Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early diagnosis of ectopic pregnancy. Does use of a strict algorithm decrease the incidence of tubal rupture?

OBJECTIVE To determine if tubal rupture rates are decreased when a strict diagnostic algorithm is employed in the evaluation of women with suspected ectopic pregnancy as compared to individualized diagnostic methods. STUDY DESIGN Between 1994 and 1996, a group of investigators at Charleston Area Medical Center employed a strict diagnostic algorithm consisting of serum quantitative human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels, progesterone levels, ultrasound and endometrial curettage in order to expedite diagnosis when ectopic pregnancy was suspected (group A patients). Other practitioners employed traditional criteria in similar clinical situations (group B patients). Medical records of patients diagnosed with ectopic pregnancy in this period were retrospectively reviewed. Demographic data, clinical and laboratory characteristics, and rate of tubal rupture were compared. RESULTS Sixty-one of 122 patients were diagnosed with ectopic pregnancy by strict criteria. These patients did not differ significantly from those evaluated by an individualized approach in regard to age, gravidity, parity or risk factors for ectopic pregnancy. Menstrual age, hCG levels and progesterone levels were similar as well. Group A patients had a median diagnostic interval of 2 days, with a range of 0-16. Group B patients had a median diagnostic interval of 8 days, with a range of 0-44 (P < .001). Of patients evaluated by this strict algorithm, 3.3% experienced rupture as compared to 23% of patients in group B (P < .001). CONCLUSION Use of a strict diagnostic algorithm in the evaluation of patients with suspected ectopic pregnancy resulted in decreased tubal rupture rates. Such an algorithm could be disseminated to all locations for triage of patients and use in a standardized manner. This practice could result in a reduction in loss of reproductive function and mortality secondary to ectopic pregnancy.
Relationship between two types of vesicular glutamate transporters and neurokinin‐1 receptor‐immunoreactive neurons in the pre‐Bötzinger complex of rats: light and electron microscopic studies

Our previous study demonstrated GABAergic and glycinergic synapses onto neurokinin‐1 receptor (NK1R)‐immunoreactive (ir) neurons in the pre‐Bötzinger complex (pre‐BötC), the hypothesized kernel of normal respiratory rhythmogenesis. In the present study, we aimed to identify glutamatergic synapses onto NK1R‐ir pre‐BötC neurons, as excitatory synaptic transmission is a prerequisite to normal respiratory rhythmogenesis. Two types of vesicular glutamate transporters (VGLUT), VGLUT1 and VGLUT2, have been recently implicated in glutamate‐mediated transmission. The present study used immunofluorescence and immunogold‐silver staining to determine the relationship between the transporters and NK1R‐ir neurons in the pre‐BötC of adult rats. Under the confocal laser‐scanning microscope, VGLUT2‐ir boutons were found to be widely distributed in the pre‐BötC, some of which were in close apposition to NK1R‐ir somas and dendrites. VGLUT1‐ir boutons were relatively rare and only a few were found to be in close apposition to NK1R‐ir somas and dendrites. Electron microscopic observation revealed that approximately 41% of VGLUT2‐ir terminals were in close apposition to, or made asymmetric synapses with NK1R‐ir somas and dendrites in the pre‐BötC. On the other hand, 50.5% of NK1R‐ir dendrites were closely apposed to, or synapsed with VGLUT2‐ir terminals. Occasionally, VGLUT1‐ir terminals were found in close apposition to NK1R‐ir somas or dendrites, but we were unable to identify synapses between them. The present findings provide the morphological basis for excitatory synaptic inputs onto NK1R‐ir neurons in the pre‐BötC. VGLUT2 may be involved in a dominant excitatory synaptic pathway for normal respiratory rhythmogenesis.
Carotid and Vertebral Artery Injury following Severe Head or Cervical Spine Trauma

In order to determine the frequency of neck vessel injuries, Doppler investigations were performed in 60 patients following either severe head injury (n = 29), cervical spine injury (n = 26), or combined head and cervical spine injury (n = 5). The majority of patients were referred to our hospital for early rehabilitation; before admission Doppler investigations had been performed in only 2 patients. Clinically, 3 patients sustained severe cerebral ischemia due to neck vessel trauma: 1 patient with left-sided ICA dissection after head trauma revealed Doppler abnormalities only in the early phase of the disease; the second patient demonstrated persistent Doppler abnormalities due to traumatic right-sided ICA and VA occlusion. The third patient sustained a fatal vertebral and basilar artery thrombosis following cervical spine injury. In 57 patients without clinical signs suspicious of neck vessel trauma, sonography revealed abnormali- ties in 3 patients (11%) with severe head injury and in 6 patients (20%) with cervical spine or combined head and spine injury, in both groups mainly related to the vertebrobasilar system. Neck vessel injury is probably an underdiagnosed complication of severe head or cervical spine trauma. Although interpretation of Doppler findings may be difficult, particularly in the vertebrobasilar system, Doppler investigations can be recommended as a screening method to exclude neck vessel injuries.
FATTY ACID COMPOSITION OF FISHES FROM INLAND WATERS

LJUBOJEVIC, D. , D. TRBOVIC, J. LUJIC, O. BJELIC-CABRILO, D. KOSTIC, N. NOVAKOV and M. CIRKOVIC, 2013. Fatty Acid Composition of Fishes from Inland Waters. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., Supplement 1: 62–71 The paper presents a comparative analysis of proximate and fatty acid composition of seven fi sh species from the Danube River including asp (Aspius aspius), common bream (Abramis brama), common barbel (Barbus barbus), common carp (Cyprinus carpio), sterlet (Acipenser ruthenus) and northern pike (Esox lucius). Eight samples of each species of freshwater fi sh were caught from the Danube. The amount of protein ranged from 16.69 g/100 g (common carp) to 18.61 g/100 g (barbel). Fat content in the fi llets of pike, asp, bream, sterlet, common carp and barbel was 1.61; 2.78; 3.24; 5.39; 7.13 and 7.78 g/100 g, respectively. The total cholesterol content was the highest in the sterlet fi llets (73.59 mg/100 g) and the lowest in the asp (36.26 mg/100 g). The total amount of saturated fatty acids was the highest in pike (39.9%) and the lowest in bream (27.27%). The sum of polyunsaturated fatty acid was however the highest in pike (28.15%) and the lowest percentage of PUFA was in bream (17.07%) and the lowest n-3/n-6 ratio was in common carp (0.44). The chemical composition and quantity of n-3 fatty acids varied largely by the fi sh species. The meat of warm water fi shes from the Danube River represents a valuable source of healthy nutrition for the consumers.
Effect of Piperine on the Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of Glimepiride in Normal and Streptozotocin - Induced Diabetic Rats

The effect of piperine on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of glimepiride in normal as well as diabetic rats was studied. In normal and streptozotocin induced diabetic rats the combination of glimepiride with piperine increased all the pharmacokinetic parameters, such as Cmax, AUC0- n, AUCtotal, t½, and MRT, and decreased the clearance, Vd, markedly as compared with the control group. In pharmacodynamic studies, the combination of glimepiride with piperine provided significant protection against the diabetes induced alterations in the biochemical parameters. In addition, the combination of glimepiride with piperine also improved the total antioxidant status significantly in diabetic rats compared with piperine and glimepiride treated groups. The results revealed that a combination of glimepiride with piperine led to the enhancement of the bioavailability of glimepiride by inhibiting the CYP2C9 enzyme, which suggested that piperine might be beneficial as an adjuvant to glimepiride in a proper dose, in diabetic patients.
Assessment of Dialysis Dose by Measured Clearance versus Extrapolated Data

Objective To determine whether estimates of daily dialysis clearance of creatinine and urea, based on data from the 4-hour peritoneal equilibration test, correlate well with daily dialysis clearance measured by 24-hour dialysate collection in chronic ambulatory peritoneal dialysis patients. Design Prospective study in which each subject collected all dialysate from a 24-hour period and then immediately thereafter underwent a standard peritoneal equilibration test (PET). Daily clearances of creatinine and urea were calculated from 24-hour dialysate collections by standard methods and then were compared with several estimates of 24-hour clearance based on PET data. Setting Single peritoneal dialysis unit of a university teaching hospital. Patients Thirty-six stable patients on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD). Main Outcome The estimated values for daily dialysis clearance both overestimated and underestimated the measured 24-hour clearance. The correlation coefficient between the extrapolations and the actual 24-hour clearances ranged from 0.63–0.68. The range of discordance for daily creatinine clearance was from -2530 mL/dayto +2199 mL/day. For daily urea clearance, the range of discordance was from -21 03 mL/ day to +1940 mL/day. The peritoneal membrane transport characteristics of the individual patient did not predict whether the extrapolation overestimated orunder estimated the measured daily clearance. Conclusion Extrapolation of PET data is not a reliable method to estimate the dose of dialysis delivered to the patient. A 24-hour collection of dialysis is necessary for this determination.
Liver T1ρ MRI measurement in healthy human subjects at 3 T: a preliminary study with a two-dimensional fast-field echo sequence.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to explore the technical feasibility of T(1)ρ MRI for the liver, and to determine the normal range of liver T(1)ρ in healthy subjects at clinical 3 T. METHODS There were 15 healthy volunteers. Three representative axial slices were selected to cut through the upper, middle and lower liver. A rotary echo spin-lock pulse was implemented in a two-dimensional fast-field echo sequence. Spin-lock frequency was 500 Hz, and the spin-lock times of 1, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 ms were used for T(1)ρ mapping. The images were acquired slice by slice during breath-holding. Regions of interest (ROIs; n=5) were manually placed on each slice of the liver parenchyma region, excluding artefacts and vessels. The mean value of these ROIs (n=15) was regarded as the liver T(1)ρ value for the subject. Six subjects were scanned once at fasting status; six subjects were scanned once 2 h post meal; three subjects were scanned twice at fasting status; and seven subjects were scanned twice 2 h post meal. RESULTS When two readers measured the same 10 data sets, the interreader reproducibility (ICC: intraclass correlation coefficient) was 0.955. With the 10 subjects scanned twice, the ICC for scan-rescan reproducibility was 0.764. There was no significant difference for the liver T(1)ρ value at the fasting status (43.08±1.41 ms) and post-meal status (42.97±2.38 ms, p=0.867). Pooling together all the 32 scans in this study, the normal liver T(1)ρ value ranged from 38.6 to 48.3 ms (mean 43.0 ms, median 42.6 ms). CONCLUSION It is feasible to obtain consistent liver T(1)ρ measurement for human subjects at 3 T.
CROSS-LINGUAL VOICE CONVERSION

CROSS-LINGUAL VOICE CONVERSION Cross-lingual voice conversion refers to the automatic transformation of a source speaker’s voice to a target speaker’s voice in a language that the target speaker can not speak. It involves a set of statistical analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, and signal processing techniques. This study focuses on the problems related to cross-lingual voice conversion by discussing open research questions, presenting new methods, and performing comparisons with the state-of-the-art techniques. In the training stage, a Phonetic Hidden Markov Model based automatic segmentation and alignment method is developed for crosslingual applications which support textindependent and text-dependent modes. Vocal tract transformation function is estimated using weighted speech frame mapping in more detail. Adjusting the weights, similarity to target voice and output quality can be balanced depending on the requirements of the crosslingual voice conversion application. A context-matching algorithm is developed to reduce the one-to-many mapping problems and enable nonparallel training. Another set of improvements are proposed for prosody transformation including stylistic modeling and transformation of pitch and the speaking rate. A high quality crosslingual voice conversion database is designed for the evaluation of the proposed methods. The database consists of recordings from bilingual speakers of American English and Turkish. It is employed in objective and subjective evaluations, and in case studies for testing new ideas in crosslingual voice conversion.
Parallelizing a Matched Pair of Ray-Tracing Projector and Backprojector for Iterative Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction

Iterative reconstruction methods in X-ray CT can provide better image quality than analytical methods but their applications in practice are still limited due to computationally expensive calculations of repeated projection and backprojection operations. In the past decade, GPU-accelerated methods have been successfully used to reduce the computation time for projection and backprojection. However, it has been of a difficult problem to overcome a trade-off between the accuracy of reconstructed images and the efficiency of parallel computations. For example, when the size of the voxel in the reconstructed volume is larger than that of the detector bin, the use of the conventional unmatched projector-backprojector pair can lower the accuracy of reconstructed images due to the error caused by the mismatch between the projector and backprojector. In this paper, we propose a new GPU-accelerated scheme for the most widely used ray-tracing method (RTM) to perform projection and backprojection operations. Unlike the previous works that accelerate the computation of backprojection by using approximations, our method does not use any approximations for parallelizing the projection and backprojection operations. Since our method is exact, the results are as accurate as those obtained from the nonaccelerated method. We apply our method to iterative reconstruction for dental cone-beam CT systems and test its performance using both the simulated data using a 3-D digital phantom and the real data acquired from an offset flat-panel X-ray CT system. Our experimental results show that, the proposed method achieves a substantially high acceleration rate while retaining the accuracy of the RTM for both projection and backprojection.
The C terminus of T cell‐specific adapter protein (TSAd) is necessary for TSAd‐mediated inhibition of Lck activity

T cell‐specific adapter protein (TSAd), encoded by the SH2D2A gene, is expressed in activated T cells. The function of TSAd is as yet unknown. We previously showed that TSAd may modulate T cell receptor‐triggered signaling events. TSAd contains a Src homology (SH)2 domain, ten tyrosines and a C‐terminal proline‐rich region. Here, we show that human TSAd interacts with Lck through the Lck SH2 and SH3 domains and is a substrate for Lck. The TSAd C terminus, including the proline‐rich region and five tyrosines, is both necessary and sufficient for TSAd interaction with and phosphorylation by Lck. Expression of TSAd in Jurkat TAg cells results in hyperphosphorylation of endogenous Lck on Y394 and to an even larger extent on Y505, resulting in a reduced Y394/Y505 phosphorylation ratio in these cells. Furthermore, full‐length TSAd, but not TSAd lacking the C terminus, inhibits the hyperactive Lck Y505F mutant when both are expressed in Jurkat T cells. In contrast, expression of the TSAd C terminus alone is sufficient to inhibit Lck Y505F in phosphorylating its substrates in Jurkat T cells. Our results indicate that the TSAd C terminus is essential for inhibition of Lck activity by TSAd, and suggest a mechanism for how TSAd may inhibit early T cell activation events.
Comparing public perceptions of social work and social workers’ expectations of the public view

INTRODUCTION : Previous studies have explored public perception of social work and social workers. There is little written about what social workers think about how they, and the profession of social work, are viewed by the public. This article explores the views of a sample of social workers in Aotearoa New Zealand about their beliefs around the public perception of social work and social workers. AIMS : This article aims to explore social worker views on the public perception of social work, and then compares these findings with a previous study which looked at the public perception of social workers. METHODOLOGY : An online survey was conducted with 403 social workers from the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Work, which asked them about their perceptions on how social work and social workers are viewed by the public. The results are then compared to a previous telephone survey, which asked 386 members of the public their views on social work and social workers. FINDINGS : Results demonstrate that the social workers generally had a poorer impression of what the public believed in most areas, compared to what the public had indicated in the prior study. CONCLUSION : Social workers, social work professional bodies and social work educators need to be proactive in promoting accurate information about social work and what social workers do.
Seed robustness of oriented relative fuzzy connectedness: core computation and its applications

In this work, we present a formal definition and an efficient algorithm to compute the cores of Oriented Relative Fuzzy Connectedness (ORFC), a recent seed-based segmentation technique. The core is a region where the seed can be moved without altering the segmentation, an important aspect for robust techniques and reduction of user effort. We show how ORFC cores can be used to build a powerful hybrid image segmentation approach. We also provide some new theoretical relations between ORFC and Oriented Image Foresting Transform (OIFT), as well as their cores. Experimental results among several methods show that the hybrid approach conserves high accuracy, avoids the shrinking problem and provides robustness to seed placement inside the desired object due to the cores properties.
Two Unlinked Double-Strand Breaks Can Induce Reciprocal Exchanges in Plant Genomes via Homologous Recombination and Nonhomologous End Joining

Using the rare-cutting endonuclease I-SceI we were able to demonstrate before that the repair of a single double-strand break (DSB) in a plant genome can be mutagenic due to insertions and deletions. However, during replication or due to irradiation several breaks might be induced simultaneously. To analyze the mutagenic potential of such a situation we established an experimental system in tobacco harboring two unlinked transgenes, each carrying an I-SceI site. After transient expression of I-SceI a kanamycin-resistance marker could be restored by joining two previously unlinked broken ends, either by homologous recombination (HR) or by nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ). Indeed, we were able to recover HR and NHEJ events with similar frequencies. Despite the fact that no selection was applied for joining the two other ends, the respective linkage could be detected in most cases tested, demonstrating that the respective exchanges were reciprocal. The frequencies obtained indicate that DSB-induced translocation is up to two orders of magnitude more frequent in somatic cells than ectopic gene conversion. Thus, DSB-induced reciprocal exchanges might play a significant role in plant genome evolution. The technique applied in this study may also be useful for the controlled exchange of unlinked sequences in plant genomes.
Secrecy and Silence in the research process

We may not be able to make you love reading, but secrecy and silence in the research process will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.
Aerosol Retrieval Sensitivity and Error Analysis for the Cloud and Aerosol Polarimetric Imager on Board TanSat: The Effect of Multi-Angle Measurement

Aerosol scattering is an important source of error in CO2 retrievals from satellite. This paper presents an analysis of aerosol information content from the Cloud and Aerosol Polarimetric Imager (CAPI) onboard the Chinese Carbon Dioxide Observation Satellite (TanSat) to be launched in 2016. Based on optimal estimation theory, aerosol information content is quantified from radiance and polarization observed by CAPI in terms of the degrees of freedom for the signal (DFS). A linearized vector radiative transfer model is used with a linearized Mie code to simulate observation and sensitivity (or Jacobians) with respect to aerosol parameters. In satellite nadir mode, the DFS for aerosol optical depth is the largest, but for mode radius, it is only 0.55. Observation geometry is found to affect aerosol DFS based on the aerosol scattering phase function from the comparison between different viewing zenith angles or solar zenith angles. When TanSat is operated in target mode, we note that multi-angle retrieval represented by three along-track measurements provides additional 0.31 DFS on average, mainly from mode radius. When adding another two measurements, the a posteriori error decreases by another 2%–6%. The correlation coefficients between retrieved parameters show that aerosol is strongly correlated with surface reflectance, but multi-angle retrieval can weaken this correlation.
Foreign Direct Investment and Authoritarian Stability

This article examines how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects the likelihood of authoritarian leaders’ political survival. We argue that FDI reduces the likelihood of experiencing political challenges from elites. We present two mechanisms for this claim. First, the host governments of authoritarian regimes can use FDI for long-term private good provision, so that FDI helps them to appease elite dissents and to buy off potential elite challengers. Second, FDI mitigates a commitment problem between elites and authoritarian leadership by creating an FDI-related distributional coalition, which in turn makes political defections costly to both parties. Our empirical tests using various two-stage estimators show that FDI significantly decreases the likelihood of elite-driven authoritarian leadership failure and coup attempt.