Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of balloon-assisted enteroscopy on the diagnosis and management of suspected and established small-bowel Crohn’s disease

Background and aims: The role of recently developed balloon-assisted enteroscopy (BAE) in small-bowel Crohn’s disease (CD) is not well established. The purpose of this study is to determine the clinical impact of BAE on patients with suspected and established small-bowel CD. Methods: This study included 22 patients (group A) with suspected small-bowel CD and 43 patients (group B) with established small-bowel CD with or without previous surgery, who underwent BAE, in a prospective BAE registry of a US academic medical institution. All underwent abdominal imaging studies including computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR) enterography before BAE. The main outcome measurements were diagnostic yield and clinical outcomes. Results: In total, 78 BAE procedures were carried out in 65 patients. In group A (n = 22, 25 BAE procedures), enteroscopy led to a diagnosis of CD in six patients (27.3 %). Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug-related enteropathy was diagnosed in three patients (13.6 %), whereas no lesions were found in the remaining 13 patients. In group B (n = 43, 53 BAE procedures) enteroscopy revealed active intestinal inflammation with ulcers and/or luminal stenosis in 18 patients (41.9 %), which led to a change and escalation of medical therapy. Five patients without active ulcers underwent successful dilation of small-bowel strictures with resulting resolution of obstructive symptoms. Of the 78 BAE procedures, two patients (2.6 %) had bleeding complications which were successfully treated conservatively. One patient (1.3 %) underwent surgery due to procedure-related perforation. Conclusions: The use of BAE may help improve management in patients with suspected and established small-bowel CD.
Prognostic significance of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio in rectal cancer: a meta-analysis

Background Inflammatory responses play decisive roles in tumor development, immune surveillance, and responses to therapy. High neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), as an inflammation index, has been reported to be a predictor for poor prognosis of various cancers. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the prognostic value of NLR in patients with rectal cancer. Methods A comprehensive search of the literature was conducted through PubMed and EMBASE. Pooled hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was used to evaluate the association between NLR and three outcomes: overall survival, disease-free survival, and recurrence-free survival. Results Seven cohorts involving 959 patients were included in this meta-analysis. Our pooled results demonstrated that elevated NLR was associated with poor overall survival (HR: 13.41, 95% CI: 4.90–36.72), disease-free survival (HR: 4.37, 95% CI: 2.33–8.19), and recurrence-free survival (HR: 3.64, 95% CI: 1.88–7.05). Conclusion An elevated NLR is a valuable and easily available prognostic marker for rectal cancer. It is associated with unfavorable overall survival, disease-free survival, and recurrence-free survival. NLR could be a useful candidate factor for making treatment decisions for individual patients with rectal cancer.
Detection of Digital Image Splicing Using Luminance

The availability of photo manipulation software has made it unprecedentedly easy to manipulate images for malicious purposes . The analyzation of images and detection of one of the most common forms of photographic manipulation operation, known as image splicing or image composition is done based on Luminance or the intensity of images. Image splicing is the process that crops and paste regions from the same or separate sources. In this project, I propose a fully automatic image forensic technique to detect digital image forgeries based on exploits inconsistencies in the illumination of images. This approach is machine-learning based and requires minimal user interaction. This technique is applicable to images containing two or more people and requires no expert interaction for the tampering decision. To achieve this, physics-based and statistical-based illuminant estimators are used to incorporate information on the image regions. From these illuminant estimates, texture-based and edge-based features are extracted which are used to provide to a automatic decisions based on machine-learning approach. Index Terms Color constancy, illuminant color, Luminance, image forensics, machine learning, spliced image detection, texture and edge descriptors.
Modulatory Mechanism of the Endogenous Peptide Catestatin on Neuronal Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors and Exocytosis

The catestatin fragment of chromogranin A is the first known endogenous compound able to inhibit catecholamine release elicited by the activation of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) of different animal species and catecholaminergic cell types. However, how catestatin regulates the receptor activity, which subunit combination of the heteropentameric forms of receptor is better blocked by the peptide, or how it affects the different stages of the exocytotic process have not yet been evaluated. To address these questions, we have assayed the effects of catestatin: (first) on the inward currents elicited by ACh (IACh) in voltage-clamped oocytes expressing different combinations of nAChR subunits; and (second) on the cytosolic Ca2+ concentration, [Ca2+]c, and quantal release of catecholamines simultaneously monitored in single adrenal chromaffin cells stimulated with ACh. Catestatin potently blocks all the subtypes of nAChRs studied. Furthermore, it inhibits the α3β4 current in a reversible, noncompetitive, voltage-, and use-dependent manner, a behavior compatible with open-channel blockade. In fura-2-loaded single chromaffin cells, the peptide reduced the [Ca2+]c signal and the total release of catecholamines elicited by ACh; however, catestatin did not modify the kinetics or the last step of the exocytotic process. Our results suggest that catestatin might play an autocrine regulatory role in neuroendocrine secretion through its interaction with different native nAChR subtypes; the extent of receptor blockade by the peptide could be acutely regulated by the intensity and duration of the presynaptic stimulus.
Convex Computation of the Basin of Stability to Measure the Likelihood of Falling: A Case Study on the Sit-to-Stand Task

Locomotion in the real world involves unexpected perturbations, and therefore requires strategies to maintain stability to successfully execute desired behaviours. Ensuring the safety of locomoting systems therefore necessitates a quantitative metric for stability. Due to the difficulty of determining the set of perturbations that induce failure, researchers have used a variety of features as a proxy to describe stability. This paper utilises recent advances in dynamical systems theory to develop a personalised, automated framework to compute the set of perturbations from which a system can avoid failure, which is known as the basin of stability. The approach tracks human motion to synthesise a control input that is analysed to measure the basin of stability. The utility of this analysis is verified on a Sit-to-Stand task performed by 15 individuals. The experiment illustrates that the computed basin of stability for each individual can successfully differentiate between less and more stable Sit-to-Stand strategies.
Fully Secure Attribute-Based Encryption with Non-monotonic Access Structures

Along with the development of the Internet, the traditional public key encryption system becomes insufficient for many newly emerging applications, such as the cloud services. Then the ABE is proposed to meet the urgent demands. The study on attribute-based encryption mainly concern on two issues: how to improve its expressibility and achieve stronger security. This paper has proposed a attribute-based encryption scheme that has good property in both two points: our scheme allows a user's private key to be expressed in non-monotonic access structures, and we prove its fully security in the standard model. Furthermore, the performance of our scheme is as efficient as the less expressive and selective security ones.
Relationship Between Electrodiagnosis and Various Ultrasonographic Findings for Diagnosis of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Objective To investigate the relationship between electrodiagnosis and various ultrasonographic findings of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) and propose the ultrasonographic standard that has closest consistency with the electrodiagnosis. Methods Ultrasonography was performed on 50 female patients (65 cases) previously diagnosed with CTS and 20 normal female volunteers (40 cases). Ultrasonography parameters were as follows: cross-sectional area (CSA) and flattening ratio (FR) of the median nerve at the levels of hamate bone, pisiform bone, and lunate bone; anteroposterior diameter (AP diameter) of the median nerve in the carpal tunnel; wrist to forearm ratio (WFR) of median nerve area at the distal wrist crease and 12 cm proximal to distal wrist crease; and compression ratio (CR) of the median nerve. Independent t-test was performed to compare the ultrasonographic findings between patient and control groups. Significant ultrasonographic findings were compared with the electrodiagnosis results and a kappa coefficient was used to determine the correlation. Results CSA and FR of median nerve at the hamate bone level, CSA of median nerve at pisiform bone level, AP diameter of median nerve within the carpal tunnel, CSA of median nerve at the distal wrist crease and WFR showed significant differences between patient and control groups. WFR showed highest concordance with electrodiagnosis (κ=0.71, p<0.001). Conclusion These findings suggested the applicability of ultrasonography, especially WFR, as a useful adjunctive tool for diagnosis of CTS.
A simple system for developing a setup of multiple antennas

MIMO systems (Multiple In - Multiple Out) are the rise of new telecommunication systems. They have the characteristic of generating greater channel capacity with low power transmitters, creating a more efficient use of energy. As the purpose is to provide higher data rate, conventional methods are too limited to improve this, and MIMO systems generate an increase in capacity and reliability, also they promise to be competition for 4G systems improving multiplexing and diversity techniques which helps to increase the transmission rate while maintaining the same power levels of a conventional system. Thus, the study and improvement of techniques for MIMO channel measurements are extremely important to check the reliability of data transmission from multiple antennas, modulation techniques as well as the channel capacity. In this work four planar antennas applied to the MIMO system are scaled, simulated and performed by comparing experimental results with simulations. Also present the development of a transmitter and a receiver simulated by System Vue (Agilent) and implemented in VHDL.
Unsupervised link prediction using aggregative statistics on heterogeneous social networks

The concern of privacy has become an important issue for online social networks. In services such as Foursquare.com, whether a person likes an article is considered private and therefore not disclosed; only the aggregative statistics of articles (i.e., how many people like this article) is revealed. This paper tries to answer a question: can we predict the opinion holder in a heterogeneous social network without any labeled data? This question can be generalized to a link prediction with aggregative statistics problem. This paper devises a novel unsupervised framework to solve this problem, including two main components: (1) a three-layer factor graph model and three types of potential functions; (2) a ranked-margin learning and inference algorithm. Finally, we evaluate our method on four diverse prediction scenarios using four datasets: preference (Foursquare), repost (Twitter), response (Plurk), and citation (DBLP). We further exploit nine unsupervised models to solve this problem as baselines. Our approach not only wins out in all scenarios, but on the average achieves 9.90% AUC and 12.59% NDCG improvement over the best competitors. The resources are available at http://www.csie. ntu.edu. tw/~d97944007/aggregative/
The Nature and Extent of Discrimination in the Marketplace : Evidence from Field Experiments *

Measuring discrimination in the marketplace is one of the most active areas of research in the social sciences. While empirical studies have provided important evidence that discrimination exists in various markets, they rarely allow the analyst to draw firm conclusions concerning the nature of discrimination observed without making strict assumptions on individual-specific unobservables. By combining data from bilateral negotiations in product markets with a series of ancillary field experiments, this study provides a framework that amends this shortcoming. The entire experimental design, which includes field data gathered from more than 1000 participants, provides sharp findings. First, I observe a remarkably strong tendency for minorities (women, nonwhites, and older agents) to receive initial and final offers that are inferior to those received by their majority counterparts. This occurs when agents are acting as buyers and sellers, though the degree of discrimination is much more pronounced when agents are selling their wares. Second, the data strongly indicate that the observed discrimination is not due to animus, but represents statistical discrimination, whereby in their pursuit of profits marketers use observable characteristics to make statistical inference about reservation values of agents. JEL: C9 (Experiments), J7 (Discrimination)
Brefeldin A redistributes resident and itinerant Golgi proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum

Brefeldin A (BFA) has been reported to block protein transport from the ER and cause disassembly of the Golgi complex. We have examined the effects of BFA on the transport and processing of the vesicular stomatitis virus G protein, a model integral membrane protein. Delivery of G protein to the cell surface was reversibly blocked by 6 micrograms/ml BFA. Pulse-label experiments revealed that in the presence of BFA, G protein became completely resistant to endoglycosidase H digestion. Addition of sialic acid, a trans-Golgi event, was not observed. Despite processing by cis- and medial Golgi enzymes, G protein was localized by indirect immunofluorescence to a reticular distribution characteristic of the ER. By preventing transport of G protein from the ER with the metabolic inhibitor carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone or by use of the temperature- sensitive mutant ts045, which is restricted to the ER at 40 degrees C, we showed that processing of G protein occurred in the ER and was not due to retention of newly synthesized Golgi enzymes. Rather, redistribution of preexisting cis and medial Golgi enzymes to the ER occurred as soon as 2.5 min after addition of BFA, and was complete by 10-15 min. Delivery of Golgi enzymes to the ER was energy dependent and occurred only at temperatures greater than or equal to 20 degrees C. BFA also induced retrograde transport of G protein from the medial Golgi to the ER. Golgi enzymes were completely recovered from the ER 10 min after removal of BFA. These findings demonstrate that BFA induces retrograde transport of both resident and itinerant Golgi proteins to the ER in a fully reversible manner.
The Modern Vat

Value-added tax, or VAT, first introduced less than 50 years ago, is now a pivotal component of tax systems around the world. The rapid and seemingly irresistible rise of the VAT is probably the most important tax development of the latter twentieth century, and certainly the most breathtaking. Written by a team of experts from the International Monetary Fund, this book examines the remarkable spread and current reach of the innovative tax, and draws lessons about the design and implementation of the VAT, as experienced by different countries around the world. How efficient is it as a tax, is it fair, and is it suitable for all countries are among the questions raised in this highly informative and well-researched book that also looks at the likely future of the tax.
Brine Disposal from Inland Desalination Plants

Abstract Desalination plants are being widely used in the inland areas of many countries to supply water for domestic purposes. When these areas are far from the shorelines of salt-water bodies, the opportunity to dispose of the reject brine (also known as concentrate, reject water, or wastewater) back into these water bodies no longer exists. In such instances, the use of evaporation ponds is very significant, both economically and environmentally. Other alternatives for brine disposal may also be very effective in some instances. Under certain conditions, brine from desalination plants can have useful applications. Potentials for such applications are addressed in this paper along with a critical review of current innovative concepts for the disposal of reject brine from inland desalination plants. This paper will also assess the present status of disposal mechanisms of brine from desalination plants and outline future research areas that could be pursued for effective, economical, and environmentally sound means for brine disposal from such plants.
Insertion Sequence Inversions Mediated by Ectopic Recombination between Terminal Inverted Repeats

Transposable elements are widely distributed and diverse in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, as exemplified by DNA transposons. As a result, they represent a considerable source of genomic variation, for example through ectopic (i.e. non-allelic homologous) recombination events between transposable element copies, resulting in genomic rearrangements. Ectopic recombination may also take place between homologous sequences located within transposable element sequences. DNA transposons are typically bounded by terminal inverted repeats (TIRs). Ectopic recombination between TIRs is expected to result in DNA transposon inversions. However, such inversions have barely been documented. In this study, we report natural inversions of the most common prokaryotic DNA transposons: insertion sequences (IS). We identified natural TIR-TIR recombination-mediated inversions in 9% of IS insertion loci investigated in Wolbachia bacteria, which suggests that recombination between IS TIRs may be a quite common, albeit largely overlooked, source of genomic diversity in bacteria. We suggest that inversions may impede IS survival and proliferation in the host genome by altering transpositional activity. They may also alter genomic instability by modulating the outcome of ectopic recombination events between IS copies in various orientations. This study represents the first report of TIR-TIR recombination within bacterial IS elements and it thereby uncovers a novel mechanism of structural variation for this class of prokaryotic transposable elements.
Computational investigation of empty nose syndrome By

Empty nose syndrome (ENS) is a rare but debilitating condition commonly resulting from resection of part or all of the inferior turbinate (Figure 1). The characteristic yet most perplexing symptom of ENS is the complaint of nasal obstruction despite objectively patent airways, termed paradoxical nasal obstruction. As benign as it sounds, the feeling of obstruction to nasal breathing can have a significant influence on patients’ well-being and cannot be remedied simply by instruction to breathe through the mouth. Patients feel constant discomfort during breathing and often get a feeling of mild suffocation which can result in symptoms such as irritability, exhaustion, or anxiety. Furthermore, ENS often occurs in patients suffering from atrophic rhinitis (AR). There has been debate as to whether ENS is a form of AR or a separate entity in itself, but many patients with ENS also present symptoms such as nasal crusting or malodor inside the nose. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) offers a unique opportunity to study nasal airflow, allowing the visualization and quantification of airflow characteristics inside the nose. Nasal geometry can be generated from computed tomography (CT) scan data allowing simulation of patient-specific geometries. Little is known about the pathophysiology of ENS, many have speculated; however, few have simulated flow through nasal geometries of patients presenting symptoms of ENS. It has been widely proposed that the paradoxical nasal obstruction is linked to the [lack of] activation of thermoreceptors in the mucous membrane of the nose during convective cooling. It is unknown if symptoms arise out of damage to these receptors or from unfavorable airflow characteristics, but it has been shown that symptoms can be improved through nasal reconstructive surgery. The aims of this work are twofold, to further understand ENS through simulation of patients suffering from the condition, and to develop predictive capability to help determine patients who may be susceptible to ENS after turbinate resection. This information may be used as a surgical planning tool to inform turbinate resection or reconstruction surgery through the use of shape optimization of the interior geometry of the nose. The project remains in its early stages, and an outline of the progress made so far is presented here.
The Alterations of Erythrocyte Phospholipids in Type 2 Diabetes Observed after Oral High-Fat Meal Loading: The FTIR Spectroscopic and Mass Spectrometric Studies

Little is known about the postprandial remodelling of erythrocytes phospholipids (PLs) in type 2 diabetics (T2DM). Therefore, this study aims to compare the alterations of erythrocyte PLs in T2DM to those of healthy subjects after ingestion of a high-fat meal. Eleven T2DM and ten healthy subjects underwent a high-fat meal loading. Erythrocytes were isolated from blood obtained after fasting and 4 h after the meal. Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy was initially used to screen erythrocyte PLs by monitoring C-H stretching vibrations. Phosphatidylcholine (PC) molecular species were further investigated by Liquid Chromatography-Electrospray Ionisation-Mass Spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS). For the control group, FTIR revealed postprandial changes in C-H stretching vibrations, particularly of the olefinic band. These findings were supported by LC-ESI-MS data, showing marked changes in PC molecular species, especially of the PC34:1 (where 34 and 1 mean the summed number of carbons and double bonds, respectively). However, similar changes of those were not apparent in the T2DM group. Our results reveal marked postprandial alterations of erythrocyte PC species in healthy subjects whereas only mild alterations are observed in T2DM. The discrepant effects of high-fat meal loading suggest abnormal PC remodelling in the diabetic erythrocyte that may affect its membrane fluidity and integrity.
Integration of Points of Interest and Regions of Interest

Images consist of different low-level features, such as Points of Interest (POIs) and Regions of Interest (ROIs). A distinction between POIs and ROIs is that the latter ones have intrinsic scale information while the former ones may not have. In this paper, we propose a scheme to integrate these two kinds of image features. The proposed scheme optimizes feature distribution so that the optimized features become more compact. The scheme also assigns scale information to a POI via a stable association between the POI and a certain “nearest” ROI. We test the proposed integration scheme in terms of the repeatability across various imaging transformations. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the integration scheme.