Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Screening, risk assessment, and the approach to therapy in patients with prostate cancer

The major challenge in prostate cancer is to identify patients at higher risk of death and to distinguish them from those more likely to die from other causes. Stratification of patients into risk groups can be used to guide management decisions at each disease stage. This review discusses the measures, tools, and nomograms available for risk assessment in prostate cancer. For patients with localized hormone‐sensitive disease, the choice is between active surveillance and radical treatment, with focal therapy an emerging option. Current guidelines recommend treatment of patients with a life expectancy ≥10 years, although active surveillance is being used with increasing frequency for low‐risk patients, even with a long life expectancy. A number of risk stratification methods have been devised to assess the risk of biochemical recurrence (BCR) after treatment, with prostate‐specific antigen (PSA) level, Gleason score, clinical stage, and tumor mass/volume all shown to be predictive of BCR. Among men with BCR after treatment, PSA doubling time (PSADT) was the best predictor of further progression. Although studies in patients with castration‐resistant prostate cancer have shown that PSA level and PSADT are associated with a risk of developing metastatic disease, there is currently no clear surrogate for disease progression or overall survival for this patient group and no standard second‐ or third‐line therapy after progression on first‐line chemotherapy. The use of newly developed risk‐stratification models and markers of disease progression should assist in the earlier identification of disease progression, allowing the optimal treatment of such patients. Cancer 2011. © 2010 American Cancer Society.
Forwarding state reduction for sparse mode multicast communication

Reducing forwarding state overhead of multicast routing protocols is an important issue towards a scalable global multicast solution. We propose a new approach, dynamic tunnel multicast, which utilizes dynamically established tunnels on unbranched links of a multicast distribution tree to eliminate unnecessary multicast forwarding states. Analysis and simulation results show promising reduction in the state overhead of sparse mode multicast routing protocols.
A Multistate Investigation of Antibiotic‐Resistant Salmonella enterica Serotype I 4,[5],12:i:‐ Infections as Part of an International Outbreak Associated with Frozen Feeder Rodents

While most human Salmonella infections result from exposure to contaminated foods, an estimated 11% of all Salmonella infections are attributed to animal exposures, including both direct animal handling and indirect exposures such as cleaning cages and handling contaminated pet food. This report describes the epidemiologic, environmental and laboratory investigations conducted in the United States as part of the response to an international outbreak of tetracycline‐resistant Salmonella enterica serotype I 4,[5],12:i:‐ infections with over 500 illnesses occurring from 2008 to 2010. This investigation found that illness due to the outbreak strain was significantly associated with exposure to pet reptiles and frozen feeder rodents used as food for pet reptiles. Salmonella isolates indistinguishable from the outbreak strain were isolated from a frozen feeder mice‐fed reptile owned by a case patient, as well as from frozen feeder mice and environmental samples collected from a rodent producing facility (Company A). An international voluntary recall of all Company A produced frozen feeder animals sold between May 2009 and July 2010 occurred. Only 13% of cases in our investigation were aware of the association between Salmonella infection and mice or rats. Consumers, the pet industry, healthcare providers and veterinarians need to be aware of the potential health risk posed by feeder rodents, whether live or frozen. Frozen feeder rodent producers, suppliers and distributors should follow the animal food labelling requirements as described in 21 CFR §501.5, and all packages of frozen feeder rodents should include safe handling instructions. Persons should wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water after handling live or frozen feeder rodents, as well as reptiles or anything in the area where the animals live. Continued opportunities exist for public health officials, the pet industry, veterinarians and consumers to work together to prevent salmonellosis associated with pet food, pets and other animals.
Pontos de possível diálogo entre aprendizado multimodal e ensino-aprendizado de línguas estrangeiras

This article is a partial review of the literature that supports an investigation on the possible impact of multimodality on foreign language learning, with particular emphasis on text design (KRESS & VAN LEEUWEN, 2001) and models of multimedia learning (SCHNOTZ, 2005; MAYER, 2001). To start, the article describes these models and establishes their relation to the field of second language acquisition. To continue, we discuss some meeting points that may justify our interest in making multimodal leaning and foreign language education engage in dialog. The article concludes with a brief account of some studies dealing with multimodal foreign language learning that illustrate such dialogue.
Learning in A Changing World: Non-Bayesian Restless Multi-Armed Bandit

We consider the restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem with unknown dynamics. In this problem, at each time, a player chooses K out of N (N > K) arms to play. The state of each arm determines the reward when the arm is played and transits according to Markovian rules no matter the arm is engaged or passive. The Markovian dynamics of the arms are unknown to the player. The objective is to maximize the long-term reward by designing an optimal arm selection policy. The performance of a policy is measured by regret, defined as the reward loss wi th respect to the case where the player knows which K arms are the most rewarding and always plays these K best arms. We construct a policy, referred to as Restless Upper Confidence Bound (RUCB ), that achieves a regret with logarithmic order of time when an arbitrary nontrivial bound on certain system parameters is known. When no knowledge about the system is available, we extend the RUCB policy to achieve a regret arbitrarily close to the logarithmic order. In both cases, the system achieves the maximum mean reward offered by the K best arms. Potential applications of these results include cognitive radio networks, opportunistic communications in unknown fading environments, and financi al investment.
Performance Study on Cooperative Relaying Topologies in beyond 3 G Systems

Relaying has been proposed to support users suffering from high shadowing or high interference and therefore being not able to receive high data rates. With adaptive relaying, a higher Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) can be used in order to increase the feasible data rate. The investigation of relaying techniques widely has concentrated on information theoretical methods. Instead, this paper focuses on system level simulations to analyse the achievable results within a realistic environment. The question where to locate the Relay Stations is investigated and the achievable system performance is outlined. We show that relaying techniques can improve the median cell throughput and decrease the outage probability. Cooperative relaying results in the lowest outage probability, whereas the introduced concept of Dynamic Resource Relaying (DRR) offers a higher cell throughput. For the investigated LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution) system with a frequency re-use factor of one, the outage probability can be decreased by using relaying and no further frequency planning is required.
Denoising in a Jiffy: A fast and GPU friendly algorithm for image denoising

Non-local means is a state-of-the-art image denoising algorithm which uses weighted contribution of similar patches to denoise images. But its asymptotic complexity upper bounds the degree to which the algorithm can be accelerated. In this paper, we present an approximate version of the same which uses Locality Sensitive Hashing to reduce the complexity. Finally, we show that the new proposed approximate algorithm is magnitudes faster that the original algorithm while maintaining 90% of the denoising performance. A GPU implementation of the algorithm which obtains over 100 times speedup is also presented.
Decreased 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine Is Associated with Neural Progenitor Phenotype in Normal Brain and Shorter Survival in Malignant Glioma

Epigenetic modification of DNA by cytosine methylation to produce 5-methylcytosine (5mC) has become well-recognized as an important epigenetic process in human health and disease. Recently, further modification of 5mC by the ten eleven translocated (TET) family of enzymes to produce 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) has been described. In the present study, we used immunohistochemistry to evaluate the distribution of 5hmC in human brain during different periods of development and in a large series of gliomas (n = 225). We found that during development, 5hmC levels are high in more differentiated compartments like the fetal cortex, but low in the periventricular progenitor cell regions. In adults, we found 5hmC levels to be highest in the cortex, but present in all intrinsic cell types in the brain including stromal elements. In brain tumors, 5hmC levels were high in low grade tumors and reduced in malignant glioma, but did not exhibit any correlation with IDH1 mutation status. Additionally, we identified a significant relationship between low levels of 5hmC and reduced survival in malignant glioma. This observation was further supported by in silico analysis showing differential expression of genes involved in 5hmC homeostasis in aggressive subsets of glioblastoma. Finally, we show that several genes involved in regulating the levels of 5hmC are also prognostic in malignant glioma. These findings suggest that 5hmC regulation in malignant glioma may represent an important determinant of tumor differentiation and aggressive behavior, as well as a potential therapeutic target.
A general scalable and elastic matching service for content‐based publish/subscribe systems

Characterized by the emergence of a large number of live content, the emergency applications have received increasing attention in recent years. Providing a general and scalable event, matching service can precisely notify users latest information that they are interested in. However, because the live content arrival rate may churn significantly in a short time and subscriptions with various patterns tend to be skewed, it is challenging to increase the generality, scalability, and elasticity of the matching process. We propose a novel parallel event matching service based on the cloud computing environment, called GSEM, to satisfy these requirements. GSEM first presents a two‐hop framework and a general subscription pattern to handle various patterns of subscriptions. To provide scalable matching service, a hybrid content space partition scheme is proposed to divide large skewed subscriptions into multiple small clusters managed by a group of parallel servers. To adapt to the sudden change of event arrival rate, GSEM elastically adjusts the scale of servers and rebalances their workloads through a performance‐aware detection technique. A prototype deployment on the OpenStack platform shows that GSEM achieves scalable matching throughput with the growth of servers, elastic service capacity with the change of event arrival rate, and significantly outperforms the existing cloud based systems in various workloads. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Increase in Cardiac Ischemia-Reperfusion Injuries in Opa1+/- Mouse Model

Background Recent data suggests the involvement of mitochondrial dynamics in cardiac ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injuries. Whilst excessive mitochondrial fission has been described as detrimental, the role of fusion proteins in this context remains uncertain. Objectives To investigate whether Opa1 (protein involved in mitochondrial inner-membrane fusion) deficiency affects I/R injuries. Methods and Results We examined mice exhibiting Opa1delTTAG mutations (Opa1+/-), showing 70% Opa1 protein expression in the myocardium as compared to their wild-type (WT) littermates. Cardiac left-ventricular systolic function assessed by means of echocardiography was observed to be similar in 3-month-old WT and Opa1+/- mice. After subjection to I/R, infarct size was significantly greater in Opa1+/- than in WTs both in vivo (43.2±4.1% vs. 28.4±3.5%, respectively; p<0.01) and ex vivo (71.1±3.2% vs. 59.6±8.5%, respectively; p<0.05). No difference was observed in the expression of other main fission/fusion protein, oxidative phosphorylation, apoptotic markers, or mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) function. Analysis of calcium transients in isolated ventricular cardiomyocytes demonstrated a lower sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ uptake, whereas cytosolic Ca2+ removal from the Na+/Ca2+ exchanger (NCX) was increased, whilst SERCA2a, phospholamban, and NCX protein expression levels were unaffected in Opa1+/- compared to WT mice. Simultaneous whole-cell patch-clamp recordings of mitochondrial Ca2+ movements and ventricular action potential (AP) showed impairment of dynamic mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake and a marked increase in the AP late repolarization phase in conjunction with greater occurrence of arrhythmia in Opa1+/- mice. Conclusion Opa1 deficiency was associated with increased sensitivity to I/R, imbalance in dynamic mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake, and subsequent increase in NCX activity.
Secure Fallback Authentication and the Trusted Friend Attack

Fallback authentication, i.e., recovering access to an account after the password is lost, is an important aspect of real-world deployment of authentication solutions. However, most proposed and deployed mechanisms have substantial weaknesses that seriously degrade security and/or usability. e.g., the well-known security questions are often easy to guess. A promising new fallback authentication mechanism is social authentication, which bases authentication on information about the social context of the user (e.g., on his social graph). We consider fallback authentication mechanisms deployed in practice on a number of social network sites (we concentrate on social networks because those can realistically implement social authentication). Our main contribution is a novel attack against Facebook's social authentication mechanism called Trusted Friends, which is the prime example for social authentication. Our attack is different from previous attacks in that it does not exploit bias in user choice but exploits tests that are realized client-side (but should be server-side) and POST-data fields that can be manipulated by an attacker. Furthermore, we found problems with all fallback authentication mechanisms used by social network sites, and demonstrate a number of cases where we can circumvent the schemes used. These findings are problematic as successfully breaking the fallback authentication gives full access to an account, just as breaking the main authentication mechanism. We conclude that implementations of fallback authentication mechanisms require more attention, both on a conceptual and an implementation level, as even seemingly minor implementation details can have a broad impact on the overall security. We have responsibly reported all attacks to the respective security teams well in advance of publication.
Multi-step image compositing for massively parallel rendering

High performance visualization has played an important role in computer-aided scientific discovery and has become an indispensable tool for computational scientists. Sort-last parallel rendering is a proven approach for visual data analytics by extracting meaningful information from huge data sets generated from large scale scientific computing. Image compositing is the last stage of sort-last parallel rendering pipeline and works by combining the images generated by the rendering nodes to generate the final image. Since it requires interprocess communication among the entire nodes, it usually dominates the total cost of the parallel rendering process. In current high-end massively parallel HPC systems, where tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes can be involved, performance degradation is inevitable even using theoretically scalable image compositing algortithms such as the well-known Binary-Swap method. To minimize this undesirable performance degradation, we propose the multi-step image compositing method, where the image compositing nodes are divided into smaller groups and the entire process is performed in several steps. We evaluated the proposed image compositing method on RIKEN K computer, which is a massively parallel HPC system, and we obtained encouraging results showing the effectiveness of this method in a large-scale image compositing environment. We also foresee a great potential of this method to meet the large-scale image compositing demands brought about by the rapid increase in processor counts of current and next-generation HPC systems.
Modeling of Low-frequency Stoneley Wave Propagation In an Irregular Borehole

This paper describes a propagator matrix formulation for the problem of the Stoneley wave propagation in an irregular borehole. This is based on a simple one-dimensional theory that is possible for the low frequency Stoneley wave, because it is a guided wave with no geometrical spreading in the borehole. The borehole and the surrounding formation are modeled by multi-layers discretized along the borehole axis, then the propagator matrices at each boundary are calculated. The mass balance boundary condition is introduced to express an interaction of the Stoneley wave at the interfaces which include radius changes. We have used the method to investigate the reflection and the transmission characteristics of the Stoneley wave with several models. The results are consistent with the results obtained by other existing modeling methods such as the finite difference method and the boundary integral method. The calculation speed is much faster than those of the other methods. We have applied the method to the field data to simulate the synthetic iso-offset records and have compared them with the actual field records. The results show a good agreement in the major reflections due to the washout zones and an important disagreement in the reflections related to the fractures. This result suggests the possibility of distinguishing the fracture induced reflections from others.
Oxidative Stress–Induced Degradation of Thioredoxin-1 and Apoptosis Is Inhibited by Thioredoxin-1–Actin Interaction in Endothelial Cells

Objective—Thioredoxin-1 (Trx-1), one important antioxidative enzyme in endothelial cells, is required for apoptosis inhibition. Apoptosis induction is dependent on cytoskeletal changes, which depend on actin rearrangements. Therefore, we wanted to elucidate whether a physical interaction exists between Trx-1 and actin and what the functional consequences are. Methods and Results—Combined immunoprecipitation/mass spectrometry identified actin as a new binding partner for Trx-1. A separate pool of Trx-1 forms a complex with apoptosis signaling kinase 1. Actin is required for stress fiber formation; thus, the interaction of actin with Trx-1 might interfere with this process. Stress fiber formation, which is directly linked to the phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase (FAK), occurs as early as 1 hour after H2O2 treatment. It is inhibited by Trx-1 overexpression, treatment with exogenous Trx-1, or inhibition of FAK. Prolonged incubation with H2O2 induced stress fiber formation, reduced Trx-1 protein levels, and increased apoptosis. All these processes were inhibited by preincubation with the FAK inhibitor PF573228. On the contrary, incubation with PF573228 1 hour after H2O2 treatment did not block stress fiber formation, degradation of Trx-1, or apoptosis. Conclusion—These data demonstrate that the actin–Trx-1 complex protects Trx-1 from degradation and, thus, endothelial cells from apoptosis. Reciprocally, Trx-1 prevents stress fiber formation.
Method for the restoration of multicomponent images distorted by applicative disturbances

A method for the restoration of multicomponent images that were distorted by applicative disturbances is proposed. A particular case of multicomponent images is studied — the RGB images each color component of which is a g-bit digital half-tone image (DHTI). The method is based on the representation of g-bit DHTIs as a set of g-bit binary images and the use of probabilistic mathematical apparatus of three-dimensional Markov chains. To improve the calculation precision of probability characteristics for each local area of the image, a sliding window is used. To detect the distorted area, a method was used that is based on an estimate of the borders and taking into consideration the possible range of pixel brightness in the distorted area. A restoration algorithm is given for images distorted by applicative disturbances. The results of the proposed algorithm simulation are presented.
The Semantics of khn3 and lo1 in Thai Compared to up and down in English: A Corpus-based Study

This corpus-based study analyzes meanings of khɨn3 ‘ascend’ and loŋ1 ‘descend’ in Thai in comparison with up and down in English. Data came from three corpora: the Thai National Corpus (TNC) (Aroonmanakun et al., 2009), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the English-Thai Parallel Concordance (Aroonmanakun, 2009). Results of the analyses show that there are senses of the vertical spatial terms khɨn3 and loŋ1 in Thai that overlap with those of up and down in English. This reflects a universal image schema of vertical movement and similar semantic extension processes in the two languages. Data from the parallel corpus also reveal that the vertical spatial terms khɨn3 and loŋ1 do not always occur in the same contexts with up and down. But, when they do, the frequently shared meaning involves vertical movement, which is the basic sense of the terms. The use of corpora as a tool to study the semantics of vertical spatial terms in Thai and English makes it possible to obtain objective and naturalistic data as well as to observe frequency of various senses that are in use.
Efficient Generation of Antigen-Specific Cytotoxic T Cells Using Retrovirally Transduced CD40-Activated B Cells1

The development of rapid, efficient, and safe methods for generating Ag-specific T cells is necessary for the clinical application of adoptive immunotherapy. We show that B cells stimulated with CD40 ligand and IL-4 (CD40-B cells) can be efficiently transduced with retroviral vectors encoding a model Ag, CMV tegument protein pp65 gene, and maintain high levels of costimulatory molecules after gene transfer. CTL lines specific for pp65 were readily generated in all four healthy CMV-seropositive donors by stimulating autologous CD8+ T cells with these transduced CD40-B cells, both of which were derived from 10 ml peripheral blood. ELISPOT assays revealed that the CTL lines used multiple HLA alleles as restricting elements. Thus, CD40-B cells transduced retrovirally with Ag-encoding cDNA can be potent APC and facilitate to generate Ag-specific CTL in vitro.
STREAMLINE - Streamlined Analysis of Data at Rest and Data in Motion

STREAMLINE aims for improving the overall workflow of big data analytics systems. For this goal, it combines research in different areas to reduce the complexity of the work with data at rest and data in motion in a unified fashion. As a foundation STREAMLINE offers a uniform programming model on top of Apache Flink, for which it drives innovations in a wide range of areas, such as interactive data in motion visualization and advanced window aggregation techniques.