Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Burdens of Cardiometabolic Diseases Attributable to Dietary and Metabolic Risks in Korean Adults 2012–2013

Purpose In line with epidemiological and sociocultural changes in Korea over the past decades, reliable estimation of diseases as a result of dietary and metabolic risks is required. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the contributions of dietary and metabolic factors to cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) in Korean adults (25–64 years old) during 2012–2013. Materials and Methods Distribution of risk factors and cause-specific mortality by gender and age per year was obtained from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and Statistics Korea, respectively. The association between the two was obtained from published meta-analyses. The population-attributable fraction attributable to the risk factors was calculated across gender and age strata (male and female, age groups 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, and 55–64) in 2012 and 2013. Results The results showed that during the period studied, high body mass index [5628 deaths; uncertainty intervals (UIs): 5473–5781] and blood pressure (4202 deaths; UIs: 3992–4410) were major metabolic risks for CMD deaths, followed by dietary risks such as low intake of whole grain (4107 deaths; UIs: 3275–4870) and fruits (3886 deaths; UIs: 3227–4508), as well as high intake of sodium (2911 deaths, UIs: 2406–3425). Also, males and the younger population were seen more prone to be exposed to harmful dietary risk than their female and older counterparts. Conclusion The findings provide the necessary information to develop targeted government interventions to improve cardiometabolic health at the population level.
Agreement between clients with schizophrenia and mental health workers on clients' social quality of life: The role of social cognition and symptoms

OBJECTIVE Studies have showed that therapists and mental health workers of persons with schizophrenia tend to estimate their patients' social quality of life (SQoL) as poorer than the clients' own estimation. This study explores the hypothesis that this discrepancy is related to clients' social cognition and symptomatology. DESIGN Cross-sectional assessment of both clients and their mental health workers. METHODS Ninety persons with schizophrenia and 12 persons who were formal care providers participated in the study. All responded to a parallel version (client and clinician) of social quality-of-life scales. Clients' emotion identification, theory of mind and symptoms were also assessed. RESULTS Low social cognitive abilities of persons with schizophrenia, as well as negative symptomatology and having children, may be related to the negative bias of mental health workers, with regard to their client's SQoL. CONCLUSIONS While more severe levels of negative symptoms and more deficits of social cognition were related to reduced levels of agreement, paradoxically, a relatively normative family life that includes parenting was also related to lower levels of agreement. PRACTITIONER POINTS Attention should be given to low agreement between clients with schizophrenia and clinicians with regard to the client's quality of life, as it is central to alliance and outcome. Clinicians tend to estimate clients' social quality of life as poorer than the clients' own estimation when those clients have low social cognition, high negative symptomatology and children. There is a need to identify additional factors that contribute to agreement and alliance in therapy. Longitudinal assessment during therapy can trace the process of construction of agreement.
Aquatic acidification: a mechanism underpinning maintained oxygen transport and performance in fish experiencing elevated carbon dioxide conditions

ABSTRACT Aquatic acidification, caused by elevating levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), is increasing in both freshwater and marine ecosystems worldwide. However, few studies have examined how acidification will affect oxygen (O2) transport and, therefore, performance in fishes. Although data are generally lacking, the majority of fishes investigated in this meta-analysis exhibited no effect of elevated CO2 at the level of O2 uptake, suggesting that they are able to maintain metabolic performance during a period of acidosis. Notably, the mechanisms that fish employ to maintain performance and O2 uptake have yet to be verified. Here, we summarize current data related to one recently proposed mechanism underpinning the maintenance of O2 uptake during exposure to aquatic acidification, and reveal knowledge gaps that could be targeted for future research. Most studies have examined O2 uptake rates while fishes were resting and did not calculate aerobic scope, even though aerobic scope can aid in predicting changes to whole-animal metabolic performance. Furthermore, research is lacking on different age classes, freshwater species and elasmobranchs, all of which might be impacted by future acidification conditions. Finally, this Review further seeks to emphasize the importance of developing collaborative efforts between molecular, physiological and ecological approaches in order to provide more comprehensive predictions as to how future fish populations will be affected by climate change. Summary: Root effect haemoglobins and plasma-accessible carbonic anhydrase may be responsible for the ability of fishes to maintain oxygen transport during high PCO2 conditions.
Feudal Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Management in Large Domains

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve dialogue policy optimisation. Traditional RL algorithms, however, fail to scale to large domains due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose a novel Dialogue Management architecture, based on Feudal RL, which decomposes the decision into two steps; a first step where a master policy selects a subset of primitive actions, and a second step where a primitive action is chosen from the selected subset. The structural information included in the domain ontology is used to abstract the dialogue state space, taking the decisions at each step using different parts of the abstracted state. This, combined with an information sharing mechanism between slots, increases the scalability to large domains. We show that an implementation of this approach, based on Deep-Q Networks, significantly outperforms previous state of the art in several dialogue domains and environments, without the need of any additional reward signal.
Scrub typhus: risks, diagnostic issues, and management challenges

Scrub typhus is an acute febrile illness in the “tsutsugamushi triangle”, transmitted by chiggers that can be treated effectively if detected early. Laboratory testing, including molecular and serological assays, is needed for confirming the diagnosis, especially in the absence of the pathognomonic eschar. In this review, factors that play a role in disease occurrence and clinical clues for diagnosis, in addition to risk factors contributing to disease severity, including mortality, are discussed in detail. Moreover, issues related to diagnostic assays, treatment, and mixed infections are also enumerated and described.
Nonlinear observer based control design for an under-actuated compliant robotic hand

This work aims at designing control algorithms for an under-actuated compliant adaptive prosthetic hand to perform a complex task of grasping and manipulating of an unknown object. As multiple objectives are considered, if one controller is designed for one control objective, a hybrid controller is needed to coordinate different controllers to perform complex tasks. This work thus tries to apply recently developed framework of System of Funnels to the underactuated compliant adaptive prosthetic hand to design this hybrid controller. In order to apply System of Funnels, each controller has to have the flexibility to obtain any given domain of attraction by tuning its parameters. This paper proposed nonlinear observer based PID controllers for Grasp Approach and Grasp Stabilization. The nonlinear observer estimates the needed velocity of the under-actuated compliant adaptive prosthetic hand. By tuning parameters of PID controller and nonlinear observers appropriately, any desired domain of attraction for each control objective can be achieved. Our next step is to design some manipulation controller with adjustable domain of attraction in order to apply the framework of System of Funnels.
Ab Initio Investigations of Structural and Magnetic Properties of Cr-Doped Ni-Co-Mn-Sn Heusler Alloys

Ab initio calculations were performed to investigate composition dependences of crystal lattice parameters, magnetic moments,bulk modulus, magnetic exchange parameters inNi2-yCoyMn1.5-xCrxSn0.5 (y =0.2, 0.4; 0.0 ≤ x ≤ 0.4) Heusler alloys. It was shown that increasing of Cr content (x) firstly leads an increasing of lattice parameter, but then a decreasing. The strongest ferromagnetic (FM) interaction for Ni1.6Co0.4Mn1.4Cr0. 1Sn0.5 is nearest-neighbor interaction between Co and Mn1 (on own sites). The strongest antiferromagnetic (AFM) interaction is observed between nearest-neighbor Mn1-Cr atoms in the first coordination sphere and it is equal to-15 meV. Total magnetic moment of Ni2-yCoyMn1.5-xCrxSn0.5 (y =0.2, 0.4; 0.0 ≤ x ≤ 0.4) takes value in region from 6.1 μB to 6.6 μB.
Single-Molecule Rapid Imaging of Linear Genomes in Nanochannel Array

Human genomic structural variation (SV) is significant factor in genome complexity, and thus has substantial implications to the cause, development and progression of genetic diseases. These SVs, ranging in size of 1kbp-1Mbp, are challenging to assess with current technologies. As such, we have developed a commercial system (nanoAnalyzer® 1000) for the rapid linear analysis of genomes at single-molecule level. The core of our system is a nanofluidic chip consisting of an array of channels with a diameter less than 100 nm, nanofabricated on the surface of a silicon substrate. Thousands of unamplified genomic DNA molecules of 100’s kbps to several Mbps can be isolated and linearly streamed into the array for analysis in a parallel fashion. Fluorescently labeled sequence-specific signatures can then be identified and aligned to reference patterns at high resolution with custom software. This automated, multi-color imaging platform will enable a wide range of applications, such as accurate sequencing assembly, discovering genome structural variations, and uncovering epigenomic content. Nanochannel arrays promise to substantially lower the barriers of entry for single-molecule DNA analysis for scientists and clinicians, greatly impacting the advancement of molecular diagnostics, personalized medicine, and biomedical research.
Linguistic Isolation and Access to the Active Kidney Transplant Waiting List in the United States.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Waitlist inactivity is a barrier to transplantation, because inactive candidates cannot receive deceased donor organ offers. We hypothesized that temporarily inactive kidney transplant candidates living in linguistically isolated communities would be less likely to achieve active waitlist status. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS We merged Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network/United Network for Organ Sharing data with five-digit zip code socioeconomic data from the 2000 US Census. The cumulative incidence of conversion to active waitlist status, death, and delisting before conversion among 84,783 temporarily inactive adult kidney candidates from 2004 to 2012 was determined using competing risks methods. Competing risks regression was performed to characterize the association between linguistic isolation, incomplete transplantation evaluation, and conversion to active status. A household was determined to be linguistically isolated if all members ≥14 years old speak a non-English language and also, speak English less than very well. RESULTS A total of 59,147 candidates (70% of the study population) achieved active status over the study period of 9.8 years. Median follow-up was 110 days (interquartile range, 42-276 days) for activated patients and 815 days (interquartile range, 361-1244 days) for candidates not activated. The cumulative incidence of activation over the study period was 74%, the cumulative incidence of death before conversion was 10%, and the cumulative incidence of delisting was 13%. After adjusting for other relevant covariates, living in a zip code with higher percentages of linguistically isolated households was associated with progressively lower subhazards of activation both in the overall population (reference: <1% linguistically isolated households; 1%-4.9% linguistically isolated: subhazard ratio, 0.89; 95% confidence interval, 0.86 to 0.93; 5%-9.9% linguistically isolated: subhazard ratio, 0.83; 95% confidence interval, 0.80 to 0.87; 10%-19.9% linguistically isolated: subhazard ratio, 0.76; 95% confidence interval, 0.72 to 0.80; and ≥20% linguistically isolated: subhazard ratio, 0.71; 95% confidence interval, 0.67 to 0.76) and among candidates designated temporarily inactive due to an incomplete transplant evaluation. CONCLUSIONS Our findings indicate that candidates residing in linguistically isolated communities are less likely to complete candidate evaluations and achieve active waitlist status.
Fabrication of nanopore systems and their application to DNA manipulation

of “Fabrication of nanopore systems and their application to DNA manipulation” by Shanshan Wu, Ph.D., Brown University, May, 2009. Nanopore system is important for its many promising applications in rapid DNA sequencing, large biological molecule detection, polynucleotide-enzyme interaction study and etc. Following the first introduction of nanopores for polynucleotide study twelve years ago, many research studies have focused on the development of synthetic nanopore systems, due to its adjustability and adaptability for meeting various application needs, and the potential integration into future nano devices. Given the broad potential technological importance, it’s highly desirable to develop a reliable yet convenient fabrication method for nanopore system. We introduce a novel fast and low-cost technique for fabricating nanopore system with soft materials, employing a low-power laser with lithography-free substrate preparation. A model of surface-tension driven mass flow is proposed to describe its mechanism of formation. We further demonstrate the soft nanopore system’s capability for sensing biological molecules with DNA characterization experiments. A solid-state nanopore based system with optical access is introduced for the purpose of manipulating DNA-tethered microspheres near the nanopore using optical tweezers. We use optical trap to anchor λ-DNA-tethered microspheres in close proximity (1 ∼ 3μm) to the solid-state nanopore, and study the ionic conductance through the voltage-biased nanopore. At high voltage (−100mV to −300mV ), we observe hundreds of free-DNA-translocation-like current suppressions. We present the finding and discuss its possible underlying mechanism.
CRNET: an efficient sampling approach to infer functional regulatory networks by integrating large‐scale ChIP‐seq and time‐course RNA‐seq data

Motivation: NGS techniques have been widely applied in genetic and epigenetic studies. Multiple ChIP‐seq and RNA‐seq profiles can now be jointly used to infer functional regulatory networks (FRNs). However, existing methods suffer from either oversimplified assumption on transcription factor (TF) regulation or slow convergence of sampling for FRN inference from large‐scale ChIP‐seq and time‐course RNA‐seq data. Results: We developed an efficient Bayesian integration method (CRNET) for FRN inference using a two‐stage Gibbs sampler to estimate iteratively hidden TF activities and the posterior probabilities of binding events. A novel statistic measure that jointly considers regulation strength and regression error enables the sampling process of CRNET to converge quickly, thus making CRNET very efficient for large‐scale FRN inference. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark data showed a significantly improved performance of CRNET when compared with existing methods. CRNET was applied to breast cancer data to identify FRNs functional at promoter or enhancer regions in breast cancer MCF‐7 cells. Transcription factor MYC is predicted as a key functional factor in both promoter and enhancer FRNs. We experimentally validated the regulation effects of MYC on CRNET‐predicted target genes using appropriate RNAi approaches in MCF‐7 cells. Availability and implementation: R scripts of CRNET are available at http://www.cbil. ece.vt.edu/software.htm. Contact: xuan@vt.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Blackghost 1.0 test chip: On the road towards commercializing ultra-low-Vdd SoC for Internet-of-Things

We introduce the Blackghost 1.0 SoC developed in Qualcomm Research, which is our first test chip that paved the road towards the commercialization of the ultra-low-Vdd Blackghost product family. Through seamless integration of many low-power innovations from software, hardware, architecture and circuit, Blackghost delivers unmatched power efficiency for battery-powered Internet-of-Things. It integrates a low footprint sensor/control processor based on ARM Cortex M0, an on-die power management unit with direct battery attach capability, a computer vision classifier processor, a programmable DSP hardware accelerator and an ultra-low-power analog front end on a 3×3 mm2 die in TSMC 28LP CMOS process technology. The computation can operate at near-threshold voltages (<0.6V) at frequencies up to 50 MHz and draws only <9 μA/MHz from the directly attached battery.
A single-chain antibody-CD39 fusion protein targeting activated platelets protects from cardiac ischaemia/reperfusion injury

Aims CD39 is a cell membrane NTPase with anti-inflammatory and anti-platelet effects. However, its clinical use is limited by its bleeding side effect. With the goal of harnessing its therapeutic potential while avoiding haemostatic problems, we designed a fusion protein consisting of the extracellular domain of CD39 and a single-chain antibody (Targ-CD39) that specifically binds to activated glycoprotein (GP)IIb/IIIa and thus to activated platelets. Through this enrichment at activated platelets, the required systemic dose is below the dose impairing haemostasis. Methods and results Using an ischaemia/reperfusion mouse model (left anterior descending artery ligated for 1 h) we achieved remarkable protection of the reperfused tissue with Targ-CD39 compared with Non-targ-CD39 (mutated, non-binding version of Targ-CD39) and PBS control. Targ-CD39 restored ejection fraction and fractional shortening to a level indistinguishable from pre-injury status, while controls showed functional deterioration. Employing advanced clinically relevant methods of ultrasound analysis, we observed that both radial and longitudinal strain and strain rate showed infarct-typical changes of myocardial deformation in controls, but not in Targ-CD39 treated mice. Histological assessment confirmed strong reduction of infarct size and increase in neovascularization. Furthermore, attenuation of post-ischaemic inflammation was seen in cytokine profiling. Conclusion Overall, we demonstrate that Targ-CD39 holds promise for treatment of myocardial infarction.
Anonymous Split E-Cash—Toward Mobile Anonymous Payments

Anonymous E-Cash was first introduced in 1982 as a digital, privacy-preserving alternative to physical cash. A lot of research has since then been devoted to extend and improve its properties, leading to the appearance of multiple schemes. Despite this progress, the practical feasibility of E-Cash systems is still today an open question. Payment tokens are typically portable hardware devices in smart card form, resource constrained due to their size, and therefore not suited to support largely complex protocols such as E-Cash. Migrating to more powerful mobile platforms, for instance, smartphones, seems a natural alternative. However, this implies moving computations from trusted and dedicated execution environments to generic multiapplication platforms, which may result in security vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose a new anonymous E-Cash system to overcome this limitation. Motivated by existing payment schemes based on MTM (Mobile Trusted Module) architectures, we consider at design time a model in which user payment tokens are composed of two modules: an untrusted but powerful execution platform (e.g., smartphone) and a trusted but constrained platform (e.g., secure element). We show how the protocol’s computational complexity can be relaxed by a secure split of computations: nonsensitive operations are delegated to the powerful platform, while sensitive computations are kept in a secure environment. We provide a full construction of our proposed Anonymous Split E-Cash scheme and show that it fully complies with the main properties of an ideal E-Cash system. Finally, we test its performance by implementing it on an Android smartphone equipped with a Java-Card-compatible secure element.
Quantum Turbo Decoding for Quantum Channels Exhibiting Memory

Inspired by the success of classical turbo codes, quantum turbo codes (QTCs) have also been conceived for near-hashing-bound transmission of quantum information over memoryless quantum channels. However, in real physical situations, the memoryless channel assumption may not be well justified, since the channel often exhibits memory of previous error events. Here, we investigate the performance of QTCs over depolarizing channels exhibiting memory and we show that they suffer from a performance degradation at low depolarizing probability values. In order to circumvent the performance degradation issue, we conceive a new coding scheme termed quantum turbo coding scheme exploiting error-correlation (QTC-EEC) that is capable of utilizing the error-correlation while performing the iterative decoding at the receiver. The proposed QTC-EEC can achieve convergence threshold at a higher depolarizing probability for channels with a higher value of correlation parameter and achieve performance near to the capacity. Finally, we propose a joint decoding and estimation scheme for our QTC-EEC relying on the correlation estimation (QTC-EEC-E) designed for more realistic quantum systems with unknown correlation parameter. Simulation results reveal that the proposed QTC-EEC-E can achieve the same performance as that of the ideal system of known correlation parameter and hence demonstrate the accurate estimation of the proposed QTC-EEC-E.