Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epilepsy in horses: aetiological classification and predictive factors.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING THE STUDY In contrast with reports in man and small animals, a systematic classification of seizures in horses is lacking. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to classify seizures based on their aetiology and to characterise epilepsy in 104 horses presented for seizures at the Ohio State University Veterinary Medical Center between 1988 and 2009. METHODS In a retrospective observational study, seizures were classified by aetiology based on history, clinical observations, diagnostic investigations (e.g. electroencephalograms, cerebrospinal fluid and computed tomography imaging of the head) and post mortem examinations, when available. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed. RESULTS Epilepsy (i.e. 2 or more recurrent seizures) was identified in 70% of cases, and further classified as symptomatic (i.e. structural brain pathology, 35.6% of cases), cryptogenic (i.e. unknown, 54.8% of cases) and idiopathic (i.e. suspected genetic predisposition, 2.7% of cases). Normal neurological examination on admission, the presence of seizures unprovoked by any identified factors and paroxysmal epileptiform activity on electroencephalogram recordings were all strongly (P<0.05) correlated with epilepsy on univariate analysis. For a horse with generalised seizures, the odds of having epilepsy was 7 times lower compared with a similar horse with partial seizures (P<0.05) in multivariate modelling. CONCLUSIONS Seizure aetiology was symptomatic or cryptogenic in most horses, whereas reactive seizures and idiopathic epilepsy were less common. POTENTIAL RELEVANCE This study is the first attempt to classify seizures and to characterise epilepsy in a referral-based equine population. Predictive factors of epilepsy in horses were similar to those reported in other species and may assist the clinician with the early diagnosis of epilepsy.
Influence of complementing a robotic upper limb rehabilitation system with video games on the engagement of the participants: a study focusing on muscle activities

Efficacious stroke rehabilitation depends not only on patients’ medical treatment but also on their motivation and engagement during rehabilitation exercises. Although traditional rehabilitation exercises are often mundane, technology-assisted upper-limb robotic training can provide engaging and task-oriented training in a natural environment. The factors that influence engagement, however, are not fully understood. This paper therefore studies the relationship between engagement and muscle activities as well as the influencing factors of engagement. To this end, an experiment was conducted using a robotic upper limb rehabilitation system with healthy individuals in three training exercises: (a) a traditional exercise, which is typically used for training the grasping function, (b) a tracking exercise, currently used in robot-assisted stroke patient rehabilitation for fine motor movement, and (c) a video game exercise, which is a proliferating approach of robot-assisted rehabilitation enabling high-level active engagement of stroke patients. These exercises differ not only in the characteristics of the motion that they use but also in their method of triggering engagement. To measure the level of engagement, we used facial expressions, motion analysis of the arm movements, and electromyography. The results show that (a) the video game exercise could engage the participants for a longer period than the other two exercises, (b) the engagement level decreased when the participants became too familiar with the exercises, and (c) analysis of normalized root mean square in electromyographic data indicated that muscle activities were more intense when the participants are engaged. This study shows that several sub-factors on engagement, such as versatility of feedback, cognitive tasks, and competitiveness, may influence engagement more than the others. To maintain a high level of engagement, the rehabilitation system needs to be adaptive, providing different exercises to engage the participants.
Financial incentives increase fruit and vegetable intake among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants: a randomized controlled trial of the USDA Healthy Incentives Pilot.

BACKGROUND US fruit and vegetable (FV) intake remains below recommendations, particularly for low-income populations. Evidence on effectiveness of rebates in addressing this shortfall is limited. OBJECTIVE This study evaluated the USDA Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP), which offered rebates to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants for purchasing targeted FVs (TFVs). DESIGN As part of a randomized controlled trial in Hampden County, Massachusetts, 7500 randomly selected SNAP households received a 30% rebate on TFVs purchased with SNAP benefits. The remaining 47,595 SNAP households in the county received usual benefits. Adults in 5076 HIP and non-HIP households were randomly sampled for telephone surveys, including 24-h dietary recall interviews. Surveys were conducted at baseline (1-3 mo before implementation) and in 2 follow-up rounds (4-6 mo and 9-11 mo after implementation). 2784 adults (1388 HIP, 1396 non-HIP) completed baseline interviews; data were analyzed for 2009 adults (72%) who also completed ≥1 follow-up interview. RESULTS Regression-adjusted mean TFV intake at follow-up was 0.24 cup-equivalents/d (95% CI: 0.13, 0.34 cup-equivalents/d) higher among HIP participants. Across all fruit and vegetables (AFVs), regression-adjusted mean intake was 0.32 cup-equivalents/d (95% CI: 0.17, 0.48 cup-equivalents/d) higher among HIP participants. The AFV-TFV difference was explained by greater intake of 100% fruit juice (0.10 cup-equivalents/d; 95% CI: 0.02, 0.17 cup-equivalents/d); juice purchases did not earn the HIP rebate. Refined grain intake was 0.43 ounce-equivalents/d lower (95% CI: -0.69, -0.16 ounce-equivalents/d) among HIP participants, possibly indicating substitution effects. Increased AFV intake and decreased refined grain intake contributed to higher Healthy Eating Index-2010 scores among HIP participants (4.7 points; 95% CI: 2.4, 7.1 points). CONCLUSIONS The HIP significantly increased FV intake among SNAP participants, closing ∼20% of the gap relative to recommendations and increasing dietary quality. More research on mechanisms of action is warranted. The HIP trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02651064.
JustMyFriends: full SQL, full transactional amenities, and access privacy

A major obstacle to using Cloud services for many enterprises is the fear that the data will be stolen. Bringing the Cloud in-house is an incomplete solution to the problem because that implies that data center personnel as well as myriad repair personnel must be trusted. An ideal security solution would be to share data among precisely the people who should see it ("my friends") and nobody else. Encryption might seem to be an easy answer. Each friend could download the data, update it perhaps, and return it to a shared untrusted repository. But such a solution permits no concurrency and therefore no real sharing. JustMyFriends ensures sharing among friends without revealing unencrypted data to anyone outside of a circle of trust. In fact, non-friends (such as system administrators) see only encrypted blobs being added to a persistent store. JustMyFriends allows data sharing and full transactions. It supports the use of all SQL including stored procedures, updates, and arbitrary queries. Additionally, it provides full access privacy, preventing the host from discovering patterns or correlations in the user's data access behavior. The demonstration will show how friends in an unnamed government agency can coordinate the management of a spy network in a transactional fashion. Demo visitors will be able to play the roles of station chiefs and/or of troublemakers. As station chiefs, they will write their own transactions and queries, logout, login. As troublemakers, visitors will be able to play the role of a curious observer, kill client processes, and in general try to disrupt the system.
Testing the SMOS-derived vegetation optical thickness over rainfed cereals

The vegetation optical thickness (τ) from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) L2 products is compared to some vegetation parameters estimated both at field scale and by means of an upscaling procedure through the MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Vegetation measurements over rainfed cereals indicated that NDVI, Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Vegetation Water Content (VWC) were strongly correlated. In turn, τ is expressed as a linear function of VWC in the literature. These relationships were studied and tested during 2010, and used to upscale the MODIS NDVI series. The results afforded no definite conclusions, due mainly to the different temporal and spatial resolution of the estimations. SMOS τ varied significantly at daily scale, which did not seem to be a realistic behavior of the vegetation. Moreover, the spatial average of the cereals cover in the MODIS NDVI produced small changes in the NDVI values. Nevertheless, the relationships studied are encouraging for the identification of new parameters that describe τ, as it was found for the Fraction of Vegetation Cover (FVC), and they should be tested for other vegetation covers.
Boosting attribute recognition with latent topics by matrix factorization

Attribute‐based approaches have recently attracted much attention in visual recognition tasks. These approaches describe images by using semantic attributes as the mid‐level feature. However, low recognition accuracy becomes the biggest barrier that limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework termed Boosting Attribute Recognition (BAR) for the image recognition task. Our framework stems from matrix factorization, and can explore latent relationships from the aspect of attribute and image simultaneously. Furthermore, to apply our framework in large‐scale visual recognition tasks, we present both offline and online learning implementation of the proposed framework. Extensive experiments on 3 data sets demonstrate that our framework achieves a sound accuracy of attribute recognition.
Estimating the Prevalence of Potential Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli and Intimin Gene Diversity in a Human Community by Monitoring Sanitary Sewage

ABSTRACT Presently, the understanding of bacterial enteric diseases in the community and their virulence factors relies almost exclusively on clinical disease reporting and examination of clinical pathogen isolates. This study aimed to investigate the feasibility of an alternative approach that monitors potential enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) prevalence and intimin gene (eae) diversity in a community by directly quantifying and characterizing target virulence genes in the sanitary sewage. The quantitative PCR (qPCR) quantification of the eae, stx 1, and stx 2 genes in sanitary sewage samples collected over a 13-month period detected eae in all 13 monthly sewage samples at significantly higher abundance (93 to 7,240 calibrator cell equivalents [CCE]/100 ml) than stx 1 and stx 2, which were detected sporadically. The prevalence level of potential EPEC in the sanitary sewage was estimated by calculating the ratio of eae to uidA, which averaged 1.0% (σ = 0.4%) over the 13-month period. Cloning and sequencing of the eae gene directly from the sewage samples covered the majority of the eae diversity in the sewage and detected 17 unique eae alleles belonging to 14 subtypes. Among them, eae-β2 was identified to be the most prevalent subtype in the sewage, with the highest detection frequency in the clone libraries (41.2%) and within the different sampling months (85.7%). Additionally, sewage and environmental E. coli isolates were also obtained and used to determine the detection frequencies of the virulence genes as well as eae genetic diversity for comparison.
Proton MR spectroscopy in clinical routine

In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) addresses metabolic pathways and their steady states in different tissue types. The brain has by tradition, and due to technical limitations in other organs, been one of the tissues most studied by MRS, and both 1H‐ and 31P‐MRS have been used. Although 31P‐MRS is outstanding for the evaluation of sources of metabolic energy in the brain, 1H‐MRS has become the major clinically applied method in neurospectroscopy, as it provides information on markers of neuronal function, myelin, cell membranes, and metabolic active compounds. Furthermore, MR sensitivity is much greater for protons than it is for phosphorus and 1H‐MRS, therefore allowing better spatial resolution. This review focuses on neurospectroscopy and diagnostic insights into diverse neurological problems provided by 1H‐MRS applied as a clinical tool. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2001;13:560–567. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Use of microarray biomarkers to identify longevity therapeutics

A number of lines of evidence, including nonhuman primate and human studies, suggest that regulatory pathways similar to those invoked by caloric restriction (CR) may be involved in determining human longevity. Thus, pharmaceuticals capable of mimicking the molecular mechanisms of life‐ and health‐span extension by CR (CR mimetics) may have application to human health. CR acts rapidly, even in late adulthood, to begin to extend life‐ and health‐span in mice. We have linked these effects with rapid changes in the levels of specific gene transcripts in the liver and the heart. Our results are consistent with the rapid effects of caloric intake on the lifespan and/or biochemistry and physiology of Drosophila, rodents, rhesus macaques and humans. To test the hypothesis that existing pharmaceuticals can mimic the physiologic effects of CR, we evaluated the effectiveness of glucoregulatory drugs and putative cancer chemopreventatives in reproducing the hepatic gene‐expression profiles produced by long‐term CR (LTCR). We found that 8 weeks of metformin treatment was superior to 8 weeks of CR at reproducing the specific changes in transcript levels produced by LTCR. Consistent with these results, metformin reduces cancer incidence in diabetic humans and ameliorates the onset and severity of metabolic syndrome. Metformin extends the mean and maximum lifespans of female transgenic HER‐2/neu mice by 8% and 13.1% in comparison with control mice. Phenformin, a close chemical relative of metformin, extends lifespan and reduces tumor incidence in C3H mice. These results indicate that gene‐expression biomarkers can be used to identify promising candidate CR mimetics.
Evidence that androgen negative feedback regulates hypothalamic gonadotropin-releasing hormone impulse strength and the burst-like secretion of biologically active luteinizing hormone in men.

Testosterone injections or pharmacological amounts of dihydrotestosterone infused in men, and androgen-secreting tumors in women, can suppress plasma LH bioactivity assessed in an in vitro rat Leydig-cell bioassay. However, such observations do not define the physiological nature of endogenous androgen feedback actions on the hypothalamo-pituitary axis. To explore the feedback role of endogenous androgen on the male gonadotropic axis, we used a potent, selective, nonsteroidal competitive antagonist of the androgen receptor, flutamide HCl. Eight young men (ages 21-30) each received flutamide (750 mg orally daily x 3 days) and placebo and underwent blood sampling at 10-min intervals for 28 h, the last 2 h of which included two consecutive iv pulses of GnRH (10 micrograms). Plasma bioactive LH concentrations were measured in the rat Leydig cell bioassay. Deconvolution analysis was used to evaluate the number, amplitude, mass, and duration of bioactive LH secretory bursts and simultaneously estimate the half-life of endogenous LH. Flutamide treatment increased mean plasma bioactive LH concentrations from 27 +/- 2.3 to 54 +/- 9.1 IU/L (P = 0.018). Increased LH concentrations were achieved by a significantly amplified mass of LH secreted per burst, which rose from 14 +/- 1.8 (control) to 24 +/- 2.8 (flutamide) IU/L distribution volume. The amplitude (maximal secretion rate) of bioactive LH release episodes also increased from 1.3 +/- 0.21 (control) to 2.2 +/- 0.29 (flutamide) IU/L/min. These responses were specific, since flutamide did not influence bioactive LH half-life [49 +/- 6.5 (control) vs 52 +/- 4.1 (flutamide) min], LH secretory burst duration, frequency, or interburst interval. The total 24-h production rate of bioactive LH rose significantly from 310 +/- 35 (control) to 570 +/- 82 (flutamide) IU/L.day. In contrast, no features of LH secretory bursts evoked by exogenous GnRH pulses were altered significantly by antiandrogen. In summary, in vivo blockade of endogenous androgen negative feedback actions in normal men selectively amplifies the mass and amplitude of bioactive LH secretory bursts without altering their number or duration, or the half-life of LH, or the amount of LH released in response to exogenous GnRH. Therefore, we infer that in the steroid milieu of normal men endogenous androgen acting via the androgen receptor can negatively regulate hypothalamic GnRH stimulus strength, and hence the rate and mass of biologically active LH secretion in vivo.
Colour doppler ultrasonography provides real-time microwave field visualisation in an ex vivo porcine model.

INTRODUCTION Microwave ablation (MWA) uses non-ionising thermal energy to cause cell death by coagulative necrosis. Colour Doppler ultrasound (US) produces a spherical image during tissue ablation that appears to approximate the microwave near field (MNF) in shape and size. The aim of the present study was to determine whether colour Doppler US images observed during microwave ablation correlate with the actual thermocoagulation zone (TCZ) observed in liver tissue. METHODS Twenty MWAs were performed in ex vivo bovine liver using a 915-MHz ablation antenna set to 45 W for 6 min concomitant with Doppler US imaging. The edges of spherical images observed with colour Doppler US were marked circumferentially in the tissue. The tissue was transected parallel to the angle of antenna insertion, and the distances between methylene blue markings and the TCZ were measured. RESULTS The images observed using colour Doppler US were similar in size and shape to the actual TCZ observed in the tissue. The mean distance between the observed colour Doppler US field diameter and the measured TCZ was 2 ± 1 mm. CONCLUSIONS Using colour Doppler US, the visualised field during MWA correlates with the TCZ in an ex vivo bovine liver model. Real-time, dynamic feedback of the treatment area may increase the effectiveness of MWA for liver tumours in vivo.
Health Service Patterns Indicate Potential Benefit of Supported Self-Management for Depression in Primary Care

Objective: To examine health service delivery in a Canadian province (British Columbia) to consider how Canadian health care services might be developed to best address the large number of individuals with mildly to moderately severe depressive illnesses. Method: We used provincial administrative data to describe patterns of medical services provided to individuals suffering from depression during 3 different time periods (1991–1992, 1995–1996, and 2000–2001) and to determine the frequency with which depression patients receive treatment from primary care physicians and psychiatrists. We then used these findings to consider the feasibility and potential applicability of the various approaches that have been described to decrease the burden of disease related to depression. Results: In the fiscal year 1991–1992, the “treated prevalence” rate was 7.7%; in 1995–1996, it was 8.7%; and in 2000–2001, it was 9.5%. In each cohort over the 10-year period, the proportion of individuals who received a diagnosis of depression and who were then treated by primary care physicians alone (no psychiatric services were provided) remained constant at 92%. Conclusions: Supported self-management is identified as a promising intervention that could be integrated into primary health care within the context of the Canadian health care system. It constitutes a feasible and practical approach to enhance the role of family physicians in the delivery of services to individuals with milder forms of depression and promotes the active engagement of individuals in their recovery and in prevention of future episodes.
Defining Low Disease Activity States in Psoriatic Arthritis Using Novel Composite Disease Instruments

To the Editor: We read with great interest the recent article by Coates and Helliwell on another definition of low disease activity using the novel composite indices to define remission in patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA)1. In 2010, the same authors developed a composite outcome measure as a target of treatment for patients with PsA2. Minimal disease activity (MDA) criteria are fulfilled when 5/7 of the following criteria were satisfied: tender joint count ≤ 1; swollen joint count ≤ 1; Psoriasis Area and Severity Index ≤ 1 or body surface area ≤ 3; patient pain visual analog scale (VAS) score ≤ 15 mm; patient global disease activity VAS score of ≤ 20 … Address correspondence to Dr. Lubrano; E-mail: enniolubrano{at}hotmail.com
Stabilization of the restriction enzyme EcoRI dried with trehalose and other selected glass-forming solutes.

The stabilization of the restriction enzyme EcoRI by its incorporation into aqueous glass-forming carbohydrate or polymer solutions, followed by vacuum-drying to low moisture, has been studied. Glass-forming solutes included trehalose, sucrose, lactose, maltose, raffinose, maltodextrin DE 10, and poly(vinylpyrrolidone) (molecular weight 40,000, PVP). Among the solutes examined, trehalose and sucrose protected the enzyme most effectively during storage at 37 and 45 degrees C. The restriction enzyme dried with trehalose or sucrose maintained its activity without detectable loss for at least 20 days at 37 degrees C and 12 days at 45 degrees C. In contrast, the activity of the enzyme dried with maltodextrin or PVP was reduced during vacuum desiccation and also it decreased remarkably during storage at the same temperatures. Stored (37/45 degrees C) vacuum-dried trehalose and sucrose systems were either a dense paste or a very viscous syrup, and this indicated that they were not glassy. Moreover, no relationship was found between the glass transition temperatures (Tg) of the pure added solute and enzyme protection during storage, since, e.g., sucrose which has significantly lower Tg values protected the enzyme much better than either maltose, lactose, maltodextrin, or PVP. The trisaccharide raffinose offered good protection of enzyme activity, and its role as a novel excipient matrix for labile enzyme stabilization deserves further investigation. The stability of enzyme EcoRI was rapidly lost when the vacuum-dried trehalose and sucrose systems were humidified to 58% relative humidity and stored at 45 degrees C, and this was attributed to disaccharide crystallization.