Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Building personal and professional resources of resilience and agility in the healthcare workplace.

This article describes the rationale, implementation and results of a pilot study evaluating the personal and organizational impact of an educational intervention on the stress of health team members. The compelling imperative for the project was to find a positive and effective way to address the documented stress levels of healthcare workers. Pilot study of oncology staff (n=29) and healthcare leaders (n=15) exploring the impact of a positive coping approach on Personal and Organizational Quality Assessment-Revised (POQA-R) scores at baseline and 7 months using paired t-tests. Personal and organizational indicators of stress decreased in the expected directions in both groups over the time intervals. The majority of POQA-R categories were statistically significantly improved in the oncology staff, and many of the categories were statistically significantly improved in the leadership group. The findings from this project demonstrate that stress and its symptoms are problematic issues for hospital and ambulatory clinic staff as evidenced by baseline measures of distress. Further, a workplace intervention was feasible and effective in promoting positive strategies for coping and enhancing well-being, personally and organizationally.
Interaction of the WD 40 Domain of a Myoinositol Polyphosphate 5-Phosphatase with SnRK 1 Links Inositol , Sugar , and Stress Signaling 1 [ W ] [ OA ]

In plants, myoinositol signaling pathways have been associated with several stress, developmental, and physiological processes, but the regulation of these pathways is largely unknown. In our efforts to better understand myoinositol signaling pathways in plants, we have found that the WD40 repeat region of a myoinositol polyphosphate 5-phosphatase (5PTase13; At1g05630) interacts with the sucrose nonfermenting-1-related kinase (SnRK1.1) in the yeast two-hybrid system and in vitro. Plant SnRK1 proteins (also known as AKIN10/11) have been described as central integrators of sugar, metabolic, stress, and developmental signals. Using mutants defective in 5PTase13, we show that 5PTase13 can act as a regulator of SnRK1 activity and that regulation differs with different nutrient availability. Specifically, we show that under low-nutrient or -sugar conditions, 5PTase13 acts as a positive regulator of SnRK1 activity. In contrast, under severe starvation conditions, 5PTase13 acts as a negative regulator of SnRK1 activity. To delineate the regulatory interaction that occurs between 5PTase13 and SnRK1.1, we used a cell-free degradation assay and found that 5PTase13 is required to reduce the amount of SnRK1.1 targeted for proteasomal destruction under low-nutrient conditions. This regulation most likely involves a 5PTase13-SnRK1.1 interaction within the nucleus, as a 5PTase13:green fluorescent protein was localized to the nucleus. We also show that a loss of function in 5PTase13 leads to nutrient level-dependent reduction of root growth, along with abscisic acid (ABA) and sugar insensitivity. 5ptase13 mutants accumulate less inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate in response to sugar stress and have alterations in ABA-regulated gene expression, both of which are consistent with the known role of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate in ABA-mediated signaling. We propose that by forming a protein complex with SnRK1.1 protein, 5PTase13 plays a regulatory role linking inositol, sugar, and stress signaling.
Adaptive regularization and discretization of bang-bang optimal control problems

In the article, Tikhonov regularization of control-constrained optimal control problems is investigated. Typically the solutions of such problems exhibit a so-called bang-bang structure. We develop a parameter choice rule that adaptively selects the Tikhonov regularization parameter depending on a-posteriori computable quantities. We prove that this choice leads to optimal convergence rates with respect to the discretization parameter. The article is complemented by numerical results.
BIOCHEMICAL AND HORMONAL EVALUATION OF CISSUS QUADRANGULARIS IN ACCELERATING HEALING PROCESS OF BONE FRACTURE: A CLINICAL STUDY

Repair of bone defects secondary to trauma, osteoporosis, osteomyelitis and fracture nonunion poses a significant problem for many orthop edicians. As a part of our continuing screening of biologically acti ve natural fractu re healing accelerating agents, drug Asthishrunkhala reported to contain phytoestrogenic steroids, ascorbic acid, carotene, calcium, and anabolic steroids and shown to heal the bone fractures in sev eral in vivo studies. Therefore, a random controlled study was conducted with the aim t o evaluate the effective remedial therapy to accelerate bone healing so as to rehabilitate the individual as early as possible . Fracture healing was assessed with biochemical parameters like seru m calcium, seru m phosphorus and a hormonal parameter PTH (parathyroid hormone) and their values were eval uated during fracture healing. From the assessed data it was found that bone healing process was accelerated as serum level of PTH Hormone have shown increasing trend during the period of 31 days and it was at its peak on 21 st day from inception of administration of drug; but levels of calcium and phosphorus were remain maintained during period of fr acture healing. In control group it was ob served that serial values of Serum Calcium, Serum Phosphorus and PTH Hormone were not having significant fluctuations. This indicates that the process of fracture healing or osteoblastic activity was initiated earlier in trial group . Hence study concludes that the drug Cissus quadran gularis is having influence on accelerating the fracture healing process and further it helps in reducing period of immobilization and
Nasal-Associated Lymphoid Tissue Is a Site of Long-Term Virus-Specific Antibody Production following Respiratory Virus Infection of Mice

ABSTRACT Nasal immunoglobulin A provides an initial defense against inhaled respiratory pathogens. However, it is not known whether the nasal-associated lymphoid tissues (NALT) are able to mount an effective long-lasting pathogen-specific immune response, nor is it known whether functional differences exist between the organized NALT (O-NALT) and the diffuse NALT lining the nasal passages (D-NALT). Here we show that although both the O-NALT and the D-NALT are capable of producing virus-specific antibody in response to influenza virus infection, the frequency of specific antibody-forming cells in the D-NALT is much greater than the frequency observed in the O-NALT. Furthermore, we show that the D-NALT but not the O-NALT is the site of long-term virus-specific humoral immunity which lasts for the life of the animal. These results indicate that the D-NALT is not only the major effector site of the NALT but also the site of local long-term specific antibody production.
Relationships between the Polymorphism of Blood Proteins and Some Reproduction Traits in Norduz Goats

The aim of this study was to determine the influences of polymorph systems such as hemoglobin and transferrin types on some the reproduction traits in Norduz goats. The material of this study consisted of 65 Norduz goats. The polymorphism of hemoglobin and transferrin phenotypes of Norduz goats were determined. Blood proteins were analyzed through horizontal starch gel electrophoresis. It was found that the hemoglobin and transferrin types were controlled by two allel genes (HbA and HbB; TfA and TfB) in the goats. The phenotypes of HbAA, HbBB and HbAB; TfAA, TfBB and TfAB were observed in the population. Hemoglobin and transferrin gene frequencies were 0.73 for HbA and 0.27 for HbB; 0.80 for TfA and 0.20 for TfB. Hemoglobin and transferrin genotype percentage frequencies were 51% for HbAA, 4% for HbBB and 45% for HbAB; 65% for TfAA, 4% for TfBB and 31% for TfAB. According to the analyses of variance, the influences of hemoglobin and transferrin types on the gestation efficiency were not significant. However, the highest gestation efficiencies were obtained from HbBB and TfBB types with the averages of 16.05±1.75 and 13.67±3.51 kg, whereas the lowest gestation efficiencies were obtained from HbAB and TfAB types with the averages of 9.94±0.82 and 9.67±0.60 kg, respectively. In conclusion, there were polymorphism in hemoglobin and transferrin types in
Throughput modeling analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF mechanism in multi-hop non-saturated wireless ad-hoc networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols have a large impact on the system performance for wireless ad hoc networks. Because of the limitations of existing analytical models for ad hoc networks, many researchers have to study the impact of MAC protocols via discrete simulations. In this paper, in order to improve this disadvantage, we provided an analytical model to compute of 802.11 DCF wireless multi-hop networkspsila throughput, with the assumption of finite number of terminals. This analytical model considers wireless network MAC layer in multi-hop non-saturated situation and also quantitatively computes the function of packet discard ratio factor. The simulation result shows that even in multi-hop situation, this network throughput model is still matching well with the actual wireless Ad-Hoc networks.
Analysis of Multi-Transmitting Formula for Absorbing Boundary Conditions

In this paper, we analyze the multi-transmitting formula (MTF) proposed by Liao et al [19]. From the computed reflection coefficients for the fully discrete MTF boundary conditions, we suggest choices for the artificial wave propagation speed, which are different from Liao’s original choice. Theoretical and numerical studies for various incidence angles demonstrate that the suggested choices effectively reduce spurious reflections.
High-speed parallel very large scale integration architecture for global stereo matching

Abstract. Although stereo matching algorithms based on beliefpropagation (BP) tend to show excellent matching performance,their huge computational complexity has been the major barrier toreal-time applications. In this light, we propose a parallel very largescale integration (VLSI) architecture for BP computation, which hasonly simple integer operations and shows low matching error rate forthe Middlebury database. © 2008 SPIE and IS&T. DOI: 10.1117/1.2892680 1 Introduction Stereo matching algorithms ﬁnd corresponding points in apair of images to locate 3-D positions. They can be classi-ﬁed into either local or global matching approaches. 1 Localapproaches, like correlation and dynamic programmingmethods, deal only with subimages. These approaches havethe advantage of real-time speed, 2,3 but tend to producehigh errors. In contrast, the global approaches, like graphcuts and belief propagations pqBPs , 4 deal with full images.These approaches have the advantage of low errors, buttend to execute huge computational loads. In real-time ap-plications, like robot vision, the stereo matching systemshould be compact and fast. In this context, we present avery large scale integration VLSI architecture for stereomatching with BP.
On interval-valued possibilistic clustering with a generalized objective function

Representing different types of uncertainty present in data is an important problem in developing machine learning algorithms. In this paper we focus on objective function-based fuzzy clustering methods, and propose an interval-valued extension of an approach based on a general objective function. In the model, both membership and possibilistic typicality values are incorporated to overcome various problems of previous clustering approaches. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposals, we perform numerical experiments on eight different fuzzy-possibilistic clustering methods and three data-sets to evaluate the performance in a binary classification problem. We find that the interval-valued extension offers improved performance compared to various approaches from the possibilistic clustering literature.
Optical coherence tomography in conjunction with bronchoscopy.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility of and the potential for using optical coherence tomography in conjunction with conventional bronchoscopy in the evaluation of the airways. METHODS This was a pilot study based on an ex vivo experimental model involving three animals: one adult New Zealand rabbit and two Landrace pigs. An optical coherence tomography imaging catheter was inserted through the working channel of a flexible bronchoscope in order to reach the distal trachea of the animals. Images of the walls of the trachea were systematically taken along its entire length, from the distal to the proximal portion. RESULTS The imaging catheter was easily adapted to the working channel of the bronchoscope. High-resolution images of cross sections of the trachea were taken in real time, precisely delineating microstructures, such as the epithelium, submucosa, and cartilage, as well as the adventitia of the anterior and lateral tracheal walls. The corresponding layers of the epithelium, mucosa, and cartilage were clearly differentiated. The mucosa, submucosa, and trachealis muscle were clearly identified in the posterior wall. CONCLUSIONS It is feasible to use an optical coherence tomography imaging catheter in combination with a flexible bronchoscope. Optical coherence tomography produces high-resolution images that reveal the microanatomy of the trachea, including structures that are typically seen only on images produced by conventional histology.
Highly Flexible Silver Nanowire Electrodes for Shape‐Memory Polymer Light‐Emitting Diodes

Shape-memory polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) using a new silver nanowire/polymer electrode are reported. The electrode can be stretched by up to 16% with only a small increase in sheet resistance. Large deformation shape change and recovery of the PLEDs to various bistable curvatures result in minimal loss of electroluminescence performance.
CFP-10 from Mycobacterium tuberculosis Selectively Activates Human Neutrophils through a Pertussis Toxin-Sensitive Chemotactic Receptor

ABSTRACT Upon infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, neutrophils are massively recruited to the lungs, but the role of these cells in combating the infection is poorly understood. Through a type VII secretion system, M. tuberculosis releases a heterodimeric protein complex, containing a 6-kDa early secreted antigenic target (ESAT-6) and a 10-kDa culture filtrate protein (CFP-10), that is essential for virulence. Whereas the ESAT-6 component possesses multiple virulence-related activities, no direct biological activity of CFP-10 has been shown, and CFP-10 has been described as a chaperone protein for ESAT-6. We here show that the ESAT-6:CFP-10 complex induces a transient release of Ca2+ from intracellular stores in human neutrophils. Surprisingly, CFP-10 rather than ESAT-6 was responsible for triggering the Ca2+ response, in a pertussis toxin-sensitive manner, suggesting the involvement of a G-protein-coupled receptor. In line with this, the response was accompanied by neutrophil chemotaxis and activation of the superoxide-producing NADPH-oxidase. Neutrophils were unique among leukocytes in responding to CFP-10, as monocytes and lymphocytes failed to produce a Ca2+ signal upon stimulation with the M. tuberculosis protein. Hence, CFP-10 may contribute specifically to neutrophil recruitment and activation during M. tuberculosis infection, representing a novel biological role for CFP-10 in the ESAT-6:CFP-10 complex, beyond the previously described chaperone function.
Roles of prefrontal cortex and paraventricular thalamus in affective and mechanical components of visceral nociception

Abstract Visceral pain represents a major clinical challenge in the management of many gastrointestinal disorders, eg, pancreatitis. However, cerebral neurobiological mechanisms underlying visceral nociception are poorly understood. As a representative model of visceral nociception, we applied cerulein hyperstimulation in C57BL6 mice to induce acute pancreatitis and performed a behavioral test battery and c-Fos staining of brains. We observed a specific pain phenotype and a significant increase in c-Fos immunoreactivity in the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT), the periaqueductal gray, and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Using neuronal tracing, we observed projections of the PVT to cortical layers of the mPFC with contacts to inhibitory GABAergic neurons. These inhibitory neurons showed more activation after cerulein treatment suggesting thalamocortical “feedforward inhibition” in visceral nociception. The activity of neurons in pancreatitis-related pain centers was pharmacogenetically modulated by designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs, selectively and cell type specifically expressed in target neurons using adeno-associated virus-mediated gene transfer. Pharmacogenetic inhibition of PVT but not periaqueductal gray neurons attenuated visceral pain and induced an activation of the descending inhibitory pain pathway. Activation of glutamatergic principle neurons in the mPFC, but not inhibitory neurons, also reversed visceral nociception. These data reveal novel insights into central pain processing that underlies visceral nociception and may trigger the development of novel, potent centrally acting analgesic drugs.
Deep Learning for Risk Analysis of Specific Cardiovascular Diseases Using Environmental Data and Outpatient Records

Cardiovascular diseases are known to be a category of diseases related to heart or blood vessels and ranked the top two and three among ten leading causes of death in Taiwan in 2011, respectively. In this study, environmental and outpatient records within Taichung Area are utilized for risk analysis of four specific categories of cardiovascular diseases using deep learning approach. Autoencoder and Softmax are employed for feature extraction and classification. The output of Softmax for each sample is interpreted as the risk of these four specific categories of cardiovascular diseases. Further analysis is done to unveil the trends with respect to the factors of gender, age, region, and month.
Mini Nutritional Assessment in patients with Parkinson's disease: correlation between worsening of the malnutrition and increasing number of disease-years

Abstract Objective: To monitor the nutritional status of patients with Parkinson's disease using the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) questionnaire. Patients and methods: This was a 3-year longitudinal study conducted in a national referral centre for Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. The cohort included 61 Parkinson's disease patients, 37 men and 24 women, mean age of 70.5 ± 5.5 years, mean duration of disease 9 ± 6.3 years; 35 patients were followed-up after 3 years. Results: MNA score diminished from 24.9 ± 1.6 to 24 ± 2.5 (P = 0.02); the proportion of patients at risk of malnutrition increased from 22.9% to 34.3%. A linear correlation was observed between MNA score and the duration of disease (P = 0.0096). The dietary assessment subscore significantly diminished (8.6 versus 8.1; P = 0.0009) as did body mass index (25.9 ± 3.5 kg/m2 versus 27.1 ± 3.1 kg/m2; P = 0.001). Conclusions: The evaluation of nutritional status should be part of the routine work-up of a Parkinson's disease patient. Dietary education should be included amongst the therapeutic measures designed to improve the general conditions in Parkinson's disease.
BDDs Strike Back (in AI Planning)

The cost-optimal track of the international planning competition in 2014 has seen an unexpected outcome. Different to the precursing competition in 2011, where explicit-state heuristic search planning scored best, advances in the state-set exploration with BDDs showed a significant lead. In this paper we review the outcome of the competition, briefly looking into the internals of the competing systems.
Not Too Big, Not Too Small: A Goldilocks Approach To Sample Size Selection

We present a Bayesian adaptive design for a confirmatory trial to select a trial’s sample size based on accumulating data. During accrual, frequent sample size selection analyses are made and predictive probabilities are used to determine whether the current sample size is sufficient or whether continuing accrual would be futile. The algorithm explicitly accounts for complete follow-up of all patients before the primary analysis is conducted. We refer to this as a Goldilocks trial design, as it is constantly asking the question, “Is the sample size too big, too small, or just right? ” We describe the adaptive sample size algorithm, describe how the design parameters should be chosen, and show examples for dichotomous and time-to-event endpoints.
IDO: Intelligent Data Outsourcing with Improved RAID Reconstruction Performance in Large-Scale Data Centers

Dealing with disk failures has become an increasingly common task for system administrators in the face of high disk failure rates in large-scale data centers consisting of hundreds of thousands of disks. Thus, achieving fast recovery from disk failures in general and high online RAID-reconstruction performance in particular has become crucial. To address the problem, this paper proposes IDO (Intelligent Data Outsourcing), a proactive and zone-based optimization, to significantly improve on-line RAID-reconstruction performance. IDO moves popular data zones that are proactively identified in the normal state to a surrogate set at the onset of reconstruction. Thus, IDO enables most, if not all, user I/O requests to be serviced by the surrogate set instead of the degraded set during reconstruction. Extensive trace-driven experiments on our lightweight prototype implementation of IDO demonstrate that, compared with the existing state-of-the-art reconstruction approaches WorkOut and VDF, IDO simultaneously speeds up the reconstruction time and the average user response time. Moreover, IDO can be extended to improving the performance of other background RAID support tasks, such as re-synchronization, RAID reshape and disk scrubbing.
A 5‐year venom immunotherapy protocol with 50 μg maintenance dose: safety and efficacy in school children

To cite this article: Konstantinou GN, Manoussakis E, Douladiris N, Hatziioannou A, Giavi S, Saxoni‐Papageorgiou P, Papadopoulos NG. A 5‐yr venom immunotherapy protocol with 50 μg maintenance dose: safety and efficacy in school children. Pediatric Allergy Immunology 2011; 22: 393–397.
Investigating the Usability of Alkali Lignin as an Additive in Polysulfone Ultrafiltration Membranes

The effects of natural and synthetic polymer additives on the properties of ultrafiltration membranes were studied. The use of NaOH to remove the residual additive remaining in the membranes during coagulation was also investigated, as was the effect of NaOH post-treatment relative to membrane performance. To evaluate the residual additives present, ATR-FTIR was used. Contact-angle analysis and water-absorption experiments were used to examine the hydrophilic properties of the prepared membranes. Membranes modified with lignin (Lig) were found to absorb more water (94% water uptake) than other membranes. In general, the contact angles were found to be low for membranes treated with NaOH. Membrane permeability was greatest in lignin_polysulfone (Lig_PSf), followed by polyvinylpyrrolidone_polysulfone (PVP_PSf), and with polyethylene glycol_polysulfone (PEG_PSf) the least permeable, similar to the trend observed in water uptake. A ‘Robeson plot’ analogue showed that Lig_PSf membranes had high separation factors regardless of the size of the solute being rejected. This study indicates the feasibility of using cheap, readily available additives to increase the performance of membranes.