Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of the Incidence of Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease in China Using Geographically Weighted Regression Models

Background Over the past two decades, major epidemics of hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) have occurred throughout most of the West-Pacific Region countries, causing thousands of deaths among children. However, few studies have examined potential determinants of the incidence of HFMD. Methods Reported HFMD cases from 2912 counties in China were obtained for May 2008. The monthly HFMD cumulative incidence was calculated for children aged 9 years and younger. Child population density (CPD) and six climate factors (average-temperature [AT], average-minimum-temperature [ATmin], average-maximum-temperature [ATmax], average-temperature-difference [ATdiff], average-relative-humidity [ARH], and monthly precipitation [MP]) were selected as potential explanatory variables for the study. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) models were used to explore the associations between the selected factors and HFMD incidence at county level. Results There were 176,111 HFMD cases reported in the studied counties. The adjusted monthly cumulative incidence by county ranged from 0.26 cases per 100,000 children to 2549.00 per 100,000 children. For local univariate GWR models, the percentage of counties with statistical significance (p<0.05) between HFMD incidence and each of the seven factors were: CPD 84.3%, ATmax 54.9%, AT 57.8%, ATmin 61.2%, ARH 54.4%, MP 50.3%, and ATdiff 51.6%. The R 2 for the seven factors’ univariate GWR models are CPD 0.56, ATmax 0.53, AT 0.52, MP 0.51, ATmin 0.52, ARH 0.51, and ATdiff 0.51, respectively. CPD, MP, AT, ARH and ATdiff were further included in the multivariate GWR model, with R 2 0.62, and all counties show statistically significant relationship. Conclusion Child population density and climate factors are potential determinants of the HFMD incidence in most areas in China. The strength and direction of association between these factors and the incidence of HFDM is spatially heterogeneous at the local geographic level, and child population density has a greater influence on the incidence of HFMD than the climate factors.
Bioenergetics in Huntington's Disease

ABSTRACT: Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant inherited neurodegenerative disorder with relentless course and prototypical clinical symptoms. In 1993 HD was associated with an expanded CAG triplet repeat stretch on chromosome 4 in the coding region of its target protein, huntingtin. The length of the resulting polyglutamine extensions correlates with lower age of onset and a higher density of ubiquitine‐positive neuronal intranuclear inclusions. Recently it has been proposed that mutant huntingtin induces progressive neuronal cell death by an apoptotic mechanism. There is strong evidence that disturbances in cellular energy homeostasis and oxidative damage contribute to neurodegeneration. This review will summarize and discuss the current concepts that point towards an involvement of free radical‐induced oxidative stress, glutamate excitotoxicity and mitochondrial resporatory chain defects in pathogenesis of HD.
Microarray-Based Determination of Estrogen Receptor, Progesterone Receptor, and HER2 Receptor Status in Breast Cancer

Purpose: The level of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and HER2 aids in the determination of prognosis and treatment of breast cancer. Immunohistochemistry is currently the predominant method for assessment, but differences in methods and interpretation can substantially affect the accuracy, resulting in misclassification. Here, we investigated the association of microarray-based mRNA expression levels compared with immunohistochemistry. Experimental Design: Microarray mRNA quantification of ER, PR, and HER2 was done by the developed TargetPrint test and compared with immunohistochemical assessment for breast tumors from 636 patients. Immunohistochemistry was done in a central laboratory and in an independent reference laboratory according to American Society of Clinical Oncology/College of American Pathologists guidelines for 100 cases. For HER2 immunohistochemistry 2+ cases, additional chromogenic in situ hybridization (CISH) was used to determine the final status. Results: ER concordance between microarray and central immunohistochemistry was 93 [95 confidence interval (95 CI), 91-95]. Only 4 of immunohistochemistry-positive samples were classified negative using microarray, whereas 18 of immunohistochemistry-negative samples showed a positive microarray ER status. Concordance for PR was 83 (95 CI, 80-86) and 96 of all samples showed an identical classification of HER2 status by microarray and immunohistochemistry/CISH (95 CI, 94-98). Nine percent of immunohistochemistry HER2-positive samples showed a negative microarray classification. Detailed review of 11 cases with discordant classifications by American Society of Clinical Oncology/College of American Pathologists and central immunohistochemistry indicated that microarray assessment was likely to add additional information in 5 cases. Conclusion: Microarray-based readout of ER, PR, and HER2 shows a high concordance with immunohistochemistry/CISH and provides an additional, objective, and quantitative assessment of tumor receptor status in breast cancer. (Clin Cancer Res 2009;15(22):700311)
MILJS : Brand New JavaScript Libraries for Matrix Calculation and Machine Learning

MILJS is a collection of state-of-the-art, platform-independent, scalable, fast JavaScript libraries for matrix calculation and machine learning. Our core library offering a matrix calculation is called Sushi, which exhibits far better performance than any other leading machine learning libraries written in JavaScript. Especially, our matrix multiplication is 177 times faster than the fastest JavaScript benchmark. Based on Sushi, a machine learning library called Tempura is provided, which supports various algorithms widely used in machine learning research. We also provide Soba as a visualization library. The implementations of our libraries are clearly written, properly documented and thus can are easy to get started with, as long as there is a web browser. These libraries are available from this http URL under the MIT license.
Inhibition of the Autophagy Pathway Synergistically Potentiates the Cytotoxic Activity of Givinostat (ITF2357) on Human Glioblastoma Cancer Stem Cells

Increasing evidence highlighted the role of cancer stem cells (CSCs) in the development of tumor resistance to therapy, particularly in glioblastoma (GBM). Therefore, the development of new therapies, specifically directed against GBM CSCs, constitutes an important research avenue. Considering the extended range of cancer-related pathways modulated by histone acetylation/deacetylation processes, we studied the anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic efficacy of givinostat (GVS), a pan-histone deacetylase inhibitor, on cell cultures enriched in CSCs, isolated from nine human GBMs. We report that GVS induced a significant reduction of viability and self-renewal ability in all GBM CSC cultures; conversely, GVS exposure did not cause a significant cytotoxic activity toward differentiated GBM cells and normal mesenchymal human stem cells. Analyzing the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved, we demonstrated that GVS affected CSC viability through the activation of programmed cell death pathways. In particular, a marked stimulation of macroautophagy was observed after GVS treatment. To understand the functional link between GVS treatment and autophagy activation, different genetic and pharmacological interfering strategies were used. We show that the up-regulation of the autophagy process, obtained by deprivation of growth factors, induced a reduction of CSC sensitivity to GVS, while the pharmacological inhibition of the autophagy pathway and the silencing of the key autophagy gene ATG7, increased the cell death rate induced by GVS. Altogether these findings suggest that autophagy represents a pro-survival mechanism activated by GBM CSCs to counteract the efficacy of the anti-proliferative activity of GVS. In conclusion, we demonstrate that GVS is a novel pharmacological tool able to target GBM CSC viability and its efficacy can be enhanced by autophagy inhibitory strategies.
Design, Implementation, and Experiences of the OMEGA End-Point Architecture

The OMEGA architecture provides end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for distributed applications. QoS parameters are translated between application and network requirements by the QoS broker, thus integrating media and network QoS management into a single entity. Admission control uses a schedulability test derived from application requirements. A novel task priority and precedence-based scheme is used to represent complex application requirements and ensure correct feasible schedules. A prototype of OMEGA has been implemented using workstations connected by a 155 Mb/s dedicated ATM local-area network (LAN). To simplify implementation, we assumed networked multimedia application with periodic media streams, specifically a master/slave telerobotics application. This application employs media with highly diverse QoS requirements (e.g., interarrival times, loss rate, and bandwidth) and therefore provides a good platform for testing how closely one can achieve QoS guarantees with workstation hosts and cell-switching. Experience with this implementation has helped to identify new challenges to extending these techniques to a larger domain of applications and systems, and suggests promising new research questions.
Fast H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoding based on residual homogeneity

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has achieved better compression performance than H.264/AVC. In order to make full use of the contents encoded by H.264/AVC, high efficient transcoding from H.264/AVC to HEVC is in great need. In this paper, a fast transcoding structure is proposed. It mainly focuses on coding unit (CU) and prediction unit (PU) decision by using blocks' homogeneity characteristic. The residual homogeneity indicator (RHI) and sum of absolute residual (SAR) value are extracted to early terminate CU partition. Further, the unnecessary PU partitions are excluded by exploring RHI information from H.264/AVC bitstream. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm achieves about 56.68% complexity saving in terms of encoding time with only 2.2% BDBR loss when compared to the trivial transcoder.
Speaker Normalization Improvement by NeuralNetwork Parameter OptimizationMichele

In this work we investigate the use of a speaker adaptation technique , for speech recognition, based on neural network spectral mapping. Diierent multilayer perceptron neural network architectures are analyzed in order to optimize the spectral diierence reduction in acoustic data of two speakers. Experiments are carried out in a telecontrol environment, used to provide voice commands to a mobile robot, based on DTW pattern matching.
Barriers to Education for the Marginalized Adult Learner

This qualitative study examines barriers to adult education by the marginalized adult learner. We adopted an inclusive approach by interviewing potential adult learners who had not participated in adult education programs due to illiteracy. Five overlapping themes related to barriers emerged and were categorized as: family values and responsibilities (i.e., cultural); the emotional effect of family poverty on participants’ lives (i.e., anger at the welfare system); disrupted school and learning experiences (i.e., multiple school changes); social exclusion and personal challenges (i.e., marginalization due to race, class); and turning points in participants’ education and hopes for the future (i.e., positive role models). Cette étude qualitative examine les obstacles à l'éducation pour adultes auxquels font face les adultes marginalisés. Nous avons adopté une approche inclusive en interviewant des adultes ayant pu participer à des programmes d'éducation pour adulte, mais qui ne l'avaient pas fait parce qu'ils étaient analphabètes. Il en a découlé cinq thèmes qui se chevauchent et qui sont liés aux obstacles. On les a catégorisés ainsi: les valeurs et responsabilités familiales (c.-à-d. culturelles); l'effet affectif de la pauvreté de la famille sur la vie des participants (par ex. la colère contre le système d'aide sociale); les expériences scolaires perturbées (c.-à-d. le changement d'école à de multiples reprises); l'exclusion sociale et des défis personnels; et les tournants décisifs dans l'éducation des participants et leurs espoirs pour l'avenir (c.-à-d. les modèles de rôle positifs).
Constrained MLE-based speaker adaptation with L1 regularization

Maximum a posterior (MAP) adaptation is one of the popular and powerful methods for obtaining a speaker-specific acoustic model. Basically, MAP adaptation needs a data storage for speaker adaptive (SA) model as much as speaker independent (SI) model needs. Modern speech recognition systems have a huge number of parameters and deal with millions of users. To reduce the data storage for SA models, in this paper, we propose a constrained maximum likelihood estimation-based speaker adaptation with L1 regularization. By the proposed method, we can more efficiently perform the model adjustments for SA models without almost any loss of phone recognition performance than the conventional sparse MAP adaptation method.
Reversible watermark using difference expansion of triplets

A new reversible watermarking algorithm based on the difference expansion of colored images has been developed. Since the watermark is completely reversible, the original image can be recovered exactly. The algorithm uses spatial and spectral triplets of pixels to hide pairs of bits, which allows the algorithm to hide a large amount of data. A spatial triplet is any three pixel values selected from the same spectral component, while a spectral triplet is any three pixel values selected from different spectral components. The algorithm is recursively applied to the rows and columns of the spectral components of the image and across all spectral components to maximize the hiding capacity. Simulation results show that the hiding capacity of the algorithm is very high and the resulting distortion is low.
The making of a psychotherapist

In the first part of the book - 'Personal Qualities' - we are reminded that Psychotherapy means 'Healing the Soul', and that the healer has a moral responsibility for the state of his own mental health as well as the patient's. The second part - 'Professional Dilemmas' - discusses ethical values, and the author's conviction that moral amorphism has caught hold of the psychotherapy movement.
The governance self‐assessment checklist: An instrument for assessing board effectiveness

This article describes the development and validation of the Governance Self-Assessment Checklist (GSAC). The GSAC was designed to assist boards of directors of nonprofit and public sector organizations to identify strengths and weaknesses in the governance of their organizations, educate board members about the essentials of good governance, and improve their governance practices. The instrument comprises 144 items organized into twelve subscales. The results of the study indicated that the subscales have excellent internal consistency reliability, exhibit good criterion-related validity, and are able to discriminate between stronger and weaker aspects of board functioning. The relative strengths and weaknesses in board effectiveness were identified, and the implications of the findings for the assessment of board effectiveness and field applications of the GSAC were discussed.
Clinical characteristics and outcome of Brucella endocarditis

Brucella endocarditis, a rare complication of brucellosis, is the main cause of death attributable to this disease. There are difficulties in the diagnosis and uncertainty regarding many aspects of the treatment of Brucella endocarditis. We retrospectively examined the clinical characteristics and outcome of patients diagnosed with Brucella endocarditis. Of the six patients diagnosed as having Brucella endocarditis, four had valvular disease, one had aortic and mitral mechanic valve prosthesis (AVR + MVR) and one had secundum type atrial septal defect. Transesophageal echocardiography showed vegetations in four patients. Blood culture grew Brucella mellitensis only in two patients. Standard agglutination tests were elevated in all patients (range 1/320–1/10240). Four patients were managed with combined antibiotherapy and surgery. One refused further treatment and one refused an operation and follow-up was lost for that patient. Two patients died during follow-up; one having had a previous AVR + MVR operation refused further treatment and the other suffering renal failure. Due to the fulminant course of the disease, treatment should be initiated when there is a clinical suspicion, even if the culture results are unknown or negative. Agglutination titres aid in the diagnosis. A combination of antibiotherapy and surgery seems to be preferable treatment modality.
p63 regulates multiple signalling pathways required for ectodermal organogenesis and differentiation

Heterozygous germline mutations in p63, a transcription factor of the p53 family, result in abnormal morphogenesis of the skin and its associated structures, including hair follicles and teeth. In mice lacking p63, all ectodermal organs fail to develop, and stratification of the epidermis is absent. We show that the ectodermal placodes that mark early tooth and hair follicle morphogenesis do not form in p63-deficient embryos, although the multilayered dental lamina that precedes tooth placode formation develops normally. The N-terminally truncated isoform of p63 (ΔNp63) was expressed at high levels in embryonic ectoderm at all stages of tooth and hair development, and it was already dominant over the transactivating TAp63 isoform prior to epidermal stratification. Bmp7, Fgfr2b, Jag1 and Notch1 transcripts were co-expressed withΔ Np63 in wild-type embryos, but were not detectable in the ectoderm of p63 mutants. In addition, β-catenin and Edar transcripts were significantly reduced in skin ectoderm. We also demonstrate that BMP2, BMP7 and FGF10 are potent inducers of p63 in cultured tissue explants. Hence, we suggest that p63 regulates the morphogenesis of surface ectoderm and its derivatives via multiple signalling pathways.
Chitosan-mediated crystallization and assembly of hydroxyapatite nanoparticles into hybrid nanostructured films

The synthesis and subsequent assembly of nearly spherical nano-hydroxyapatite (nHA) particles in the presence of trace amounts of the polysaccharide chitosan was carried out employing a wet chemical approach. Chitosan addition during synthesis not only modulated HA crystallization but also aided in the assembly of nHA particles onto itself. Solvent extraction from these suspensions formed iridescent films, of which the bottom few layers were rich in self-assembled nHA particle arrays. The cross-section of these hybrid films revealed compositional and hence structural grading of the two phases and exhibited a unique morphology in which assembled nHA particles gradually gave way to chitosan-rich top layers. Transmission electron microscope and selected area electron diffraction studies suggested that the basal plane of HA had interacted with chitosan, and scanning electron microscope studies of the hybrid films revealed multi-length scale hierarchical architecture composed of HA and chitosan. Phase identification was carried out by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Rietveld analysis of digitized XRD data showed that the basic apatite structure was preserved, but chitosan inclusion induced subtle changes to the HA unit cell. The refinement of crystallite shape using the Popa method clearly indicated a distinct change in the growth direction of HA crystallites from [001] to [100] with increasing chitosan concentration. The paper also discusses the likelihood of chitosan phosphorylation during synthesis, which we believe to be a pathway, by which chitosan molecules chemically interact with calcium phosphate precursor compounds and orchestrate the crystallization of nHA particles. Additionally, the paper suggests several interesting biomedical applications for graded nHA–chitosan nanostructured films.
Influence of organ environment on the growth, selection, and metastasis of human colon carcinoma cells in nude mice.

The purpose of these studies was to determine whether the biological and metastatic behaviors of tumor cells isolated from fresh surgical specimens of human colon carcinomas are influenced by the isolation method and the organ site of implantation and growth in nude mice. Three surgical specimens were obtained from three different patients. Two tumors were primary human colorectal carcinomas (HCC) classified as Dukes' B2 (KM12) and Dukes' D stages (KM20), and the third was from a liver metastasis (KM23). The tumors were enzymatically dissociated, and viable cells were implanted into the subcutis or spleen of different nude mice or were established in culture. Tumors developed in both sites of implantation, but hepatic metastases were found only in those nude mice that received splenic implantations of HCC cells. Cells from Dukes' D stage tumors produced more hepatic disease than cells from the Dukes' B tumor. Cells of the parental KM12C (culture) were injected into the spleen or cecum of nude mice to produce experimental and spontaneous hepatic metastases, respectively. HCC lesions were harvested from livers of nude mice and established as individual cell lines in culture. This procedure yielded cell lines KM12SM (spontaneous metastasis) and KM12L1 (experimental metastasis). The selection cycle for cells implanted into the spleen was repeated three more times to produce the cell line designated KM12L4. Cells of the parental KM12C and the three selected variants were injected into nude mice by different routes: i.v. , s.c. into the cecum, and into the spleen. Subsequent to implantation into the spleen, all cell lines were shown to be tumorigenic. Cells from the selected KM12L4 and KM12SM lines produced a significantly higher number of experimental liver metastases than the parental cells. Moreover, subsequent to the injection into the cecum, cells of the once-selected KM12SM (for spontaneous metastasis) produced a higher incidence of spontaneous liver metastasis than all other lines. The human origin of all the lines was confirmed by isoenzyme and karyotype analyses. The two highly metastatic lines (KM12L4 and KM12SM) were tetraploid and produced elevated levels of type IV collagenolytic activity. Collectively, the results demonstrate that the orthotopic implantation of HCC cells into the appropriate organ environment can be used for efficient isolation and for study of metastatic subpopulations of cells from human colon carcinoma.
Cerebral Blood Flow Velocities are Reduced During Attacks of Unilateral Migraine Without Aura

It has been disputed whether or not large intracranial arteries are dilated during migraine attacks. In order to answer this question the present transcranial Doppler study focused on side-to-side differences of middle cerebral artery blood velocity during unilateral attacks of migraine without aura in 25 patients. Blood velocity in the middle cerebral artery was lower on the headache side (59 cm/s) than on the non-headache side (65 cm/s) during the migraine attack. No such difference was found outside of attack (65 cm/s both sides). The difference (headache side minus non-headache side) was on average -6.1 cm/s during attack compared to -0.4 cm/s outside of attack (p = 0.01). Assuming that rCBF is unchanged during attacks of migraine without aura, our results suggest a 9% increase in middle cerebral artery lumen (cross-sectional area) on the affected side during unilateral attacks of migraine without aura. The findings, however, do not necessarily mean that arterial dilatation is the only or even the most significant cause of pain.