Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of high‐risk thrombophilia status on recurrence among children with a first non‐central‐venous‐catheter‐associated VTE: an observational multicentre cohort study

Deficiency of antithrombin (AT), protein C (PC) or protein S (PS) constitutes a major risk factor for venous thromboembolism (VTE). Individuals at high risk for recurrence who benefit from screening need to be identified. The primary study objective was to determine the individual recurrence risk among children with a first non‐central‐venous‐catheter‐associated VTE with respect to their thrombophilia status and to evaluate if the clinical presentation at first VTE onset differs between children with AT, PC or PS deficiency versus no thrombophilia. We calculated the absolute risk of VTE recurrence and event‐free‐survival adjusted for thrombophilia, age, sex and positive family VTE history in 161 consecutively enrolled paediatric VTE patients. The presence of a deficiency relative to no thrombophilia was evaluated as a potential predictor of recurrence. Predictors for recurrence were AT deficiency (hazard ratio/95% CI: 6·5/2·46–17·2) and female gender (2·6/1·1–6·35). The annual recurrence rates (95% CIs) were 5·4% (2·6–10) in AT‐deficient children, 1·3% (0·3–3·8) in patients with PC deficiency, 0·7% (0·08–2·4) in the PS‐deficient cohort and 0·9% (0·4–1·8) in patients with no thrombophilia. Positive family VTE history or combined thrombophilias did not predict recurrence. Given the overall annual incidence rate of recurrence of 1·5% we suggest screening for AT deficiency in children with VTE.
The A ect Heuristic in Judgments of Risks and Bene ® ts

This paper re-examines the commonly observed inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived bene®t. We propose that this relationship occurs because people rely on aect when judging the risk and bene®t of speci®c hazards. Evidence supporting this proposal is obtained in two experimental studies. Study 1 investigated the inverse relationship between risk and bene®t judgments under a time-pressure condition designed to limit the use of analytic thought and enhance the reliance on aect. As expected, the inverse relationship was strengthened when time pressure was introduced. Study 2 tested and con®rmed the hypothesis that providing information designed to alter the favorability of one's overall aective evaluation of an item (say nuclear power) would systematically change the risk and bene®t judgments for that item. Both studies suggest that people seem prone to using an `aect heuristic' which improves judgmental eciency by deriving both risk and bene®t evaluations from a common source Ð aective reactions to the stimulus item. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Real-Time Transfer and Evaluation of Activity Recognition Capabilities in an Opportunistic System

This paper describes and evaluates the challenging feature of an opportunistic activity recognition system to train a newly discovered sensor with the available sensing devices to recognize activities at runtime. The term ”opportunistic” means that the system does not operate with a fixed set of sensor devices, but uses and configures the currently available sensors that just happen to be available. Therefore, the paper presents a reference implementation of an opportunistic system, referred to as OPPORTUNITY Framework, and demonstrates the transfer of recognition capabilities from a fused multisensor ensemble to an untrained sensing device within the system in a real-world setup. Main contribution of the paper is the evaluation of the approach by describing an experimental setup and presenting results in terms of accuracy and recognition rate from the machine-learning perspective as well as from the framework and system perspective by comparing predicted classes from the teaching sensor set and the newly trained sensor to obtain QoS parameters. Keywords-Activity and Context Recognition; Opportunistic Sensing; Senor Networks.
Fat suppression in magnetic resonance imaging near metal implants.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most outstanding developments in medical diagnosis in recent decades. It is used in a wide range of clinical imaging applications, and is particularly effective for producing high quality images of soft tissues. It should therefore be well-suited to evaluating complications arising in patients with orthopaedic metal implants which are considered safe for MRI scanning. However, the presence of the metal produces large variations in the magnetic field, and the resulting images have significant artifacts. Performing accurate fat suppression near metal implants remains an unsolved challenge in MRI. The ability to use multipoint fat suppression techniques close to metal would be greatly beneficial, as it would allow for easier diagnosis of certain soft tissue complications through contrast-enhanced imaging. To succeed, multipoint techniques require a robust and accurate method for estimating the magnetic field variation induced by the metal. Existing methods tend to fail near the boundary of the metal where the field is rapidly varying. This thesis explores new methods for estimating the phase shift due to the magnetic field variation in the three-point Dixon technique near metal. The problem of phase unwrapping in regions where the phase varies rapidly is investigated. Magnetic field variation simulations are used throughout for developing and assessing these new methods. The most significant contribution presented is the development and evaluation of the Phase Onion Peeling (POP) algorithm. POP is a novel approach to phase estimation in the three-point Dixon technique. POP estimates the phase across a two-dimensional slice using a set of closed paths which enclose the implant boundary. The phase is first estimated at the outer edges of the slice. The method incrementally works inwards along a set of adjacent paths, finishing at the boundary of the implant. The phase along each path is represented by a Fourier series, and the coefficients for each path are estimated by minimising an objective function. The main advantage of POP over existing techniques is that the phase unwrapping problem is converted to one of parameter estimation. POP was tested on data acquired from three phantoms and seven human participants, with results presented and evaluated. POP is shown to have superior performance compared to existing phase unwrapping methods
Human language reveals a universal positivity bias

Significance The most commonly used words of 24 corpora across 10 diverse human languages exhibit a clear positive bias, a big data confirmation of the Pollyanna hypothesis. The study’s findings are based on 5 million individual human scores and pave the way for the development of powerful language-based tools for measuring emotion. Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts.
Online query-focused twitter summarizer through fuzzy lattice

Microblog service has attracted much attention in big data analysis. Twitter statistics remark that the average number of tweets per day is greater than 100 million and many thousands of them happen every minute. It's an urgent challenge to face with such a large amount of collected tweets. This work defines an online query-focused Twitter summarization framework. It crawls and semantically indexes tweets exploiting wikification service. When a user's query is submitted, the system filters out the most relevant tweets. Then, a summarization algorithm browses the knowledge structure extracted by performing a Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis on the given filtered tweets. Experimental results reveal good performances.
Associations Between Arterial Compliance and Anthropometry of Children from Four Ethnic Groups in South Africa: the THUSA BANA Study

Aim: To investigate whether associations and differences exist regarding the arterial compliance, dietary intake and anthropometric parameters of children of four different ethnic groups in South Africa. Study Design: In this study, 1244 children from four ethnic groups, aged 10–15 years, were randomly selected from five regions of the North West Province. Blood pressure was measured with a Finapres apparatus and analysed to obtain systemic arterial compliance. Measurements were done to obtain body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio and percentage body fat. Dietary intake was determined with a 24-h dietary recall questionnaire. Results: The black and mixed-origin subjects indicated the lowest values (p ≤ 0.05) for BMI, percentage body fat, and dietary intake, whereas the white and Indian subjects showed significantly higher values than the other ethnic groups. The white and Indian children had significantly higher arterial compliance than the black and mixed-origin children at all ages from 10 to 15 years. Compliance showed significant correlations with all anthropometric parameters. Conclusion: Since black and mixed-origin children have the highest prevalence of undernutrition and stunted growth, it is suggested that parental undernutrition and inadequate nutrition in early life, associated with lower arterial compliance, may lead to the onset of adult hypertension.
Interfacial toughness evolution under thermal cycling by laser shock and mechanical testing of an EB-PVD coating system

One of the major challenges for coatings on superalloys is to keep adherence during aging, where damage is mostly driven by thermal cycling. On the other hand, the methodology of the evaluation of the interfacial toughness should be consistent with in service loading. Recently, the use of LAser Shock Adhesion Test (LASAT) has shown its capability for both ranking different coating solutions and evaluating the evolution of a given coating as a function of aging [1-2]. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the ability of LASAT to reproduce damage mechanisms observed under quasi-static in plane mechanical testing and to propose a general methodology to assess interfacial toughness evolution based on LASAT measurements. The material chosen in this study is a partially Y2O3 stabilized EB-PVD zirconia layer coating deposited by Electron Beam – Physical Vapor Deposition (EB-PVD) onto a first generation Ni base superalloy. Aging has been performed using thermal cycling under laboratory air. Degradation of the coating system due to ageing is quantitatively assessed by LASAT and accompanied by different microstructural analysis methods. For LASAT, if laser flux is below a threshold, no delamination occurs. When increasing laser flux above this threshold, a systematic sequence is observed: i) delamination without buckling of the ceramic layer, ii) delamination and buckling, iii) partial cracking of the ceramic layer, and iv) spallation [1-2]. These different states are also achieved in compressive quasi-static testing and assessed by means of local strain measurement using digital image correlation technique [3]. Aging is evaluated through the evolution of both the delamination and the buckling behavior induced by the LASAT method or critical strain at ceramic spallation under compressive static load. The LASAT has shown to introduce very low scatter in delamination/buckling results when laser flux is low enough to avoid any cracking within the ceramic layer [2]. Thus, we choose to determine interfacial toughness from the specimen after LASAT leading to buckling without ceramic cracking. To determine the interfacial toughness between the ceramic layer and the substrate, a large variety of experimental techniques has been employed, including light profilometer, photoluminescence piezo-spectroscopy, infra-red imaging and image analysis. All these techniques enable to determine the precise 3D morphology of the ceramic blister obtained after LASAT and the size of interfacial crack. Further, mechanical elastic analysis of the blister shape is used to calculate the toughness of an interfacial crack at arrest as well as the residual stresses. At last but not least, 3D shape of the crack tip is measured by FIB and slice tomography to validate the size of the process zone and to determine the range of error including the global chain of measurements to the final evaluation of interfacial toughness.
Ross procedure

Introduction In 1967 Donald Ross introduced the subcoronary Ross procedure consisting of transplantation of the autologous pulmonary valve into aortic position. We describe our 15-year experience in Ross procedures. Methods 576 subcoronary operations have been performed (436 male and 140 female patients); the mean age was 45±11.9 years. (range, 13 to 70 years). The mean follow-up was 7±4.2 years (range, 0 to 16 years). There were 4597 patient years at follow-up with a clinical completeness of 95% and echo completeness of 91%. Results There were two operative deaths (0.3%) and 31 patients with reoperation. The survival is similar to that of the normal population and the freedom from allo- and autograft reoperation is 87% at 15 years. Autograft regurgitation at last examination was grade 0 in 40%, trace in 54%, grade I in 19%, grade II in 4% and grade III in 0.4%; the pressure gradient was smaller than 5 mmHg in 57% and between 5 and 10 mmHg in 24%. Only 6% had a transvalvular pressure gradient of more than 10 mmHg. Discussion After 15 years of experience it can be concluded that the subcoronary technique provides near normal survival in adult patients, with excellent hemodynamics and acceptable rate of reoperations.
Multivariate spectral analysis of electroencephalography data

We propose a time-domain approach to detect cross-trial frequencies based on nonlinear correlation functions. This method is a multivariate extension of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and can be applied to short and/or sparse time series. Cross-trial and/or cross-channel spectra (CTS) can be obtained for electroencephalography (EEG) data where multiple short data segments of the same experiment are available. There are two versions of CTS: The first one assumes some phase coherency across the trials while the second one is independent of phase coherency. We demonstrate that the phase dependent version is more consistent with traditional spectral methods as implemented in EEGLAB. This multivariate spectral analysis is a spatio-temporal extension of DFT and should not be confused with cross-spectral analysis. We applied this method to EEG data recorded while participants reached for and grasped a virtual object where we compared a cross-trial spectrogram (CTS) of data around a stimulus with traditional event related spectral perturbations (ERSP) analysis. We show that CTS can be applied to shorter data windows than ERSP by using spatio-temporal information in the EEG and therefore yields higher temporal resolution. Furthermore a CTS can be computed for each individual subject while ERSP is commonly computed on a whole population of subjects.
Automatic generation of KEGG OC ( Ortholog Cluster ) and its assignment to draft genomes

As the number of sequenced genomes are rapidly growing, a method for automatic generation of orthologous gene clusters is needed. However, it is computationally hard to cluster a large number of genes at once. To address this problem, we have developed a heuristic method to assign gene groups from closely related organisms to an ortholog cluster in a bottom-up approach. In this method, we consider each gene subgroup as a representative gene and find their correspondence using bi-directional best hit (BBH) relations obtained from the KEGG SSDB database which stores all-vs-all Smith-Waterman similarity scores [1]. We have clustered all the genes in the KEGG GENES database [1] to generate KEGG Ortholog Clusters (OCs) which represent various aspects of the protein universe. As an application of KEGG OC, we have performed automatic gene assignment of the draft genomes which are not yet included in KEGG. Our method provides an efficient way for rapid annotation of the genes of newly sequenced organisms.
Improved Teager Energy Operator and Improved Chirp-Z Transform for Parameter Estimation of Voltage Flicker

Effective estimation of voltage flicker components plays an important role in distribution systems for either flicker meters or flicker compensators. A novel approach has been presented in this paper to accurately estimate voltage flicker components by using the improved Teager energy operator (ITEO) and the improved chirp-Z transform (ICZT). The error correction factor K of the Teager energy operator is presented and ITEO is established to reduce the extraction errors of voltage flicker waveform. ICZT is used to extract the frequency and magnitude of the voltage envelope which is corrected by the K factor of ITEO. The effects of signal sampling rate, sampling number, spectrum subdivision points of ICZT, voltage harmonics and interharmonics, frequency fluctuation, and white noise are investigated. The implementation of the proposed approach in the digital-signal-processor platform is also introduced. Multiple simulation and experimental test application results validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Genetic Association of the Antiviral Restriction Factor TRIM5α with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection

ABSTRACT The innate antiviral factor TRIM5α restricts the replication of some retroviruses through its interaction with the viral capsid protein, leading to abortive infection. While overexpression of human TRIM5α results in modest restriction of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), this inhibition is insufficient to block productive infection of human cells. We hypothesized that polymorphisms within TRIM5 may result in increased restriction of HIV-1 infection. We sequenced the TRIM5 gene (excluding exon 5) and the 4.8-kb 5′ putative regulatory region in genomic DNA from 110 HIV-1-infected subjects and 96 exposed seronegative persons, along with targeted gene sequencing in a further 30 HIV-1-infected individuals. Forty-eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including 20 with allele frequencies of >1.0%, were identified. Among these were two synonymous and eight nonsynonymous coding polymorphisms. We observed no association between TRIM5 polymorphism in HIV-1-infected subjects and their set-point viral load after acute infection, although one TRIM5 haplotype was weakly associated with more rapid CD4+ T-cell loss. Importantly, a TRIM5 haplotype containing the nonsynonymous SNP R136Q showed increased frequency among HIV-1-infected subjects relative to exposed seronegative persons, with an odds ratio of 5.49 (95% confidence interval = 1.83 to 16.45; P = 0.002). Nonetheless, we observed no effect of individual TRIM5α nonsynonymous mutations on the in vitro HIV-1 susceptibility of CD4+ T cells. Therefore, any effect of TRIM5α polymorphism on HIV-1 infection in primary lymphocytes may depend on combinations of SNPs or on DNA sequences in linkage disequilibrium with the TRIM5α coding sequence.
Algorithms for particle-field simulations with collisions

We develop an efficient algorithm for detecting collisions among a large number of particles moving in a velocity field, when the field itself is possibly coupled to the particle motions. We build on ideas from molecular dynamics simulations and, as a byproduct, give a literature survey of methods for hard sphere molecular dynamics. We analyze the complexity of the algorithm in detail and present several experimental results on performance which corroborate the analysis. An optimal algorithm for collision detection has cost scaling at least like the total number of collisions detected. We argue, both theoretically and experimentally, that with the appropriate parameter choice and when the number of collisions grows with the number of particles at least as fast as for billiards, the algorithm we recommend is optimal.
A MAP kinase gene, Clk1, is required for conidiation and pathogenicity in the phytopathogenic fungus Curvularia lunata

Mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are highly conserved signal transduction pathways, which play a wide variety of important roles in extracellular signal transduction. The first MAPK gene of the maize pathogen Curvularia lunata, Clk1, was isolated via a PCR‐based approach with a primer pair designed on the basis of conserved regions of known MAPKs. Southern blot analysis showed that the gene existed in the genome as a single copy. The predicted amino acid sequence (352 amino acids) was highly homologous with MAP kinases of other phytopathogenic fungi. Flanking regions of Clk1 were obtained through RACE and genomic walking technology. To understand the role of Clk1 in C. lunata, targeted gene disruption was adopted to construct Clk1 mutants. It was found that mutants lacking functional domain of Clk1 were not able to produce conidia but tended to form a few special chlamydospore‐shaped structures. Clk1 mutants grew slower in adverse environments (at 24°C), produced less cell degrading enzymes (CWDEs) than the wild type, and they were almost unable to infect maize leaves via artificial wounds.
An Examination of Shared Variance in Self-Report and Objective Measures of Attention in the Incarcerated Adult Population

Objective: The present study was designed to test some assumptions about screening procedures for ADHD in adults. Method: Twenty-eight incarcerated male adults completed a self report scale of attention deficits as a part of an examination of attention and reading skills. Further assessment of attention included a battery of tests that assessed vigilance, attention shifts, and other aspects of cognitive control. Results: Fifty seven percent of the sample showed test performance indicating a high probability of ADHD. Correlation analyses yielded significant effects for self report scales and objective tests of attention. Conclusion: The results support the assumption that the self report measures share a significant part of the variance with tests of attention commonly used in clinical assessment. However, the risk of making both false positive and false negative inferences about ADHD is present, as the specificity and the sensitivity of the rating scale needs to be further explored.
IL‐4 receptor alpha chain genetic polymorphism and total IgE levels in the English population: two‐locus haplotypes are more informative than individual SNPs

The IL‐4RA locus encodes for the alpha chain of the IL‐4 receptor, and is both a functional and positional candidate gene for atopy and allergic disease. Recently Ober et al. have shown that the study of haplotypes at multiple loci in the IL‐4RA gene could be more informative than the separate study of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
Sustainable Investing and the Cross-Section of Maximum Drawdown

We use supervised learning to identify factors that predict the cross-section of maximum drawdown for stocks in the US equity market. Our data run from January 1980 to June 2018 and our analysis includes ordinary least squares, penalized linear regressions, tree-based models, and neural networks. We find that the most important predictors tended to be consistent across models, and that non-linear models had better predictive power than linear models. Predictive power was higher in calm periods than stressed periods, and environmental, social, and governance indicators augmented predictive power for non-linear models.