Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COMPARISON OF MORTALITY IN ALL PATIENTS ON DIALYSIS , PATIENTS ON DIALYSIS AWAITING TRANSPLANTATION , AND RECIPIENTS OF A FIRST CADAVERIC TRANSPLANT

A BSTRACT Background The extent to which renal allotransplantation — as compared with long-term dialysis — improves survival among patients with end-stage renal disease is controversial, because those selected for transplantation may have a lower base-line risk of death. Methods In an attempt to distinguish the effects of patient selection from those of transplantation itself, we conducted a longitudinal study of mortality in 228,552 patients who were receiving long-term dialysis for end-stage renal disease. Of these patients, 46,164 were placed on a waiting list for transplantation, 23,275 of whom received a first cadaveric transplant between 1991 and 1997. The relative risk of death and survival were assessed with time-dependent nonproportional-hazards analysis, with adjustment for age, race, sex, cause of end-stage renal disease, geographic region, time from first treatment for end-stage renal disease to placement on the waiting list, and year of initial placement on the list. Results Among the various subgroups, the standardized mortality ratio for the patients on dialysis who were awaiting transplantation (annual death rate, 6.3 per 100 patient-years) was 38 to 58 percent lower than that for all patients on dialysis (annual death rate, 16.1 per 100 patient-years). The relative risk of death during the first 2 weeks after transplantation was 2.8 times as high as that for patients on dialysis who had equal lengths of follow-up since placement on the waiting list, but at 18 months the risk was much lower (relative risk, 0.32; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.30 to 0.35; P<0.001). The likelihood of survival became equal in the two groups within 5 to 673 days after transplantation in all the subgroups of patients we examined. The long-term mortality rate was 48 to 82 percent lower among transplant recipients (annual death rate, 3.8 per 100 patient-years) than patients on the waiting list, with relatively larger benefits among patients who were 20 to 39 years old, white patients, and younger patients with diabetes. Conclusions Among patients with end-stage renal disease, healthier patients are placed on the waiting list for transplantation, and long-term survival is better among those on the waiting list who eventually undergo transplantation. (N Engl J Med 1999; 341:1725-30.)
Persistent Nav1.6 current at axon initial segments tunes spike timing of cerebellar granule cells

Cerebellar granule (CG) cells generate high‐frequency action potentials that have been proposed to depend on the unique properties of their voltage‐gated ion channels. To address the in vivo function of Nav1.6 channels in developing and mature CG cells, we combined the study of the developmental expression of Nav subunits with recording of acute cerebellar slices from young and adult granule‐specific Scn8a KO mice. Nav1.2 accumulated rapidly at early‐formed axon initial segments (AISs). In contrast, Nav1.6 was absent at early postnatal stages but accumulated at AISs of CG cells from P21 to P40. By P40–P65, both Nav1.6 and Nav1.2 co‐localized at CG cell AISs. By comparing Na+ currents in mature CG cells (P66–P74) from wild‐type and CG‐specific Scn8a KO mice, we found that transient and resurgent Na+ currents were not modified in the absence of Nav1.6 whereas persistent Na+ current was strongly reduced. Action potentials in conditional Scn8a KO CG cells showed no alteration in threshold and overshoot, but had a faster repolarization phase and larger post‐spike hyperpolarization. In addition, although Scn8a KO CG cells kept their ability to fire action potentials at very high frequency, they displayed increased interspike‐interval variability and firing irregularity in response to sustained depolarization. We conclude that Nav1.6 channels at axon initial segments contribute to persistent Na+ current and ensure a high degree of temporal precision in repetitive firing of CG cells.
Flow Cytometric Analysis of Respiratory Burst Activity in Phagocytes With Hydroethidine and 2′,7′‐Dichlorofluorescin

Hydroethidine (HE) and 2′,7′‐dichlorofluorescin (DCFH) were used for the flow cytometric measurement of reactive oxygen metabolites in leukocytes. Hydroethidine and DCFH were both rapidly oxidized in a cell‐free cuvette assay to ethidium bromide (EB) and 2′,7′‐dichlorofluorescein (DCF) by H2O2 and peroxidase, but not by H2O2 alone, while only HE was oxidized by KO2, a source of O‐ 2. Quiescent lymphocytes, monocytes, and neutrophils spontaneously oxidized HE to EB, while DCFH was only oxidized to a low degree. Neutrophils increased 6.9‐fold in EB red fluorescence and 12.5‐fold in DCF green fluorescence during the respiratory burst induced by phorbol 12‐myristate 13‐acetate or 6.1‐fold and 4.7‐fold, respectively, during the respiratory burst induced by Escherichia coll bacteria. The HE or DCFH oxidation during the respiratory burst, unlike the spontaneous HE oxidation, was not inhibitable by 10 mM NaN. indicating a non‐mitochondrial source of cellular oxidants during the respiratory burst such as NADPH oxidase, which produces O‐ 2. The oxidation of DCFH, but not of HE, was decreased in stimulated neutrophils, which were simultaneously loaded with HE and DCFH. Intracellular DCFH oxidation induced by incubation of resting neutrophils with extracellular H2O2 was not influenced by the presence of HE. This indicates that HE is oxidized at an earlier step in the reactive oxygen metabolism of neutrophils than DCFH, i.e., by early oxygen metabolites like O2 ‐, while DCFH is oxidized in part by H2O2 and phagosomal peroxidases. The differential oxidation of HE and DCFH during simultaneous cellular staining permits the analysis of up to three functionally different neutrophil populations in septic patients. This is of interest for the determination of disease‐related alterations of oxygen metabolism in quiescent and stimulated leukocytes.
EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO RULE EXTRACTION FROM MEDICAL DATA

In the paper the method called CGA based on a cooperating genetic algorithm is presented. The CGA is developed for searching a set of rules describing classes in classification problems on the basis of training examples. The details of the method, such as a schema of coding (a chromosome), and a fitness function are shortly described. The method is independent of the type of attributes and it allows choosing different evaluation functions. Developed method was tested using different benchmark data sets. Next, in order to evaluate the efficiency of CGA, it was tested using the Breast Cancer data set with 10 fold cross validation technique.
The arithmetic problem size effect in children: an event-related potential study

This study used for the first time event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the well-known arithmetic problem size effect in children. The electrophysiological correlates of this problem size effect have been well documented in adults, but such information in children is lacking. In the present study, 22 typically developing 12-year-olds were asked to solve single-digit addition problems of small (sum ≤ 10) and large problem size (sum > 10) and to speak the solution into a voice key while ERPs were recorded. Children displayed similar early and late components compared to previous adult studies on the problem size effect. There was no effect of problem size on the early components P1, N1, and P2. The peak amplitude of the N2 component showed more negative potentials on left and right anterior electrodes for large additions compared to small additions, which might reflect differences in attentional and working memory resources between large and small problems. The mean amplitude of the late positivity component which follows the N2, was significantly larger for large than for small additions at right parieto-occipital electrodes, in line with previous adult data. The ERPs of the problem size effect during arithmetic might be a useful neural marker for future studies on fact retrieval impairments in children with mathematical difficulties.
Prediction of Antimicrobial Activity of Synthetic Peptides by a Decision Tree Model

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial resistance is a persistent problem in the public health sphere. However, recent attempts to find effective substitutes to combat infections have been directed at identifying natural antimicrobial peptides in order to circumvent resistance to commercial antibiotics. This study describes the development of synthetic peptides with antimicrobial activity, created in silico by site-directed mutation modeling using wild-type peptides as scaffolds for these mutations. Fragments of antimicrobial peptides were used for modeling with molecular modeling computational tools. To analyze these peptides, a decision tree model, which indicated the action range of peptides on the types of microorganisms on which they can exercise biological activity, was created. The decision tree model was processed using physicochemistry properties from known antimicrobial peptides available at the Antimicrobial Peptide Database (APD). The two most promising peptides were synthesized, and antimicrobial assays showed inhibitory activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Colossomin C and colossomin D were the most inhibitory peptides at 5 μg/ml against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. The methods described in this work and the results obtained are useful for the identification and development of new compounds with antimicrobial activity through the use of computational tools.
Wnt and Hedgehog Are Critical Mediators of Cigarette Smoke-Induced Lung Cancer

Background Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world, and greater than 90% of lung cancers are cigarette smoke-related. Current treatment options are inadequate, because the molecular basis of cigarette-induced lung cancer is poorly understood. Methodology/Principal Findings Here, we show that human primary or immortalized bronchial epithelial cells exposed to cigarette smoke for eight days in culture rapidly proliferate, show anchorage-independent growth, and form tumors in nude mice. Using this model of the early stages of smoke-induced tumorigenesis, we examined the molecular changes leading to lung cancer. We observed that the embryonic signaling pathways mediated by Hedgehog and Wnt are activated by smoke. Pharmacological inhibition of these pathways blocked the transformed phenotype. Conclusions/Significance These experiments provide a model in which the early stages of smoke-induced tumorigenesis can be elicited, and should permit us to identify molecular changes driving this process. Results obtained so far indicate that smoke-induced lung tumors are driven by activation of two embryonic regulatory pathways, Hedgehog (Hh) and Wnt. Based on the current and emerging availability of drugs to inhibit Hh and Wnt signaling, it is possible that an understanding of the role of Hh and Wnt in lung cancer pathogenesis will lead to the development of new therapies.
TourViz: interactive visualization of connection pathways in large graphs

We present TourViz, a system that helps its users to interactively visualize and make sense in large network datasets. In particular, it takes as input a set of nodes the user specifies as of interest and presents the user with a visualization of connection subgraphs around these input nodes. Each connection subgraph contains good pathways that highlight succinct connections among a "close-by" group of input nodes. TourViz combines visualization with rich user interaction to engage and help the user to further understand the relations among the nodes of interest,by exploring their neighborhood on demand as well as modifying the set of interest nodes. We demonstrate TourViz's usage and benefits using the DBLP graph, consisting of authors and their co-authorship relations, while our system is designed generally to work with any kind of graph data. We will invite the audience to experiment with our system and comment on its usability, usefulness, and how our system can help with their research and improve the understanding of data in other domains.
Hydration of calcium aluminate cement blended with anhydrite

Calcium aluminate cements (CACs) are used in combination with calcium sulfates as binders in self-levelling mortars. The influence of commercial CAC/anhydrite ratio on the solid phase assemblage and pore solution at water to binder (w/b) ratios of 0·40 and 0·72 was investigated between 1·5 h and 91 d of hydration using a multi-method approach including x-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis and thermodynamic calculations. The reduction of the extent of hydration at the lower w/b ratio can be explained by a lack of water for complete hydration and lack of space. In the system with a CAC/anhydrite weight ratio of 1, ettringite and AH3 were the main hydration products, whereas in the case of a CAC/anhydrite ratio of 2·3, in addition to ettringite and AH3, monosulfate was present along with stratlingite and at a later age. In contrast to the thermodynamic modelling results, anhydrite persisted even at low calcium sulfate contents as the precipitation of AH3 around the anhydrite grains seemed to lead to.
Arbitrary Symbolism in Natural Language Revisited: When Word Forms Carry Meaning

Cognitive science has a rich history of interest in the ways that languages represent abstract and concrete concepts (e.g., idea vs. dog). Until recently, this focus has centered largely on aspects of word meaning and semantic representation. However, recent corpora analyses have demonstrated that abstract and concrete words are also marked by phonological, orthographic, and morphological differences. These regularities in sound-meaning correspondence potentially allow listeners to infer certain aspects of semantics directly from word form. We investigated this relationship between form and meaning in a series of four experiments. In Experiments 1–2 we examined the role of metalinguistic knowledge in semantic decision by asking participants to make semantic judgments for aurally presented nonwords selectively varied by specific acoustic and phonetic parameters. Participants consistently associated increased word length and diminished wordlikeness with abstract concepts. In Experiment 3, participants completed a semantic decision task (i.e., abstract or concrete) for real words varied by length and concreteness. Participants were more likely to misclassify longer, inflected words (e.g., “apartment”) as abstract and shorter uninflected abstract words (e.g., “fate”) as concrete. In Experiment 4, we used a multiple regression to predict trial level naming data from a large corpus of nouns which revealed significant interaction effects between concreteness and word form. Together these results provide converging evidence for the hypothesis that listeners map sound to meaning through a non-arbitrary process using prior knowledge about statistical regularities in the surface forms of words.
PROTEOLIPID PROTEIN: SYNTHESIS AND ASSEMBLY INTO QUAKING MOUSE MYELIN

The incorporation of radioactive glycine into the major myelin proteolipid protein isolated from whole brain and from purified myelin of Quaking mice and normal littermates was compared. In a typical experiment, four Quaking mice and four littermate controls were injected intracranially with 250 μCi [2‐3H]glycine and 25 μCi [U‐14C]glycine respectively. Three hours later, the eight mice were killed and their brains combined. Equivalent portions were taken for (1) chloroform‐methanol (2:1) extraction followed by ether precipitation of proteolipid from the brain and (2) myelin preparation. The 3H/14C ratios for the microsomes:, the major myelin proteolipid as well as the other non‐myelin proteolipids extracted from whole brain was approx 3.0. while the 3H/14C ratio for proteolipid protein in myelin was near 0.4. These findings were consistent for ages studied between 18 and 90 days. The results indicate that the synthesis of the major myelin proteolipid protein in the whole brain of Quaking mouse, as seen previously in our studies on basic protein, proceeds at a normal rate relative to microsomes but its incorporation into myelin is depressed. A working hypothesis of myelin membrane assembly is presented to account for the defect in the incorporation of these proteins into Quaking myelin.
Computing topological parameters of biological networks

UNLABELLED Rapidly increasing amounts of molecular interaction data are being produced by various experimental techniques and computational prediction methods. In order to gain insight into the organization and structure of the resultant large complex networks formed by the interacting molecules, we have developed the versatile Cytoscape plugin NetworkAnalyzer. It computes and displays a comprehensive set of topological parameters, which includes the number of nodes, edges, and connected components, the network diameter, radius, density, centralization, heterogeneity, and clustering coefficient, the characteristic path length, and the distributions of node degrees, neighborhood connectivities, average clustering coefficients, and shortest path lengths. NetworkAnalyzer can be applied to both directed and undirected networks and also contains extra functionality to construct the intersection or union of two networks. It is an interactive and highly customizable application that requires no expert knowledge in graph theory from the user. AVAILABILITY NetworkAnalyzer can be downloaded via the Cytoscape web site: http://www.cytoscape. org
Hospital rankings : a new challenge for MCDA and preference learning ?

The aim of this paper is to convince the MultiCriteria Decision Aid (MCDA) and Preference Learning communities to investigate and to contribute in the development of methodologies dedicated to hospital ranking. To do so, we present the French hospital ranking and show how these rankings can be built properly through two existing methods: decision tree and ELECTRE Tri.
Kinetics of Biosynthesis of Silver Nanoparticles Using Fusarium Oxysporum

The emergence of nanobiotechnology has exposed the greener methods of preparation and application. Many theoretical and experimental works have been conducted in the biosynthesis of various nanomaterials and nanocomposites. Biologically synthesised nanomaterials are exhibiting excellent, unique and optimised properties. Micro organisms play an important role in the detoxification of metals through the reduction of metal ions. This process can be exploited for biosynthesis of NPs. Experiments were conducted by varying the concentrations of silver ions for analysing the formation of silver nanoparticles by Fusarium Oxysporum. The analysis has been done for extracellular and intracellular in the growing cell and whole cell sysytems. Silver nanoparticles formed by Fusarium Oxysporum was found to be purely extracellular. In this paper, from the experimental analysis, an attempt is being made to suggest a mechanism and elucidate the kinetics for the formation of silver nanoparticles.
Impact of CPU load on video conferencing quality

It has been shown that there exist significant computational resources in user equipment deployed in enterprises, which are under-utilized most of the time. A new architecture was proposed in order to use these resources as media servers, in order to handle tasks such as video mixing, trans-coding, etc. This represents an economical and efficient alternative to MCU-based or P2P architectures. However, several questions arise from this approach: to which extent an office PC can be used as a platform for media server? How the dynamic characteristics of these PCs (in particular, CPU load) affect the quality of the video conference? In this paper, we set up a testbed for estimating the perceived quality of processed video streams and investigate the influence of CPU load. Our experiments demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of using commodity office hardware as a platform for media servers.
Identity-Based Encryption for Sensor Networks

In spite of several years of intense research, the area of security and cryptography in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) still has a number of open problems. On the other hand, the advent of identity-based encryption (IBE) has enabled a wide range of new cryptographic solutions. In this work, we argue that IBE is ideal for WSNs and vice versa. We discuss the synergy between the systems, describe how IBE can solve the key agreement problem in WSNs, and present some estimates of performance
Robust Degraded Face Recognition Using Enhanced Local Frequency Descriptor and Multi-scale Competition

Recognizing degraded faces from low resolution and blurred images are common yet challenging task. Local Frequency Descriptor (LFD) has been proved to be effective for this task yet it is extracted from a spatial neighborhood of a pixel of a frequency plane independently regardless of correlations between frequencies. In addition, it uses a fixed window size named single scale of short-term Frequency transform (STFT). To explore the frequency correlations and preserve low resolution and blur insensitive simultaneously, we propose Enhanced LFD in which information in space and frequency is jointly utilized so as to be more descriptive and discriminative than LFD. The multi-scale competition strategy that extracts multiple descriptors corresponding to multiple window sizes of STFT and take one corresponding to maximum confidence as the final recognition result. The experiments conducted on Yale and FERET databases demonstrate that promising results have been achieved by the proposed Enhanced LFD and multi-scale competition strategy.
Record Allocation for Minimizing Expected Retrieval Costs on Drum-Like Storage Devices

This paper examines the problem of distributing a set of equal-size records among the sectors of a drum-like storage device in order to exploit known access frequencies and reduce the average access time. A simple catenated search model is defined for which, the problem is shown to be NP-complete. Heuristics are then defined and analyzed in terms of worst-case bounds. It is shown that easily implemented highest-access-frequency-first assignment rules provide an average access time very close to optimal.
Owl: next generation system monitoring

As microarchitectural and system complexity grows, comprehending system behavior becomes increasingly difficult, and often requires obtaining and sifting through voluminous event traces or coordinating results from multiple, non-localized sources. Owl is a proposed framework that overcomes limitations faced by traditional performance counters and monitoring facilities in dealing with such complexity by pervasively deploying programmable monitoring elements throughout a system. The design exploits reconfigurable or programmable logic to realize hardware monitors located at event sources, such as memory buses. These monitors run and writeback results autonomously with respect to the CPU, mitigating the system impact of interrupt-driven monitoring or the need to communicate irrelevant events to higher levels of the system. The monitors are designed to snoop any kind of system transaction, e.g., within the core, on a bus, across the wire, or within I/O devices