Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quercetin and Green Tea Extract Supplementation Downregulates Genes Related to Tissue Inflammatory Responses to a 12-Week High Fat-Diet in Mice

Quercetin (Q) and green tea extract (E) are reported to counter insulin resistance and inflammation and favorably alter fat metabolism. We investigated whether a mixture of E + Q (EQ) could synergistically influence metabolic and inflammation endpoints in a high-fat diet (HFD) fed to mice. Male C57BL/6 mice (n = 40) were put on HFD (fat = 60%kcal) for 12 weeks and randomly assigned to Q (25 mg/kg of body weight (BW)/day), E (3 mg of epigallocatechin gallate/kg BW/day), EQ, or control groups for four weeks. At 16 weeks, insulin sensitivity was measured via the glucose tolerance test (GTT), followed by area-under-the-curve (AUC) estimations. Plasma cytokines and quercetin were also measured, along with whole genome transcriptome analysis and real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) on adipose, liver, and skeletal muscle tissues. Univariate analyses were conducted via analysis of variance (ANOVA), and whole-genome expression profiles were examined via gene set enrichment. At 16 weeks, plasma quercetin levels were higher in Q and EQ groups vs. the control and E groups (p < 0.05). Plasma cytokines were similar among groups (p > 0.05). AUC estimations for GTT was 14% lower for Q vs. E (p = 0.0311), but non-significant from control (p = 0.0809). Genes for cholesterol metabolism and immune and inflammatory response were downregulated in Q and EQ groups vs. control in adipose tissue and soleus muscle tissue. These data support an anti-inflammatory role for Q and EQ, a result best captured when measured with tissue gene downregulation in comparison to changes in plasma cytokine levels.
Formal Methods for Service Composition

Current approaches to service composition range from industrial standards (like BPEL and OWL-S) to formal methods (like Petri nets and process algebras). In this paper, we survey a number of such approaches and compare them with respect to a carefully selected set of characteristics (like exception handling and quality of services). We conclude that formal methods, often including tool support, are ideal to assist designers and developers because their use leads to increased confidence in the obtained compositions.
Epidemiological Studies of Life Change and Illness

Currently popular methodologies in life changes and illness research are presented in some detail. Selected examples of epidemiological studies utilizing these methodologies are briefly reviewed. Examples of both retrospective and prospective investigations of life change and illness are given. Discussed in the chapter are the author's views as to limitations of the epidemiologic method and probable directions of future research in efforts to clarify etiologic mechanisms along the pathway between subjects' recent life changes and their subsequent susceptibility to illness.
Integrated primary care: a systematic review of program characteristics.

The integration of behavioral health services into primary care medical settings may be part of the solution to the fragmented health care system currently found in the United States. Although integrated primary care (IPC) is implemented in various locations across the United States, little information is available about how IPC is specifically practiced. Using a systematic review design, we extracted data from 76 articles to examine 6 categories of IPC program characteristics, including collaboration practices (e.g., shared decision-making, written communication, hallway conversations), program models, behavioral health interventions, behavioral health training and supervision, behavioral health provider type, and setting. Findings show that most IPC programs include psychoeducation, medication, follow-up contact, psychotherapy, and at least 1 care management strategy as part of treatment. Fewer than half of researchers report communication between providers, and even fewer report collaboration as a "shared decision making process. " A third of researchers report training and/or supervising behavioral health providers to work in an IPC program, and a fourth report recruiting nurses as behavioral health providers. Of all the studies, family-based interventions were used in 1. We recommend that future researchers report more information about collaboration processes as well as training and supervision of behavioral health providers. We also recommend that researchers develop IPC programs that involve family members in treatment and better implement theory into future IPC programs to support conceptualization and replication of IPC program models.
Normalized Online Learning

We introduce online learning algorithms which are independent of feature scales, proving regret bounds dependent on the ratio of scales existent in the data rather than the absolute scale. This has several useful effects: there is no need to pre-normalize data, the test-time and test-space complexity are reduced, and the algorithms are more robust.
Mumps outbreak in a tribal population from the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India

A cluster of parotitis cases (n = 13) were observed in a tribal population of Vansda village from the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India between 20th and 22nd week of 2016. Primary information was received by the local Infectious Disease Surveillance Program team, and subsequently field investigations were carried out in the affected area. Active surveillance was conducted till twice the incubation period from onset of the last surveyed case. For the laboratory investigations, 19 serum samples were collected from 11‐suspected cases and their close contacts (n = 8). All samples were transported within 12 h on icepacks to the main laboratory at Pune. Majority of the suspected mumps cases were children except four adults. Mumps infection was confirmed in 8 of 11 suspected cases with post‐onset ranging from 28 to 43 days and none from the close contacts. Both mumps specific IgM and IgG antibodies were detected in nine cases (including one equivocal) and single contact (equivocal result). Overall, ten cases and eight contacts (including one equivocal) showed mumps specific IgG antibodies. Present investigation provides information about the characteristics of mumps outbreak in a tribal community that resides in the remote areas. In addition, introduction of mumps containing vaccine in the tribal population may have added advantages in the tribal health program.
RNA Aptamer-Based Functional Ligands of the Neurotrophin Receptor, TrkB

Many cell surface signaling receptors, such as the neurotrophin receptor, TrkB, have emerged as potential therapeutic targets for diverse diseases. Reduced activation of TrkB in particular is thought to contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. Unfortunately, development of therapeutic reagents that selectively activate particular cell surface receptors such as TrkB has proven challenging. Like many cell surface signaling receptors, TrkB is internalized upon activation; in this proof-of-concept study, we exploited this fact to isolate a pool of nuclease-stabilized RNA aptamers enriched for TrkB agonists. One of the selected aptamers, C4-3, was characterized with recombinant protein-binding assays, cell-based signaling and functional assays, and, in vivo in a seizure model in mice. C4-3 binds the extracellular domain of TrkB with high affinity (KD ∼2 nM) and exhibits potent TrkB partial agonistic activity and neuroprotective effects in cultured cortical neurons. In mice, C4-3 activates TrkB upon infusion into the hippocampus; systemic administration of C4-3 potentiates kainic acid-induced seizure development. We conclude that C4-3 is a potentially useful therapeutic agent for neurodegenerative diseases in which reduced TrkB activation has been implicated. We anticipate that the cell-based aptamer selection approach used here will be broadly applicable to the identification of aptamer-based agonists for a variety of cell-surface signaling receptors.
Cognitive decline after hospitalization in a community population of older persons

Objective: To test the hypothesis that hospitalization in old age is associated with subsequent cognitive decline. Methods: As part of a longitudinal population-based cohort study, 1,870 older residents of an urban community were interviewed at 3-year intervals for up to 12 years. The interview included a set of brief cognitive tests from which measures of global cognition, episodic memory, and executive function were derived. Information about hospitalization during the observation period was obtained from Medicare records. Results: During a mean of 9.3 years, 1,335 of 1,870 persons (71.4%) were hospitalized at least once. In a mixed-effects model adjusted for age, sex, race, and education, the global cognitive score declined a mean of 0.031 unit per year before the first hospitalization compared with 0.075 unit per year thereafter, a more than 2.4-fold increase. The posthospital acceleration in cognitive decline was also evident on measures of episodic memory (3.3-fold increase) and executive function (1.7-fold increase). The rate of cognitive decline after hospitalization was not related to the level of cognitive function at study entry (r = 0.01, p = 0.88) but was moderately correlated with rate of cognitive decline before hospitalization (r = 0.55, p = 0.021). More severe illness, longer hospital stay, and older age were each associated with faster cognitive decline after hospitalization but did not eliminate the effect of hospitalization. Conclusion: In old age, cognitive functioning tends to decline substantially after hospitalization even after controlling for illness severity and prehospital cognitive decline.
Assessment of a professional development programme for music educators

A professional development programme for music educators was designed and administered to include institutional and personal professional strategies for the enhancement and growth of music teachers’ knowledge base and actions. Supervisors and targeted practitioners in a large public school system built an innovative programme, applying current strategies from the music education literature of successful practices to develop a music curriculum for kindergarten-through-12th grades, establish music technology in classrooms, teach music literacy and composition techniques, enhance assessment of teaching and learning, apply reflective practice and staff development models, and mentor or peer coach music practitioners in at-risk schools. Quantitative and qualitative assessments indicated evidence of enhancements and increases in teachers’ knowledge base, teaching skills, and overall professional development as music educators. The results also revealed productive practices in professional development for the urban school setting which may assist other researchers of continuing teacher education.
Probabilistic framework for segmenting people under occlusion

In this paper we address the problem of segmenting foreground regions corresponding to a group of people given models of their appearance that were initialized before occlusion. We present a general framework that uses maximum likelihood estimation to estimate the best arrangement for people in terms of 2D translation that yields a segmentation for the foreground region. Given the segmentation result we conduct occlusion reasoning to recover relative depth information and we show how to utilize this depth information in the same segmentation framework. We also present a more practical solution for the segmentation problem that is online to avoid searching an exponential space of hypothesis. The person model is based on segmenting the body into regions in order to spatially localize the color-features corresponding to the way people are dressed. Modeling these regions involves modeling their appearance (color distributions) as well us their spatial distribution with respect to the body. We use a non-parametric approach bused on kernel density estimation to represent the color distribution of each region and therefore we do not restrict the clothing to be of uniform color instead it can be any mixture of colors and/or patterns. We also present a method to automatically initialize these models and learn them before the occlusion.
Nonnegative matrix factorization common spatial pattern in brain machine interface

Fast and accurate discrimination of Electroencephalography (EEG) data is necessary for controlling brain machine interface. This paper introduces a novel method to discriminate 2-class motor imagery states (left and right hand) using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), common spatial pattern (CSP) and random forest. Conventionally CSP is used after extracting frequency band segment of EEG signal, which is called bandpass-filtered CSP (BPCSP). Especially filter bank CSP (FBCSP) has been extensively used to extract feature vectors from EEG data. However in these methods, the range of frequency band needed to be specified in advance and the performance depends on the selected frequency band. Our new method can decide the frequency band automatically by using NMF (NMFCSP). After the feature vectors were extracted from EEG data, random forests (RF) method was adopted as a classification algorithm. The mean accuracy rate of 2-class classifier using NMFCSP was 78.8±3.27%. This is higher than the accuracy rate of BPCSP (64.4±8.53%) and FBCSP (68.4±6.81%).
Integrating Fingerprint Verification into the Smart Card-Based Healthcare Information System

As VLSI technology has been improved, a smart card employing 32-bit processors has been released, and more personal information such as medical, financial data can be stored in the card. Thus, it becomes important to protect personal information stored in the card. Verification of the card holder's identity using a fingerprint has advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and passwords. However, the computational workload of fingerprint verification is much heavier than that of the typical PIN-based solution. In this paper, we consider three strategies to implement fingerprint verification in a smart card environment and how to distribute the modules of fingerprint verification between the smart card and the card reader. We first evaluate the number of instructions of each step of a typical fingerprint verification algorithm, and estimate the execution time of several cryptographic algorithms to guarantee the security/privacy of the fingerprint data transmitted in the smart card with the client-server environment. Based on the evaluation results, we analyze each scenario with respect to the security level and the real-time execution requirements in order to implement fingerprint verification in the smart card with the client-server environment.
DESTPRE: a data-driven approach to destination prediction for taxi rides

With the wide use of mobile devices, predicting the destination of moving vehicles has become an increasingly important problem for location based recommendation systems and destination-based advertising. Most existing approaches are based on various Markov chain models, in which the historical trajectories are used to train the model and the top-k most probable destinations are returned. We identify certain limitations of the previous approaches. Instead, we propose a new data-driven framework, called DestPre, which is not based on a probabilistic model, but directly operates on the trajectories and makes the prediction. We make use of only historic trajectories, without individual identity information. Our design of DestPre, although simple, is a result of several useful observations from the real trajectory data. DestPre involves an index based on Bucket PR Quadtree and Minwise hashing, for efficiently retrieving similar trajectories, and a clustering on destinations for predictions. By incorporating some additional ideas, we show that the prediction accuracy can be further improved. We have conducted extensive experiments on real Beijing Taxi dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DestPre.
Analysis of atrial fibrillation Laplacian potential maps using spatial independent component analysis

A novel methodology that uses spatial independent component analysis (SICA) to study atria fibrillation (AF) was proposed. Component patterns and their associated time course were extracted from Laplacian potential maps using SICA. Simulation test patterns and potential maps were generated and used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. It was found that, the time courses that are extracted by SICA could review multiple activations in the simulated potential maps. Additionally, activation duration and number of activations are defined from the extracted time course. Experiment was conducted on eight open chest canines. During sustained AF, the activation durations increased 56.10% after infusion of Procainamide. On the other hand, the number of activation and the activation block numbers decreased from 2.48plusmn0. 31 to 1.29plusmn0. 19 and from 8.96plusmn0. 52 to 6.41plusmn1. 28, respectively. The results indicate that when AF occurs, there are multiple wavelets activated spontaneously around the periphery of the atrium. After Procainamide infusion, the numbers of wavelet and the numbers of activation block decreased. These results match the current knowledge of AF and indicate that the proposed technique has significant potential in the analysis of atria fibrillation. Studies will be conducted in the future to further validate its usefulness in clinical diagnosis.
Fuzzy inference systems applied to LV substation load estimation

This paper describes a system for estimating load curves at low-voltage (LV) substations. The system is built by the aggregation of individual fuzzy inference systems of the Takagi-Sugeno type. The model was developed from actual measurements forming a base of raw data of consumer behavior. This database allowed one to build large test and training sets of simulated LV substations, which led to the development of the fuzzy system. The results are compared in terms of accuracy with the ones obtained with a previous artificial neural network approach, with better performance.
Linear parametrically varying systems with brief instabilities: an application to vision/inertial navigation

This paper addresses the problem of nonlinear filter design to estimate the relative position and velocity of an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) with respect to a point on a ship using infrared (IR) vision, inertial, and air data sensors. Sufficient conditions are derived for the existence of a particular type of complementary filters with guaranteed stability and performance in the presence of so-called out-of-frame events that arise when the vision system loses its target temporarily. The results obtained build upon new developments in the theory of linear parametrically varying systems (LPVs) with brief instabilities - also reported in the paper - and provide the proper framework to deal with out-of-frame events. Field tests with a prototype UAV illustrate the performance of the filter and the scope of applications of the new theory developed.
Experimental evaluation of electron gun, PPM focusing and collector for Ka Band TWT

Design of electron gun, PPM focusing and four stage depressed collector has been experimentally validated by developing and testing beam stick tube with the application of rated potentials for high efficiency Ka band helix TWT. This paper will present design and experimental results for electron gun, PPM focusing and four stage depressed collector in dc conditions.
Detachment of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 from Germinal Centers by Blocking Complement Receptor Type 2

ABSTRACT After the transition from the acute to the chronic phase of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, complement mediates long-term storage of virions in germinal centers (GC) of lymphoid tissue. The contribution of particular complement receptors (CRs) to virus trapping in GC was studied on tonsillar specimens from HIV-infected individuals. CR2 (CD21) was identified as the main binding site for HIV in GC. Monoclonal antibodies (MAb) blocking the CR2-C3d interaction were shown to detach 62 to 77% of HIV type 1 from tonsillar cells of an individual in the presymptomatic stage. Although they did so at a lower efficiency, these antibodies were able to remove HIV from tonsillar cells of patients under highly active antiretroviral therapy, suggesting that the C3d-CR2 interaction remains a primary entrapment mechanism in treated patients as well. In contrast, removal of HIV was not observed with MAb blocking CR1 or CR3. Thus, targeting CR2 may facilitate new approaches toward a reduction of residual virus in GC.
Applicability of evidence from previous systematic reviews on immunotherapy in current practice of childhood asthma treatment: a GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) systematic review

Objective Because most children with asthma now use inhaled corticosteroids (ICS), the added benefit of immunotherapy in asthmatic children needs to be examined. We re-assessed the effectiveness of subcutaneous (SCIT) and sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) in childhood asthma treatment focusing on studies with patient-relevant outcome measures and children using ICS. Methods We used the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach to systematically search and appraise the evidence using predefined critical patient-relevant outcomes (asthma symptoms, asthma control and exacerbations). We searched to retrieve systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials on immunotherapy for asthma in children (1960–2017). We assessed the quality of the body of evidence with GRADE criteria. Results The quality of the evidence for SCIT was very low due to a large risk of bias and indirectness (dated studies in children not using ICS). No effect of SCIT was found for asthma symptoms; no studies reported on asthma control. For asthma exacerbations, studies favoured SCIT. We have little confidence in this effect estimate, due to the very low quality of evidence. For SLIT, quality of the evidence was very low due to a large risk of bias, indirectness and imprecision. The outcome ‘asthma symptoms’ could not be calculated due to lack of standardisation and large clinical heterogeneity. Other predefined outcomes were not reported. Conclusion The beneficial effects of immunotherapy in childhood asthma found in earlier reviews are no longer considered applicable, because of indirectness (studies performed in children not being treated according to current asthma guidelines with ICS). There was absence of evidence to properly determine the effectiveness or lack thereof of immunotherapy in asthma treatment in children with ICS.