial infection control are needed for successful prevention of Acinetobacter spread in hospitals. (Ann Clin Microbiol 2014;17:29-34)
Establishing a global learning community for incident-reporting systems

Background Incident-reporting systems (IRS) collect snapshots of hazards, mistakes and system failures occurring in healthcare. These data repositories are a cornerstone of patient safety improvement. Compared with systems in other high-risk industries, healthcare IRS are fragmented and isolated, and have not established best practices for implementation and utilisation. Discussion Patient safety experts from eight countries convened in 2008 to establish a global community to advance the science of learning from mistakes. This convenience sample of experts all had experience managing large incident-reporting systems. This article offers guidance through a presentation of expert discussions about methods to identify, analyse and prioritise incidents, mitigate hazards and evaluate risk reduction.
Extracting points features from laser rangefinder data based on hough transform

This paper describes a novel feature extraction method for laser rangefinder data. Extracted features correspond to real and virtual corners of the scanned scene. The method is based on the Hough Transform (HT) for line extraction, where the intersecting points of these lines are considered as features. This work highlights the use of the HT outside of image applications, and presents a new filtering algorithm that reduces false positive in line detection by the HT based method. The developed method was tested under various simulated benchmarks in order to compare the performance as a function of correctness, uncertainty, execution time and other parameters. Also, a real data benchmark was included in the tests. Finally, a simulation of EKF-SLAM was performed to demonstrate the functionality of the developed method in more complex tasks.
A Topology-based Design Methodology for Networks-on-Chip Applications

The topological structure of interconnection networks plays an important role in the design of Networks-on-Chip based Systems. With an enormous number of regular and irregular topologies, acquiring the optimum network topology for a specific application is one of the most complex design problems. In this paper, we propose a new design methodology to automatically acquire the most adapted topology for a given application. A Matlab-based tool called OptNoC is developed to generate the interconnection network using the proposed methodology. The granularity of the OptNoC library facilitates a tool to explore ten different topologies for each design. The current version of the tool mainly aims at minimizing the interconnection network power consumption by using an exhaustive search mapping technique. As a proof of concept, a case study is discussed to show how OptNoC can improve the interconnection network power consumption compared to other tools.
Online Multiclass Learning with "Bandit" Feedback under a Confidence-Weighted Approach

Data volume has been increasing explosively in recent years and learning methods are vitally important to extract key information in such mass data. Traditional offline learning requires multiple traversals to the dataset, thus frequently suffering from lack of computational resources. Online learning can benefit in shrinking total time consumed by training model and lowering computational capacity. However they often converge slowly due to memory loss. Considering partial feedback, we uniquely propose online Confidence- Weighted learning in Bandit setting (CWB) for lower cumulative error and higher convergence rate. Specifically, historical information is preserved to adjust the weights of features for speeding up the convergence rate. Moreover, we novelly integrate the random sampling into the confidence-weighted learning, which can balance the exploitation and exploration in bandit setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
miR-221 and miR-222 expression increased the growth and tumorigenesis of oral carcinoma cells.

BACKGROUNDS MicroRNAs are small noncoding RNAs involved in posttranscriptional gene regulation, which play an important role in both physiological functioning and pathological progression. The miR-221/miR-222 microRNA family has been shown to be related to the neoplastic process in a number of different types of cancers; nevertheless, its function in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) remained uncertain. MATERIALS AND METHODS Paired OSCC and matched noncancerous oral mucosa were examined for miR-221/miR-222 expression using quantitative reverse-transcription PCR. Ectopic expression of miR-221/miR-222 by lentiviral infection was investigated to explore its in vitro and in vivo impact on the oncogenic phenotype and the expression of various target genes. The expression of Cip/Kip cell cycle regulator p27 in tumors was analyzed with immunohistochemistry. RESULTS The expression levels of miR-221 and miR-222 were highly correlated in OSCC. Increased miR-221/miR-222 expression was found in 40% of OSCC tissues. The ectopic expression of miR-221 or of miR-222 increased growth and anchorage-independent colony formation of OSCC cell lines. It also resulted in an increase in the tumorigenesis of an OSCC cell line in nude mice. Western blot analysis suggested that p27 and p57 might be the targets of miR-221/miR-222. p27 expression was reversely associated with the miR-221 and miR-222 expression level in OSCC tissues. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggested that increased miR-221/miR-222 expression was associated with the OSCC cell growth.
The effect of ondansetron on the efficacy of postoperative tramadol: a systematic review and meta‐analysis of a drug interaction

Several studies have investigated the presence of a drug interaction between tramadol and ondansetron that reduced the efficacy of tramadol postoperatively. Most of these studies were small and the results inconsistent, so we performed a systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomised controlled trials comparing the cumulative dose of tramadol administered by patient‐controlled analgesia within the first 24 h after surgery between subjects receiving tramadol alone and those who received tramadol with ondansetron. Six studies, with a total of 340 participants, met the selection criteria and were included in the meta‐analysis. There was an increased tramadol requirement in patients receiving ondansetron. The standardised mean difference in tramadol requirements, expressed in terms of standard deviations (95% CI), was 1.03 (0.54–1.53) (p < 0.001) at 4 h, 0.66 (0.06–1.25) (p = 0.03) at 8 h, 0.86 (0.41–1.31) (p < 0.001) at 12 h and 0.45 (0.01–0.90) (p = 0.046) at 24 h postoperatively, where the mean pooled standard deviations were 79.5, 157.7, 238.1 and 289.4 mg at 4, 8, 12 and 24 h, respectively. There was a significant linear time effect over the 24 h, indicating that the effect of ondansetron on tramadol consumption diminished with time. The results support the presence of a drug interaction between tramadol and ondansetron in the early postoperative period that potentially decreases the effectiveness of tramadol.
Assimilating evidence quality at a glance using graphic display: research synthesis on labor induction

Evidence profiled in the World Health Organization induction of labor guideline extended to 84 tables and 116 pages, which is hard to assimilate. Summarizing this evidence graphically can present information on key outcomes succinctly, illustrating where the gaps, strengths and weaknesses lie. For induction of labor, graphic representation clearly showed that evidence was lacking on maternal complications when comparing oxytocin with other agents, evidence was strong on birth within 24 h when comparing vaginal prostaglandins with placebo or no treatment, but again it was weak on uterine hyperstimulation when comparing oxytocin with vaginal prostaglandins. These graphs/plots allow readers to capture the essence of the information gathered at a glance. The use of graphical displays when interpreting and publishing data on several comparisons and outcomes is encouraged.
MR image reconstruction using cosupport constraints and group sparsity regularisation

It has always been challenging to reconstruct magnetic resonance (MR) images from a limited set of k -space data due to the ill-posed nature. An effective way to compensate for the data incompleteness is through the use of the sparsity-based regularisation. Recent work in image processing suggests that exploiting structured sparsity may lead to improved results. In this study, this idea is explored in combination with additional support prior of the MR images in the analysis context. Put differently, the authors propose a highly effective regulariser constraining group sparsity of the analysis coefficients within the pre-estimated cosupport. A two-stage iterative algorithm is developed and proceeds by alternatively calling its two key components: image reconstruction and cosupport detection. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated for individual and multiple T1/T2-weighted MR images. Simulation results show considerable improvement of their method compared with the methods using structured sparsity and support knowledge in the synthesis context and other related reconstruction methods.
The Psychologic and Psychosocial Impact of Otoplasty on Children and Adults

Background:In previous studies, our research group already evaluated the impact of aesthetic surgery on “quality of life” (QoL). This study evaluates QoL factors and perceptions of well-being after otoplasty as a single indication. Methods:Eighty-one patients who underwent otoplasty were divided into three age groups: Youth 1 (Y1) = 8–12 years (n = 17), Youth 1 (Y2) = 13–17 years (n = 13), and Adult ≥18 years (n = 51). For competitive analysis, 2 groups of tests were used: a standardized self-assessment test on life satisfaction (FLZM), the Glasgow Benefit Inventory (GBI), the standardized Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), the standardized Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI-R), the Patient Health Questionnaire 4 (PHQ-4), and a self-developed and indication-specific questionnaire for “Adult” group. The tools for the groups Y1 and Y2 were: PHQ-4, KINDLR, the Glasgow Child Benefit Inventory (GCBI), and a self-developed and indication-specific questionnaire either. Results:Our data bared numerous significant improvements on patients’ QoL. In the items “friends” (P = 0.036) and “freedom of anxiety” (P = 0.034) of the FLZM, important improvements were found. In section “satisfaction with appearance” (body image), the items “hair” (P = 0.003) and “ear” (P = 0.034) were to point out. The RSES (P = 0.001) and the FPI-R (P = 0.035) data indicated a well-balanced emotional stability. The results of the GBI/GCBI (P = 0.000/P = 0.000) showed a higher QoL of postsurgery patients. The data of the KINDLR questionnaire provided increasing values in the modules “friends” (P = 0.033) and “total score” (P = 0.040) for boys of the ages 8 to 12. For all age groups, there was a less affinity to depression (PHQ-4) and a high satisfaction with the aesthetical result (indication-specific questionnaire). Conclusions:This study showed higher QoL in all age groups by using standardized tools in comparison with the norm data. The knowledge of postoperative psychologic benefits, such as “satisfaction with appearance” (body image) and “different areas of life,” self-confidence, and self-esteem as well as lower level of depression support meaningfulness of otoplasty. Level of Evidence:Therapeutic, III: Retrospective cohort or comparative study.
Dynamic Profiling Methodology for Resource Optimization in Heterogeneous Computing System

Embedded Systems combine one or more processing cores to support dedicated logic running on an ASIC or FPGA and meets design goals with optimized resource utilization. Optimization of resource utilization can be achieved by estimating the requirement of an application with a variety of aspects like performance, memory usage, resource usage, cache hit versus cache misses, energy consumption, etc. Out of these, estimation of resources is more important to enhance the execution speed of an application with minimum resource utili- zation. Since ever increasing system and application complexities, it becomes quite necessary to estimate the resources of Computing Systems for an application. This paper addresses a profiling methodology for resource optimization in Heterogeneous Systems. The addressed profiling methodology estimate the resources required for an application execution and prepares a resource utilization chart for the Heterogeneous Systems. The profiling methodology also estimates the performance of an application i.e. speed enhancement based on the attributes of an application and resources of Heterogeneous Systems. Here, the Heterogeneous System (HS) is a computing platform which contains an array of Programmable Logic Devices such as FPGAs in combination with a General Purpose Processor as Processing Elements (PEs). The behavior of profiling methodology for resource optimization is described by using SystemC language to support Heterogeneous Systems i.e. hardware software co-design.
Integration of Independence Detection into SAT-based Optimal Multi-Agent Path Finding - A Novel SAT-based Optimal MAPF Solver

The problem of optimal multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is addressed in this paper. The task is to find optimal paths for mobile agents where each of them need to reach a unique goal position from the given start with respect to the given cost function. Agents must not collide with each other which is a source of combinatorial difficulty of the problem. An abstraction of the problem where discrete agents move in an undirected graph is usually adopted in the literature. Specifically, it is shown in this paper how to integrate independence detection (ID) technique developed for search based MAPF solving into a compilation-based technique that translates the instance of the MAPF problem into propositional satisfiability formalism (SAT). The independence detection technique allows decomposition of the instance consisting of a given number of agents into instances consisting of small groups of agents with no interaction across groups. These small instances can be solved independently and the solution of the original instance is combined from small solutions eventually. The reduction of the size of instances translated to the target SAT formalism has a significant impact on performance as shown in the presented experimental evaluation. The new solver integrating SAT translation and the independence detection is shown to be state-of-the-art in its class for optimal MAPF solving.