Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biochemical scenario behind initiation of diabetic retinopathy in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Purpose: Despite the disease having similar glycemic status and duration microangiopathy in some patients develop within few years whereas it doesn't appear as a health complication in some diabetics for a considerable period. This study is undertaken to assess the hyperglycemia-induced biochemical background behind the development of diabetic retinopathy (DR) in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). Methods: Following proper diagnosis, 100 patients of type 2 DM of 10–12 years duration having no DR, and 42 patients of type 2 DM of the same duration and glycemic status as the second group, with mild retinopathy were recruited in the study. Lactic acid, glutamate, malondialdehyde (MDA), nitrate, advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), peripheral blood mononuclear cell reactive oxygen species (ROS), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and its receptor 2 (VEGFR2) in these two groups were produced in an assay following standard methodology. Results: Biochemical markers of anaerobic glycolysis, lipid peroxidation, AGEs, glutamate concentration, oxidative stress, and expression of VEGF and its VEGFR2 with significantly elevated markings were found in them who developed earliest stage of DR rather than them who had not. Conclusion: Hyperglycemia-induced anomalous glucose metabolism, lipid peroxidation, advanced glycation, glutamate toxicity, and oxidative stress create a background where apoptosis of retinal capillary endothelial cells invite increased expression of VEGF and VEGFR2, these being the crucial factors behind the development of diabetic microangiopathy.
Multiple Solutions Approach (MSA): Conceptions and Practices of Primary School Teachers in Ghana.

The study explored the curriculum guidelines and primary school teachers’ conceptions and practices of the Multiple Solutions Approach (MSA) in teaching mathematics using basic qualitative research design. Informal conversation interviews (ICIs), observations, video and document analyses were used to collect data. Participants included a purposive sample of five practicing teachers from three districts of the Central Region of Ghana. Descriptive analytical procedures were applied to the quantitative data while the qualitative data were analyzed thematically. Findings indicated that the curriculum materials lacked concrete direction for MSA and less than 22% of sub-topics were presented in different ways: a provision that is insufficient to guide and stimulate teachers to teach in multiple ways. Teachers also lacked a clear understanding of the MSA. Although the curriculum policy encouraged MSA, teachers’ practices were inconsistent with the curriculum guidelines. The implementation of MSA was limited by inadequate curriculum provisions and teacher knowledge.
Why prescribe exercise as therapy in type 2 diabetes? We have a pill for that!

The majority of T2D cases are preventable through a healthy lifestyle, leaving little room for questions that lifestyle should be the first line of defence in the fight against the development of T2D. However, when it comes to the clinical care of T2D, the potential efficacy of lifestyle is much less clear‐cut, both in terms of impacting the pathological metabolic biomarkers of the disease, and long‐term complications. A healthy diet, high leisure‐time physical activity, and exercise are considered to be cornerstones albeit adjunct to drug therapy in the management of T2D. The prescription and effective implementation of structured exercise and other lifestyle interventions in the treatment of T2D have not been routinely used. In this article, we critically appraise and debate our reflections as to why exercise and physical activity may not have reached the status of a viable and effective treatment in the clinical care of T2D to the same extent as pharmaceutical drugs. We argue that the reason why exercise therapy is not utilized to a satisfactory degree is multifaceted and primarily relates to a “vicious cycle” with lack of proven efficacy on T2D complications and a lack of proven effectiveness on risk factors in the primary care of T2D. Furthermore, there is a lack of experimental research establishing the optimal dose of exercise. This precludes widespread and sustained implementation of physical activity and exercise in the clinical treatment of T2D will not succeed.
Spatially uniform colors for projectors and tiled displays

Abstract— A major issue when setting up multi‐projector tiled displays is the spatial non‐uniformity of the color throughout the display's area. Indeed, the chromatic properties do not only vary between two different projectors, but also between different spatial locations inside the displaying area of one single projector. A new method for calibrating the colors of a tiled display is presented. An iterative algorithm to construct a correction table which makes the luminance uniform over the projected area of one single projector is presented first. This so‐called intra‐projector calibration uses a standard camera as a luminance measuring device and can be processed in parallel for all projectors. Once the color inside each projector is spatially uniform, the set of displayable colors — the color gamut — of each projector is measured. On the basis of these measurements, the goal of the inter‐projector calibration is to find an optimal gamut shared by all the projectors. Finding the optimal color gamut displayable by n projectors in time O(n) is shown, and the color conversion from one specific color gamut to the common global gamut is derived. The method of testing it on a tiled display consisting of 48 projectors with large chrominance shifts was experimentally validated.
Joint user scheduling and transceiver design for cross-link interference suppression in MU-MIMO dynamic TDD systems

Dynamic time-division duplexing (TDD) allows flexible resource allocation among different transmission directions to adapt to the traffic variation. However, strong cross-link interference (CLI), e.g. downlink (DL)-to-uplink (UL) and UL-to-DL interference, may lead to significant performance degradation. In this paper, a joint user scheduling and transceiver design based CLI suppression (CLIS) scheme is investigated in multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dynamic TDD systems. To eliminate UL-to-DL interference, an algorithm is designed to avoid scheduling DL user equipments (UEs) which will be interfered by neighboring UL UEs. To suppress DL-to-UL interference, the DL-to-UL interference channel is divided into several interference sub-channels and a novel precoding and detection design strategy is provided to make the wanted signal channel orthogonal to these interference sub-channels. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively eliminate CLI so that the UL user rate is significant improved compared to conventional schemes.
Carboxylated nanodiamonds can be used as negative reference in in vitro nanogenotoxicity studies

Nanodiamonds (NDs) are promising nanomaterials for biomedical applications. However, a few studies highlighted an in vitro genotoxic activity for detonation NDs, which was not evidenced in one of our previous work quantifying γ‐H2Ax after 20 and 100 nm high‐pressure high‐temperature ND exposures of several cell lines. To confirm these results, in the present work, we investigated the genotoxicity of the same 20 and 100 nm NDs and added intermediate‐sized NDs of 50 nm. Conventional in vitro genotoxicity tests were used, i.e., the in vitro micronucleus and comet assays that are recommended by the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety for the toxicological evaluation of nanomedicines. In vitro micronucleus and in vitro comet assays (standard and hOGG1‐modified) were therefore performed in two human cell lines, the bronchial epithelial 16HBE14o– cells and the colon carcinoma T84 cells. Our results did not show any genotoxic activity, whatever the test, the cell line or the size of carboxylated NDs. Even though these in vitro results should be confirmed in vivo, they reinforce the potential interest of carboxylated NDs for biomedical applications or even as a negative reference nanoparticle in nanotoxicology. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
PRIS Kidult Anti-SPAM Solution at the TREC 2005 Spam Track: Improving the Performance of Naive Bayes for Spam Detection

Technical Report KidSPAM xxxx Abstract. Recently, the spam already constituted a serious problem for both e-mail users and Internet Service Providers (ISP). Solutions to the abuse of spam would be both technical and legal regulatory. This paper reports our solution for the TREC 2005 spam track, in which we consider the use of Naive Bayes spam filter for its desirable properties (simplicity, low time and memory requirements, etc.). Then the approaches to modify the Naive Bayes by simply introducing weight and classifier assemble based on dynamic threshold are proposed, which can help to improve the accuracy of a Naive Bayes spam classifier dramatically. Additionally, we discuss some steps that must be adopted naturally thought before, such as stop list, word stemming, feature selection, class prior probabilities. The theory analysis implies these steps are not necessarily the best way to extend the Bayesian classifier, and these were also verified empirically. Many of these techniques appear to be counterintuitive but can be explained by the statistical properties of e-mail itself. Experiment results of TREC 2005 spam track demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A paraxial theory for the propagation of ultrasonic beams in anisotropic solids

The necessity of nondestructively inspecting cast steels, weldments, composites, and other inherently anisotropic materials has stimulated considerable interest in wave propagation in anisotropic media. Here, the problem of an ultrasonic beam traveling in an anisotropic medium is formulated in terms of an angular spectrum of plane waves. Through the use of small angle approximations, the integral representation is reduced to a summation of Gauss–Hermite eigensolutions. The anisotropic effects of beam skew and excess beam divergence enter into the solution through parameters that are simply interpreted in terms of the slowness surface. Both time harmonic and pulsed solutions are discussed. Formulas are also presented for transmission of a beam through a curved interface between two media. Examples are given illustrating how this method may be applied to predicting beam patterns during ultrasonic inspections.
Follow-me: A new start-and-stop method for visual animal tracking in biology research

Very frequently, research in biology and ethology requires visual tracking of live animals, such as insects, rodents and fish. The challenge is particularly difficult in the aquatic environment because of the light scattering effect of water: reflections and refractions, low contrast and resolution images, noise, and also due to the unpredictable animal behavior. This paper describes a new tracking method that is based in start and stop detection. When the animals stop or move very slowly, a precise tracker based on AdaBoost classifiers is applied. Otherwise, when they move faster, a more efficient process based on background detection is used. A control system is responsible for deciding which method should be used in each instant. The experimental results using sea cucumbers (Echinodermata, Holothuroidea), zebrafish and rodents, show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method, which is able to deal with complex situations.
Prediction of in-flight particle behaviors in plasma spraying

Purpose: In plasma spraying, the coating properties such as porosity, hardness, strength, etc. are directly determined by particle behaviors, i.e. the temperature and velocity. Therefore, it is necessary and meaningful to predict the particle behaviors under a certain combination of process parameters before the spraying process is executed. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, SVM (Support Vector Machines) is applied to the prediction of in-flight particle temperature and velocity in plasma spraying by argon flow rate, hydrogen flow rate and electric current. The influences of the three parameters on particle temperature and velocity are also investigated. Findings: In the leave-one-out cross validation on an orthogonal experiment with 9 sets of parameters, the maximum relative errors of prediction for particle temperature and velocity are 0.68% and 1.42% respectively. The prediction results reveal that the most influential parameter for particle temperature is hydrogen flow rate, and argon flow rate exerts the greatest influences on particle velocity. Research limitations/implications: Future work should focus on the modeling of the whole spraying process with all the spraying parameters. Practical implications: It will be helpful to the prediction and controll of particle behaviors in plasma spraying. Originality/value: First application of SVM to modeling the in-flight particle behaviors in plasma spraying.
Soft tissue volume gain around dental implants using autogenous subepithelial connective tissue grafts harvested from the lateral palate or tuberosity area. A randomized controlled clinical study

AIM To compare the soft tissue volume gain (VG) around single tooth implants with subepithelial connective tissue graft (SCTG) from either the lateral palate (LP) or from the tuberosity area (TA). METHODS Thirty-two patients with 36 implants with buccal volume deficiencies were randomly assigned to receive SCTG from LP (control group/CG) or TA (test group/TG). Clinical parameters were recorded. VG was evaluated by stereolithography (STL) image superimposition of two intraoral scans (baseline/BL and 3 months after surgery/FU-3). Descriptive analysis was performed for both groups, and for comparisons, Mann-Whitney U test was used. RESULTS In terms of VG values, no statistically significant differences were observed except for values at 6 and 7 mm apically to the healing abutment which favoured the TG. Mean values were 0.69 ± 0.23 mm for CG while TG obtained 0.79 ± 0.10 mm (p = .64). Regarding Keratinized tissue (KT) width statistical significant differences were found favouring TG, which obtained a gain of 0.83 ± 0.61 mm compared with 0.22 ± 0.48 mm for CG (p = .009). Pink esthetic scores resulted in mean values of 10.07 ± 2.19 for the CG, while TG obtained 9.15 ± 2.34. CONCLUSIONS Both procedures were effective in increasing soft tissue volume with no statistically significant differences. A longer follow-up is needed to confirm or refute these results.
Can Exposure to Online Conversations About Death and Dying Influence Death Competence? An Exploratory Study Within an Australian Massive Open Online Course

A Massive Open Online Course, Dying2Learn, was designed to foster community death conversations and strengthen community awareness of palliative care and death as a normal process. This exploratory study used a pre–post prospective design to determine if participation in Dying2Learn and exposure to online conversations about death and dying resulted in any significant influence on death competence in 134 participants who completed the Coping-with-Death-Scale both at the beginning and end of the course in 2016. Death competence refers to a range of attitudes and capabilities people have for dealing with death. Results at the end of the course indicated that engagement in Dying2Learn led to significant improvements in death competence scores over time (medium-to-large effect size). The positive impact was greater for those who completed more of the course, and effectiveness did not depend on sociodemographic characteristics. In conclusion, this study found that an online learning platform in the form of a Massive Open Online Course could engage community members in meaningful social discussion about death and dying, and that exposure to these conversations was beneficial for all participants regardless of previous exposure to death. Further exploration is required to determine whether this change in death competence will have an impact on participant’s behavior in the community regarding death conversations and preparedness.
RETRACTED ARTICLE: Mechanism of MALAT1 preventing apoptosis of vascular endothelial cells induced by oxygen–glucose deficiency and reoxidation

Abstract We, the Editors and Publisher of the journal Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology, have retracted the following article: Guoping Wang, Yuanbo Wu & Yuyou Zhu (2018) Mechanism of MALAT1 preventing apoptosis of vascular endothelial cells induced by oxygen–glucose deficiency and reoxidation. Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology, 46(sup1), 798–805, DOI: 10.1080/21691401.2018. 1436065 Since publication, the authors repeated some of their experiments and found that under the same conditions they could not repeat the results reported in this paper. In addition, concerns were raised regarding the high degrees of similarity with the following previously published paper: Jia-Wei Xin & Yu-gang Jiang (2017) Long noncoding RNA MALAT1 inhibits apoptosis induced by oxygen-glucose deprivation and reoxygenation in human brain microvascular endothelial cells, Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, 13(4), 1225–1234, DOI: 10.3892/etm.2017. 4095. As this directly impacts the integrity of the reported results and conclusions, the authors alerted the issue to the Editor and Publisher and all have agreed to retract the article to ensure correction of the scholarly record. We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions. The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.
Embodied Cognition and the Direct Induction of Affect as a Compliment to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

We make the case for the possible integration of affect experience induced via embodiment techniques with CBT for the treatment of emotional disorders in clinical settings. Theoretically we propose a possible integration of cognitive behavioural theory, neuroscience, embodied cognition and important processes of client change outcomes such as the therapeutic alliance to enhance client outcomes. We draw from evidence of bidirectional effects between embodiment modes of bottom-up (sensory-motor simulations giving rise to important basis of knowledge) and top-down (abstract mental representations of knowledge) processes such as CBT in psychotherapy. The paper first describes the dominance and success of CBT for the treatment of a wide range of clinical disorders. Some limitations of CBT, particularly for depression are also outlined. There is a growing body of evidence for the added value of experiential affect-focused interventions combined with CBT. Evidence for the embodied model of cognition and emotion is reviewed. Advantages of embodiment is highlighted as a complimentary process model to deepen the intensity and valence of affective experience. It is suggested that an integrated embodiment approach with CBT enhances outcomes across a wide range of emotional disorders. A description of our embodiment method integrated with CBT for inducing affective experience, emotional regulation, acceptance of unwanted emotions and emotional mastery is given. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of the therapeutic alliance as a critical component of the change process. The paper ends with a case study highlighting some clinical strategies that may aid the therapist to integrate embodiment techniques in CBT that can further explore in future research on affective experience in CBT for a wider range of clinical disorders.
Whole-Genome Sequence of the Metastatic PC3 and LNCaP Human Prostate Cancer Cell Lines

The bone metastasis-derived PC3 and the lymph node metastasis-derived LNCaP prostate cancer cell lines are widely studied, having been described in thousands of publications over the last four decades. Here, we report short-read whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and de novo assembly of PC3 (ATCC CRL-1435) and LNCaP (clone FGC; ATCC CRL-1740) at ∼70 × coverage. A known homozygous mutation in TP53 and homozygous loss of PTEN were robustly identified in the PC3 cell line, whereas the LNCaP cell line exhibited a larger number of putative inactivating somatic point and indel mutations (and in particular a loss of stop codon events). This study also provides preliminary evidence that loss of one or both copies of the tumor suppressor Capicua (CIC) contributes to primary tumor relapse and metastatic progression, potentially offering a treatment target for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Our work provides a resource for genetic, genomic, and biological studies employing two commonly-used prostate cancer cell lines.
The C3dg Fragment of Complement Is Superior to Conventional C3 as a Diagnostic Biomarker in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Introduction/objectives In 2012, hypocomplementemia was included in the classification criteria of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The suggested measurement of C3 or C4 often reflect disease activity poorly. Our objective was to establish an assay measuring C3dg, which is generated following complement activation, and to evaluate the assay in a cross-sectional SLE cohort. Method We included SLE patients (n = 169) and controls (n = 170) and developed a modified C3dg assay where C3dg fragments were separated from the large plasma proteins by polyethylene glycol (PEG), and the supernatant containing the C3dg fragment was used for analysis in an antibody-based sandwich-type assay. Gel permeation chromatography and western blotting were used to establish the optimal conditions for PEG precipitation. Results 16% PEG was optimal for separating C3dg from C3 and the larger protein fragments. The assay showed a high degree of stability when using EDTA plasma, and measurements correlated well with commercially available complement activation assays. SLE patients had higher concentrations in plasma of C3dg than controls (p < 0.05). ROC analysis showed that the C3dg activation fragment of C3 with an AUC of 0.96 (CI 0.94–0.98) was superior to C3 (AUC 0.52) in differentiating between patients and controls. Conclusion Our results present a modified assay for the measurement of C3dg. We demonstrate that C3dg was superior to conventional C3 measurements in discriminating SLE patients from controls. We suggest that C3dg should be considered as a complement activation measurement in the SLE classification criteria.