Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Against Influenza A(H3N2) Hospitalizations in Children in Hong Kong in a Prolonged Season, 2016/2017

Background Influenza A(H3N2) viruses circulated for 12 consecutive months in Hong Kong in 2016-2017, peaking in late June and July 2017. The objective of our study was to estimate the effectiveness of influenza vaccination in preventing hospitalizations in children in Hong Kong. Methods We conducted a test-negative study between 1 September 2016 and 31 August 2017, enrolling children 6 months to 17 years of age hospitalized for an acute respiratory infection. Influenza was diagnosed by PCR on nasopharyngeal aspirates. Results We enrolled 5514 children, including 3608 children 6 months to 2 years, 1600 children 3-5 years, and 1206 children 6-17 years of age. Influenza-associated hospitalizations occurred throughout the study year but time of vaccination of these children was also wide spread, from September 2016 to May 2017. Influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) was 39.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 14.7%-57.3%) against laboratory-confirmed influenza A(H3N2). In analyses stratified by time since vaccination, the VE against influenza A(H3N2) was 52.8% (95% CI, 17.1%-73.2%) within 3 months of vaccination, and 31.2% (95% CI, -6.6% to 55.6%) 4-6 months after vaccination. Conclusions Influenza vaccination was effective in preventing hospitalizations in children in Hong Kong.
Label-Free Raman Imaging to Monitor Breast Tumor Signatures

Although not yet ready for clinical application, methods based on Raman spectroscopy have shown significant potential in identifying, characterizing, and discriminating between noncancerous and cancerous specimens. Real-time and accurate medical diagnosis achievable through this vibrational optical method largely benefits from improvements in current technological and software capabilities. Not only is the acquisition of spectral information now possible in milliseconds and analysis of hundreds of thousands of data points achieved in minutes, but Raman spectroscopy also allows simultaneous detection and monitoring of several biological components. Besides demonstrating a significant Raman signature distinction between nontumorigenic (MCF-10A) and tumorigenic (MCF-7) breast epithelial cells, our study demonstrates that Raman can be used as a label-free method to evaluate epidermal growth factor activity in tumor cells. Comparative Raman profiles and images of specimens in the presence or absence of epidermal growth factor show important differences in regions attributed to lipid, protein, and nucleic acid vibrations. The occurrence, which is dependent on the presence of epidermal growth factor, of new Raman features associated with the appearance of phosphothreonine and phosphoserine residues reflects a signal transduction from the membrane to the nucleus, with concomitant modification of DNA/RNA structural characteristics. Parallel Western blotting analysis reveals an epidermal growth factor induction of phosphorylated Akt protein, corroborating the Raman results. The analysis presented in this work is an important step toward Raman-based evaluation of biological activity of epidermal growth factor receptors on the surfaces of breast cancer cells. With the ultimate future goal of clinically implementing Raman-guided techniques for the diagnosis of breast tumors (e.g., with regard to specific receptor activity), the current results just lay the foundation for further label-free optical tools to diagnose the disease.
Ergonomic evaluation of slide boards used by home care aides to assist client transfers

Abstract Home care aides risk musculoskeletal injury because they lift and move clients; the body weight of most adults exceeds the NIOSH recommended limit for lifting. Methods to reduce manual patient lifting in institutional settings are often technically or economically infeasible in home care. Our goal was to identify suitable, safe, low-technology transfer devices for home care use. Sixteen experienced home care aides performed client transfers from wheelchair to bed (upward) and bed to wheelchair (downward) in a simulated home care environment (laboratory), using four different slide boards and by hand without a device. Aides’ hand forces were measured during client transfers; aides also evaluated usability of each board. Hand forces exerted while using slide boards were mostly lower than in manual transfer, and forces were lower in downward versus upward transfers. Aides judged a board with a sliding mechanism easier to use than boards without a sliding mechanism. Practitioner Summary: This paper provides quantitative biomechanical measurements showing that slide boards reduced the hand forces needed by home care aides to transfer clients from bed to wheel chair and vice versa, compared to manual lifting. Using a semi-quantitative usability survey, aides identified boards with a sliding mechanism easiest to use.
A Decrease of Brain MicroRNA-122 Level Is an Early Marker of Cerebrovascular Disease in the Stroke-Prone Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat

Based on preliminary evidence that highlights microRNA-122 as a contributing factor to stroke pathogenesis, we aimed at assessing its expression level, along with the presence of early signs of cerebrovascular disease, in the brain of stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHRSP), a suitable model of human disease that accelerates stroke occurrence under a high sodium/low potassium (Japanese-style) diet (JD). After one month of JD, before stroke occurrence, brain microRNA-122 level was significantly decreased in SHRSP as compared to the stroke-resistant SHR (SHRSR). At this time, levels of markers of oxidative stress and inflammation, as well as of endothelial integrity and function, apoptosis and necrosis were differently modulated in the brains of JD-fed SHRSP as compared to SHRSR, pointing to a significant activation of all deleterious mechanisms underlying subsequent stroke development in SHRSP. We also showed that miR-122 improved survival of rat endothelial cerebral cells upon stress stimuli (excess NaCl, hydrogen peroxide). Our data suggest that a decrease of brain microRNA-122 level is deleterious and can be considered as an early marker of stroke in the SHRSP. Understanding the mechanisms by which microRNA-122 protects vascular cells from stress stimuli may provide a useful approach to improve preventive and treatment strategies against stroke.
Mobility-Aware User Association in Uplink Cellular Networks

This letter studies the mobility aware user-to-base station (BS) association policies, within a stochastic geometry framework, in two-tier uplink cellular networks with fractional channel inversion power control. Particularly, we model the BSs’ locations using the widely accepted Poisson point process and obtain the coverage probability and handover cost expressions for the coupled and decoupled uplink and downlink associations. To this end, we compute the average throughput for the mobile users and study the merits and demerits of each association strategy.
Multiple Tasks are Better than One: Multi-task Learning and Feature Selection for Head Pose Estimation, Action Recognition and Event Detection

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images and videos and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information. The classical problem in computer vision is that of determining whether or not the image or video data contains some specific object, feature, or activity. This task can normally be solved robustly and without effort by a human, but is still not satisfactorily solved in computer vision for the general case - arbitrary objects in arbitrary situations. The existing methods for dealing with this problem can at best solve it only for specific objects, such as simple geometric objects (e.g., polyhedra), human faces, printed or hand-written characters, or vehicles, and in specific situations, typically described in terms of well-defined illumination, background, and pose of the object relative to the camera. Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV) have been put together during the development of computer vision in the past decade. Nowadays, machine learning is considered as a powerful tool to solve many computer vision problems. Multi-task learning, as one important branch of machine learning, has developed very fast during the past decade. Multi-task learning methods aim to simultaneously learn classification or regression models for a set of related tasks. This typically leads to better models as compared to a learner that does not account for task relationships. The goal of multi-task learning is to improve the performance of learning algorithms by learning classifiers for multiple tasks jointly. This works particularly well if these tasks have some commonality and are generally slightly under-sampled.
p53 Maintains Baseline Expression of Multiple Tumor Suppressor Genes

TP53 is the most commonly mutated tumor suppressor gene and its mutation drives tumorigenesis. Using ChIP-seq for p53 in the absence of acute cell stress, we found that wild-type but not mutant p53 binds and activates numerous tumor suppressor genes, including PTEN, STK11(LKB1), miR-34a, KDM6A(UTX), FOXO1, PHLDA3, and TNFRSF10B through consensus binding sites in enhancers and promoters. Depletion of p53 reduced expression of these target genes, and analysis across 18 tumor types showed that mutation of TP53 associated with reduced expression of many of these genes. Regarding PTEN, p53 activated expression of a luciferase reporter gene containing the p53-consensus site in the PTEN enhancer, and homozygous deletion of this region in cells decreased PTEN expression and increased growth and transformation. These findings show that p53 maintains expression of a team of tumor suppressor genes that may together with the stress-induced targets mediate the ability of p53 to suppress cancer development. p53 mutations selected during tumor initiation and progression, thus, inactivate multiple tumor suppressor genes in parallel, which could account for the high frequency of p53 mutations in cancer. Implications: In this study, we investigate the activities of p53 under normal low-stress conditions and discover that p53 is capable of maintaining the expression of a group of important tumor suppressor genes at baseline, many of which are haploinsufficient, which could contribute to p53-mediated tumor suppression. Mol Cancer Res; 15(8); 1051–62. ©2017 AACR.
Ultrasound Assessment of the Transverse Abdominis During Functional Movement

The traditional activation ratio divides contracted muscle thickness by resting muscle thickness while an abdominal draw‐in maneuver is performed during hook lying. Ultrasound imaging during function, such as standing or gait, or peak knee flexion in a single‐leg squat allows for further visualization of muscle activity. The goal of this study was to examine activation ratio calculations for transverse abdominis function in supine versus loaded conditions to determine the most informative normalization strategy for muscle activity based on thickness values.
A practical framework for dynamically immunizing software security vulnerabilities

Many security attacks are caused by software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflow. How to eliminate or mitigate these vulnerabilities, in particular with unstoppable software, is a great challenge for security researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we propose a practical framework to immunize software security vulnerabilities on the fly. We achieve the vulnerability immunization by using a security antibody, which can be implemented independently from the protected software and is used to defend against vulnerability exploitation attacks. And we employ in-core patching technique to attach the antibody quietly into running process, and hence we neither need to re-compile nor re-execute the protected software. The effectiveness of our framework depends on the effectiveness of the antibody that is implemented by redirecting flaw functions into secure ones. As a proof of concept, we have built a prototype and applied it to prevent the software from buffer overflow attacks. Preliminary experimental results show that our framework is practical and efficient for the dynamical immunization of software security vulnerabilities.
A Data-driven Methodology for Agent Based Exploration of Customer Retention

Customer retention is of crucial importance for companies in the mobile services industry (MSI) because of the increasing competition in the mobile services sector. As a result, companies are increasingly exploiting data to address customer retention. Traditional data collection methods such as questionnaires and interviews have been utilised to address customer retention. In addition, data mining techniques such as classification and clustering have been applied to understand customer retention. The effectiveness of utilising these techniques to investigating customer retention is debatable as a result of the complexity of the mobile services market. This study proposes a novel data-driven methodological approach to investigating customer retention in the MSI, using agent based modelling and simulation (ABMS). The dataset for this study is extracted from Twitter using specific keywords to gather data from mobile services companies of interest. The design science paradigm is adopted as the overarching methodology along with a selected framework, the social media domain analysis framework (SoMeDoA) to generate customer satisfaction determinants and agent models. ABMS is performed with the established determinants to uncover the social effects of customer retention. Data analysis show that customers' environment is a key influence on their decision to remain with (or leave) their mobile services provider, with word of mouth as an important factor. Importantly, ABMS is able to explore further determinants in a wider market place.
Selectable high‐yield recombinant protein production in human cells using a GFP/YFP nanobody affinity support

Recombinant protein expression systems that produce high yields of pure proteins and multi‐protein complexes are essential to meet the needs of biologists, biochemists, and structural biologists using X‐ray crystallography and cryo‐electron microscopy. An ideal expression system for recombinant human proteins is cultured human cells where the correct translation and chaperone machinery are present. However, compared to bacterial expression systems, human cell cultures present several technical challenges to their use as an expression system. We developed a method that utilizes a YFP fusion‐tag to generate recombinant proteins using suspension‐cultured HEK293F cells. YFP is a dual‐function tag that enables direct visualization and fluorescence‐based selection of high expressing clones for and rapid purification using a high‐stringency, high‐affinity anti‐GFP/YFP nanobody support. We demonstrate the utility of this system by expressing two large human proteins, TOP2α (340 KDa dimer) and a TOP2β catalytic core (260 KDa dimer). This robustly and reproducibly yields >10 mg/L liter of cell culture using transient expression or 2.5 mg/L using stable expression.
Neonatal hyperoxia increases airway reactivity and inflammation in adult mice

Supplemental O2 to treat bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) in premature infants, is a major risk factor producing alteration in lung function, airway reactivity, and predisposition to respiratory infections. This study explores inflammatory and airway responses following neonatal hyperoxia in adult mice.
Facile Preparation of Cellulose/Polylactide Composite Materials with Tunable Mechanical Properties

ABSTRACTA solvent-free route was developed to fabricate 100% biobased, renewable, and degradable polylactide (PLA) composites reinforced with ball-milled celluloses. The results show that the original pulp cellulose fibers were modified to partial amorphization through 30-min ball milling. Filling the ball milled celluloses into PLA increased the tensile modulus for the resultant cellulose/PLA composite materials, while decreased their tensile strength and impact resistance. This method can be used to access the cost-efficient PLA-based composite materials with tunable mechanical properties. The variation analysis shows that filling content contributed more to the variations of their mechanical properties than that particle size did.
The Histone Acetyltransferase Gcn5 Positively Regulates T Cell Activation

Histone acetyltransferases (HATs) regulate inducible transcription in multiple cellular processes and during inflammatory and immune response. However, the functions of general control nonrepressed–protein 5 (Gcn5), an evolutionarily conserved HAT from yeast to human, in immune regulation remain unappreciated. In this study, we conditionally deleted Gcn5 (encoded by the Kat2a gene) specifically in T lymphocytes by crossing floxed Gcn5 and Lck-Cre mice, and demonstrated that Gcn5 plays important roles in multiple stages of T cell functions including development, clonal expansion, and differentiation. Loss of Gcn5 functions impaired T cell proliferation, IL-2 production, and Th1/Th17, but not Th2 and regulatory T cell differentiation. Gcn5 is recruited onto the il-2 promoter by interacting with the NFAT in T cells upon TCR stimulation. Interestingly, instead of directly acetylating NFAT, Gcn5 catalyzes histone H3 lysine H9 acetylation to promote IL-2 production. T cell–specific suppression of Gcn5 partially protected mice from myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein–induced experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, an experimental model for human multiple sclerosis. Our study reveals previously unknown physiological functions for Gcn5 and a molecular mechanism underlying these functions in regulating T cell immunity. Hence Gcn5 may be an important new target for autoimmune disease therapy.
Spiritual well‐being of Italian advanced cancer patients in the home palliative care setting

This study evaluates the spiritual well-being (SpWB) in very advanced cancer patients assisted by the home palliative care program of ANT Foundation, a no-profit Italian organisation. SpWB was assessed by the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Spiritual Well-Being Scale (FACIT-Sp12), including Meaning, Peace, and Faith subscales. The quality-of-life (QoL) was evaluated by using the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General scale. Questionnaires were distributed to 1,055 patients and 683 were compiled and evaluable for analysis. The mean scores of FACIT-Sp12 as well as of QoL were notably lower than reference values for cancer survivors. The FACIT-Sp12 score was higher in patients with less impaired Karnofsky Performance Status, fully participating in religious rituals and living in central Italy. A high Pearson's correlation was found between QoL and FACIT-Sp12 (r = .60), Peace (r = .71) and Meaning (r = .52), while it was marginal for Faith (r = .27). The hierarchical regression analysis showed that FACIT-Sp12 is a significant predictor of QoL. The study suggests that Italian patients with advanced cancer assisted by expert multi-professional teams in the home palliative care setting have a low level of SpWB thereby highlighting the need for the integration of spiritual support as part of comprehensive cancer care.
Anatomical Study of the Innervation of Anterior Knee Joint Capsule: Implication for Image-Guided Intervention

Background and Objectives The knee joint is the most common site of osteoarthritis. While joint replacement is considered an ultimate solution, radiofrequency denervation may be contemplated in some cases. Radiofrequency ablation requires precise localization of the articular branches innervating the joint capsule. The objective of this cadaveric study was to determine the source, course, relationships, and frequency of articular branches innervating the anterior knee joint capsule. Methods Fifteen knees were meticulously dissected. The number and origin of the articular branches were recorded, and their distribution defined by quadrants. Their relationships to anatomical landmarks were identified. Results The articular branches terminated in 1 of the 4 quadrants with minimal overlap. In all specimens, the superolateral quadrant was innervated by the nerve to vastus lateralis, nerve to vastus intermedius, superior lateral genicular and common fibular nerves; inferolateral by the inferior lateral genicular and recurrent fibular nerves; superomedial by the nerve to vastus medialis, nerve to vastus intermedius and superior medial genicular nerve; and inferomedial by the inferior medial genicular nerve. In 3 specimens, the inferomedial quadrant also received innervation from the infrapatellar branch of saphenous nerve. All articular branches except the nerves to vastus lateralis and medialis course at the periosteal level. Conclusions The frequency map of the articular branches provides an anatomical basis for the development of new clinical protocols for knee radiofrequency denervation and perioperative pain management.
Frequency of Youth E-Cigarette, Tobacco, and Poly-Use in the United States, 2015: Update to Villanti et al., "Frequency of Youth E-Cigarette and Tobacco Use Patterns in the United States: Measurement Precision Is Critical to Inform Public Health".

Our published study in Nicotine and Tobacco Research using data from the National Tobacco Survey (NYTS) showed that the majority of US middle and high school students had not used tobacco or e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. Among youth who reported any past 30-day tobacco or e-cigarette use, poly-use was the dominant pattern of use. Tobacco-naïve youth rarely reported using e-cigarettes, and most e-cigarette users were ever users of other tobacco products.
RESEARCH ON USE OF LOW CONCENTRATION INVERSE SOLUBILITY POLYMERS IN WATER FOR HARDENING MACHINE COMPONENTS AND TOOLS

There is an optimal water concentration of inverse solubility polymers ( 1 %) where in many cases film boiling is absent. Based on accurate experimental data of French and data of authors, it was shown that during quenching from 875 o C in cold water solutions of optimal concentration film boiling is completely absent for those steel parts initial heat flux densities of which are below critical value. It is established that initial heat flux density decreases with increase sizes of tested samples. Initial process of quenching (formation of boundary boiling layer), which makes further history of cooling, is not investigated deeply and widely yet enough. When film boiling is absent, mathematical model includes only transient nucleate boiling process and convection. In this case, cooling time within the transient nucleate boiling process can be calculated using average effective Kondratjev numbers Kn. They were evaluated for inverse solubility polymers depending on their concentration and sizes of tested samples. As a result, an improved technology of hardening large gears and bearing rings is proposed by authors. Its essence consists in interruption of accelerated cooling or turning off agitation of quenchant when dissolving of surface polymeric layer starts. Examples of performing improved technology are provided by authors. Developments can be used by engineers to switch from carburized large gears quenched in oil to gears made of optimal hardenability steel and quenched in water solutions of optimal concentration.