Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interpersonal psychotherapy and mirtazapine versus mirtazapine alone in treatment resistant depressed patients with sequential functional brain scans of dopamine D2 receptors with IBZM spect

Twenty DSM-IV major depressed patients who had not responded to at least one previous trial of antidepressant therapy at an adequate dose and duration agreed to participate in this study. They were randomly assigned to receive either mirtazapine (30-45mg) alone or in combination with 16 sessions of weekly Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT). The patients were followed up naturalistically one year, during this time the psychotherapy sessions were delivered monthly Blinded clinician ratings and self ratings were obtained for depression (Hamilton Depression Scale (HamD). Beck Depression Inventory (BD ), anxiety (Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAS)), and social functioning (Social Adaptation Scale) at baseline, 6, 16, 26 and 52 weeks. I123 Iodobenzamide Single Photon Computed Emission Tomography (IBZM SPECT) scans measured striatal dopamine D2 receptor activity at baseline and after 6 weeks of treatment. A two way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) detected significant effects measured by the HamD and HAS for time (p= 0.001; p= 0.001 respectively), treatment (p= p= 0.007; p= 0.033) and the interaction between the two (p = 0.007： p = 0.044). Significant differences emerged between the two groups by six months and continued to one year follow up favouring the IPT group (HamD, p= 0.033; HAS, p= 0.003). The only significant effects for the BDI were for time (p= 0.001). There were no statistically significant effects measured by the SAS. A 3-way repeated measures ANOVA on the IBZM SPECT data detected a significant interaction between Time X Hemisphere, demonstrated by a higher IBZM uptake in the striatum in non-responders (p=0.013, agitated patients (p= 0.045) and women (p= 0.012). The same interaction effects were noted in patients with a high level of resistant depression (p= 0.001). This preliminary study shows promising initial results for IPT in resistant depression. There is some evidence to support a role for dopamine in treatment resistant depression.
Bone Morphogenetic Protein Signaling Is Required for Aortic Valve Calcification

Objective— Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) is the most prevalent type of heart valve disease, affecting ≈2% of the US population. CAVD is characterized by the presence of calcific nodules, resulting in aortic valve (AoV) stenosis; however, the underlying mechanisms driving disease remain unknown. Studies of human diseased AoV provide initial evidence that bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling, essential for normal bone formation, is activated during CAVD. Mice deficient in Klotho, an FGF23 transmembrane coreceptor, exhibit premature aging and develop AoV calcific nodules as occurs in human CAVD. The role of BMP signaling in the development of CAVD was examined in porcine aortic valve interstitial cells (VICs) and Klotho −/− mice. Approach and Results— We show that activation of BMP signaling, as indicated by pSmad1/5/8 expression, precedes and later localizes with AoV calcification in Klotho −/− mice. In addition, cellular and extracellular matrix changes resembling features of normal bone formation are accompanied by increased osteochondrogenic gene induction in calcified Klotho −/− AoV. Likewise, osteogenic media treatment of porcine VICs results in BMP pathway activation, increased osteochondrogenic gene induction, and formation of calcific nodules in vitro. We demonstrate that genetic inactivation of the BMP type IA receptor in Klotho −/− aortic VICs, as well as BMP pathway inhibition of osteogenic media–treated aortic VICs in vitro, results in the inhibition of AoV calcification. Conclusions— BMP signaling and osteochondrogenic gene induction are active in calcified Klotho −/− AoV in vivo and calcified porcine aortic VICs in vitro. Importantly, BMP signaling is required for the development of AoV calcification in vitro and in vivo.
Systematic Risk and Information Technology

We find evidence that the conventional wisdom, among both managers and researchers, that information technology (IT) investments are risky is incorrect. IT managers are increasingly asked to justify IT investments in financial terms in order to gain project approval. Researchers have moved beyond productivity in an attempt to “open up the black box” of the returns to investment in IT. Using a sample of 653 firm-years for the years 1991-1996, this study finds that IT reduces systematic risk in the five-year period after the IT investment. The implication for managers is that, while implementation of IT projects is risky in the near term, managers should use lower return requirements for IT investments due to the longer-term impact of IT upon firm-level systematic risk. For researchers, the implication is that part of the reason for excessively high estimates of returns attributed to levels of IT capital may be that prior investment in IT may have reduced systematic risk and borrowing cost to the firm.
Multiple sequence alignment with the Clustal series of programs

The Clustal series of programs are widely used in molecular biology for the multiple alignment of both nucleic acid and protein sequences and for preparing phylogenetic trees. The popularity of the programs depends on a number of factors, including not only the accuracy of the results, but also the robustness, portability and user-friendliness of the programs. New features include NEXUS and FASTA format output, printing range numbers and faster tree calculation. Although, Clustal was originally developed to run on a local computer, numerous Web servers have been set up, notably at the EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/clustalw/).
Influenza Viruses with Receptor-Binding N1 Neuraminidases Occur Sporadically in Several Lineages and Show No Attenuation in Cell Culture or Mice

ABSTRACT In nearly all characterized influenza viruses, hemagglutinin (HA) is the receptor-binding protein while neuraminidase (NA) is a receptor-cleaving protein that aids in viral release. However, in recent years, several groups have described point mutations that confer receptor-binding activity on NA, albeit in laboratory rather than natural settings. One of these mutations, D151G, appears to arise in the NA of recent human H3N2 viruses upon passage in tissue culture. We inadvertently isolated the second of these mutations, G147R, in the NA of the lab-adapted A/WSN/33 (H1N1) strain while we were passaging a heavily engineered virus in the lab. G147R also occurs at low frequencies in the reported sequences of viruses from three different lineages: human 2009 pandemic H1N1 (pdmH1N1), human seasonal H1N1, and chicken H5N1. Here we reconstructed a representative G147R NA from each of these lineages and found that all of the proteins have acquired the ability to bind an unknown cellular receptor while retaining substantial sialidase activity. We then reconstructed a virus with the HA and NA of a reported G147R pdmH1N1 variant and found no attenuation of viral replication in cell culture or change in pathogenesis in mice. Furthermore, the G147R virus had modestly enhanced resistance to neutralization by the Fab of an antibody against the receptor-binding pocket of HA, although it remained completely sensitive to the full-length IgG. Overall, our results suggest that circulating N1 viruses occasionally may acquire the G147R NA receptor-binding mutation without impairment of replicative capacity. IMPORTANCE Influenza viruses have two main proteins on their surface: one (hemagglutinin) binds incoming viruses to cells, while the other (neuraminidase) helps release newly formed viruses from these same cells. Here we characterize unusual mutant neuraminidases that have acquired the ability to bind to cells. We show that the mutation that allows neuraminidase to bind cells has no apparent adverse effect on viral replication but does make the virus modestly more resistant to a fragment of an antibody that blocks the normal hemagglutinin-mediated mode of viral attachment. Our results suggest that viruses with receptor-binding neuraminidases may occur at low levels in circulating influenza virus lineages.
CC-DTW: An Accurate Indoor Fingerprinting Localization Using Calibrated Channel State Information and Modified Dynamic Time Warping

Indoor wireless local area network (WLAN) based positioning technologies have boomed recently because of the huge demands of indoor location-based services (ILBS) and the wide deployment of commercial Wi-Fi devices. Channel state information (CSI) extracted from Wi-Fi signals could be calibrated and utilized as a fine-grained positioning feature for indoor fingerprinting localization. One of the main factors that would restrict the positioning accuracy of fingerprinting systems is the spatial resolution of fingerprints (SRF). This paper mainly focuses on the improvement of SRF for indoor CSI-based positioning and a calibrated CSI feature (CCF) with high SRF is established based on the preprocess of both measured amplitude and phase. In addition, a similarity calculation metric for the proposed CCF is designed based on modified dynamic time warping (MDTW). An indoor fingerprinting method based on CCF and MDTW, named CC-DTW, is then proposed to improve the positioning accuracy in indoors. Experiments are conducted in two indoor office testbeds, and the performances of the proposed CC-DTW, one time-reversal (TR) based approach and one Euclidean distance (ED) based approach are evaluated and discussed. The results show that the SRF of CC-DTW outperforms the TR-based one and the ED-based one in both two testbeds in terms of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve metric, and the area under curve (AUC) metric.
Effect of Vitamin E on Serum Aminotransferase and Thioredoxin Levels in Patients with Viral Hepatitis C

Objectives: Oxidative stress induces cellular responses such as cell death, gene activation and cell proliferation, in the liver. Vitamin E (Vit. E) has been found to protect the liver against oxidative stress in animal experiments. Thioredoxin (TRX) is a stress inducible, multifunctional protein, secreted during oxidative stress. This study evaluated effects of Vit. E on serum TRX and aminotransferase levels in hepatitis C virus (HCV) patients, partly non-responsive to initial interferon (IFN), with higher than average level of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) after receiving anti-inflammatory drug treatment. Methods: Seventeen HCV patients (male=3; female=14) of age 62±7.65 years receiving anti-inflammatory drug therapy, at least 6 months prior to Vit. E administration, were given d-α´-tocopherol 500 mg/day, orally, for a period of 3 months. ALT, aspartate aminotransferase (AST), TRX and Vit. E were measured at 0, 1, 2 and 3 months and 1 month after end of treatment. As controls, the same patients biochemical data, 3 months from the start of therapy were used. Patients were divided into three categories: total patients “T”, low ALT group “L” (ALT<70 IU/l) and high ALT group “H”(ALT>70 IU/l), respectively.Results: The ALT level was lowered, significantly in group H, in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 1-month post therapy, compared to the initial value. But group L showed little or no change in ALT. Post Vit. E therapy, in groups T and H, the TRX level was elevated but remained below initial levels, whereas in group L, TRX level remained significantly lower than the pretreatment value. Groups T and L, showed significant reduction (p<0.05) in serum TRX levels in the 2nd and 3rd month. Group H showed a tendency towards TRX reduction, but not significantly. Serum Vit. E levels increased significantly (p<0.0001) from the 1st to 3rd month in all three T, H and L groups. Conclusion: Oxidative stress induced liver damage is reduced by Vit. E in patients with viral hepatitis C, particularly those with initial ALT levels >70 IU/l. Vit. E treatment causes reduction of oxidative stress markers as TRX and ALT in sera. Therefore, Vit. E can act as a supportive therapy to combat liver damage caused by oxidative stress, in such patients with continuously high levels of ALT even after anti-viral and anti-inflammatory drug therapy.
Targeted inactivation of β1 integrin induces β3 integrin switching, which drives breast cancer metastasis by TGF-β

Chemotherapeutic targeting of β1 integrin has been proposed as a way to alleviate breast cancer metastasis. It is shown here that inactivation of β1 integrin elicits compensatory expression of β3 integrin, which rescues mammary tumor growth and metastasis, as well as promoting oncogenic TGF-β signaling in late-stage breast cancer.
Exact Analysis of Latency of Stateless Opportunistic Forwarding

Stateless opportunistic forwarding is a simple fault- tolerant distributed approach for data delivery and information querying in wireless ad hoc networks, where packets are forwarded to the next available neighbors in a "random walk" fashion, until they reach the destinations or expire. This approach is robust against ad hoc topology changes and is amenable to computation/bandwidth/energy-constrained devices; however, it is generally difficult to predict the end-to-end latency suffered by such a random walk in a given network. In this paper, we make several contributions on this topic. First, by using spectral graph theory we derive a general formula for computing the exact hitting and commute times of weighted random walks on a finite graph with heterogeneous sojourn times at relaying nodes. Such sojourn times can model heterogeneous duty cycling rates in sensor networks, or heterogeneous delivery times in delay tolerant networks. Second, we study a common class of distance-regular networks with varying numbers of geographical neighbors, and obtain simple estimate-formulas of hitting times by numerical analysis. Third, we study the more sophisticated settings of random geographical locations and distance-dependent sojourn times through simulations. Finally, we discuss the implications of this on the optimization of latency-overhead trade-off.
Unsupervised Effectiveness Estimation for Image Retrieval Using Reciprocal Rank Information

In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach for estimating the effectiveness of image retrieval results obtained for a given query. The proposed approach does not require any training procedure and the computational efforts needed are very low, since only the top-k results are analyzed. In addition, we also discuss the use of the unsupervised measures in two novel rank aggregation methods, which assign weights to ranked lists according to their effectiveness estimation. An experimental evaluation was conducted considering different datasets and various image descriptors. Experimental results demonstrate the capacity of the proposed measures in correctly estimating the effectiveness of different queries in an unsupervised manner. The linear correlation between the proposed and widely used effectiveness evaluation measures achieves scores up to 0.86 for some descriptors.
Interference mitigation in MIMO interference channel via successive single-user soft decoding

This paper examines a practical way of mitigating interference in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) interference channel when each user is constrained to use a point-to-point code. It was recently shown that the capacity region of interference channel with point-to-point codes can be established by a combination of two schemes: treating interference as noise and joint decoding. In practice, a straightforward implementation of a joint decoding receiver could be significantly more complex than treating interference as noise. Thus, as a low-complexity approach to joint decoding, this paper proposes a successive single-user soft decoding receiver, which performs interference-aware detection with a priori log-likelihood ratio (LLR) and single-user soft decoding for every user successively. The proposed receiver is compared with a receiver treating interference as noise and a receiver performing interference-aware detection without a priori LLR and single-user decoding for the desired user only. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver significantly outperforms these existing receivers.
Applying Deep Belief Networks to Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we applied a novel learning algorithm, namely, Deep Belief Networks (DBN) to word sense disambiguation (WSD). DBN is a probabilistic generative model composed of multiple layers of hidden units. DBN uses Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to greedily train layer by layer as a pretraining. Then, a separate fine tuning step is employed to improve the discriminative power. We compared DBN with various state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms in WSD such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Maximum Entropy model (MaxEnt), Naive Bayes classifier (NB) and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). We used all words in the given paragraph, surrounding context words and part-of-speech of surrounding words as our knowledge sources. We conducted our experiment on the SENSEVAL-2 data set. We observed that DBN outperformed all other learning algorithms.
Evaluation of aqueous outflow facility in patients with high intraocular pressure after cataract surgery.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE To study whether patients with a marked elevation of intraocular pressure (IOP) the day after cataract surgery may have a chronically impaired aqueous outflow. PATIENTS AND METHODS In 128 consecutive patients, IOP was measured both preoperatively and the day after phacoemulsification and intraocular lens implantation. In the late postoperative period, aqueous outflow facility (C-value) was measured with pneumatonography in patients (n = 7) who experienced a postoperative IOP increase of at least 20 mm Hg and in patients (n = 11) with a difference between preoperative and postoperative IOP of not more than 2 mm Hg. RESULTS Aqueous outflow facility was normal in both groups. Mean C-value was 0.32 +/- 0.18 microL/min/ mm Hg in the hypertensive group and 0.23 +/- 0.10 microL/ min/mm Hg in the normotensive group. The difference was not statistically significant (P = .20). CONCLUSIONS Patients with marked IOP elevation the day after cataract surgery do not seem to have a chronically impaired aqueous outflow facility compared with normotensive patients.
RHO binding to FAM65A regulates Golgi reorientation during cell migration

ABSTRACT Directional cell migration involves reorientation of the secretory machinery. However, the molecular mechanisms that control this reorientation are not well characterised. Here, we identify a new Rho effector protein, named FAM65A, which binds to active RHOA, RHOB and RHOC. FAM65A links RHO proteins to Golgi-localising cerebral cavernous malformation-3 protein (CCM3; also known as PDCD10) and its interacting proteins mammalian STE20-like protein kinases 3 and 4 (MST3 and MST4; also known as STK24 and STK26, respectively). Binding of active RHO proteins to FAM65A does not affect the kinase activity of MSTs but results in their relocation from the Golgi in a CCM3-dependent manner. This relocation is crucial for reorientation of the Golgi towards the leading edge and subsequent directional cell migration. Our results reveal a previously unidentified pathway downstream of RHO that regulates the polarity of migrating cells through Golgi reorientation in a FAM65A-, CCM3- and MST3- and MST4-dependent manner. Highlighted Article: Identification of a new pathway downstream of the RHO subfamily of small GTPases that regulates Golgi orientation during cell migration through FAM65A, CCM3 and the MST3 and MST4 protein kinases.
Solving the Traveling Repairman problem with differentiated waiting times through Lagrangian relaxation

In this paper we present a formulation of the traveling repairman problem with differentiated waiting times that is derived from the extended disaggregated flow formulation for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem. We focus on the usage of the Lagrangian approach as a mechanism of speeding up the solution of the linear relaxation by a simplex method. We show some computational results.
A phase I and pharmacokinetic study of dihydro-5-azacytidine (NSC 264880).

5,6-Dihydro-5-azacytidine (DHAC; NSC 264880) is an analogue of 5-azacytidine that does not possess the hydrolytically unstable 5,6-imino bond of the parent compound. Thus, unlike 5-azacytidine, DHAC is stable in aqueous solution and may be administered by prolonged i.v. infusion, potentially avoiding acute toxicities associated with bolus administration of 5-azacytidine. In this study, patients with advanced cancer were treated with DHAC administered as a 24-h constant i.v. infusion every 28 days. Treatment began at a dose of 1 g/sq m and was escalated to the maximum-tolerated dose of 7 g/sq m, where the limiting toxicity was pleuritic chest pain. Other toxicities included nausea and vomiting, which were not limiting. There was no evidence for myelosuppression, nephrotoxicity, or hepatotoxicity. DHAC was measured in plasma, urine, and ascites by a sensitive and specific reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography assay capable of detecting 50 ng of drug per ml. Steady-state plasma levels were achieved with 8 h and ranged from 10.0 to 20.5 micrograms of DHAC per ml at the maximum-tolerated dose. Total-body clearance of 311 +/- 76 ml/min/sq m and postinfusion half-lives between 1 and 2 h were observed. Between 8 and 20% of the administered dose was excreted unchanged in urine. While ascites DHAC levels in a patient with ovarian cancer were comparable to plasma levels, postinfusion elimination was slower from this compartment than from plasma. No correlation was observed between DHAC plasma levels and duration or intensity of dose-limiting pleuritic chest pain. One patient with progressive Hodgkin's lymphoma demonstrated stabilization of disease for seven treatment cycles, and two patients with aggressive lymphoma demonstrated dramatic, although transient, disease responses. A dose of 7 g/sq m is recommended for Phase II trials of DHAC using this schedule.
Statistical process monitoring of between-part and within-part variations using independent component analysis

The data collected from in-process measurement usually contain useful information about the nature of the source of process variability. In this paper, each variation source is assumed to generate a different spatial variation pattern in the quality characteristics measurements. The variation source might also reveal interesting temporal pattern over the data sample. The spatial variation pattern and temporal pattern caused by a variation source may turn out to be the observed within- and between-part variations in the monitoring of product measurements. The study reported in this paper aimed at applying independent component analysis (ICA) to monitor within- and between-part variations. Various monitoring statistics obtained from ICA are used to construct the control procedure. The average run length (ARL) is used to measure the abnormalities detection performance. An extensive comparison based on simulation study indicates that the ICA-based control charts perform better than conventional control charts in terms of ARL. The paper contributes to the monitoring of within- and between-part variations.