Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of subconjunctival bevacizumab, ranibizumab, and aflibercept on corneal neovascularization

Purpose To investigate the effects of subconjunctival bevacizumab, ranibizumab, and aflibercept in an experimental corneal neovascularization model. Materials and methods The eyes of 24 rats were chemically cauterized and randomly divided into four groups: bevacizumab group (0.05 mL/1.25 mg bevacizumab), ranibizumab group (0.05 mL/0.5 mg ranibizumab), aflibercept group (0.05 mL/1.25 mg aflibercept), and control group (0.05 mL saline solution). Plasma vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) levels were among the major measurement outcomes to assess corneal neovascularization. The collected plasmas were analyzed using the SIGMA RAB0511 Rat VEGF Elisa kit. The PCR technique and VEGF amplification procedures were used for molecular analysis. Each cornea was removed and histologically examined on day 21. Corneal images were evaluated by image analyzer software. Results In the post-injection period, the number of major corneal arteries decreased significantly in the injection groups when compared to the control group (p = 0.037), but no statistically significant differences were noted among the injection groups (p > 0.05). The aflibercept group had the lowest area of neovascularization. Immunohistochemical staining revealed substantially lower VEGF percentages in neovascularized arteries of the injection groups than the control group (p = 0.015). In TUNEL staining, the mean TUNEL value (number/1hpf) was substantially greater in the control group than in the injection groups, but the mean TUNEL values were similar between the injection groups (p = 0.019, p > 0.05, respectively). No statistically significant differences were observed between the groups in terms of corneal surface area with increased cellularity, edema, and inflammation (p = 0.263). The mean plasma VEGF concentration in the control group was statistically greater than those in the injection groups (p = 0.001). Conclusion Subconjunctival bevacizumab, ranibizumab, and aflibercept crossed the blood and seemed to be effective in inhibiting corneal neovascularization without causing epitheliopathy in an experimental rat model compared to the controls. However, no significant results were noted between these three anti-VEGF molecules.
The potential for indoor ultrafine particle reduction using vegetation under laboratory conditions

Ultrafine particle pollution is a health concern in indoor and outdoor settings. Reducing ultrafine particle exposure and concentrations in populated areas is therefore an important research topic. Our study assesses the effectiveness of plants to decrease ultrafine particle concentrations in indoor environments. Ambient ultrafine particle concentrations were measured for three hours in and outside a polycarbonate chamber with and without plants using a condensation particle counter. Reduction in ambient ultrafine particle levels between blanks and treatments of 11 plant species were compared using infiltration factors (Finfs). All but one species, Dracaena deremensis compacta, resulted in in-chamber ultrafine particle reductions, with typically small but statistically significant results. Juniperus chinensis ‘San Jose' showed the highest per-plant ultrafine particle reduction (5.5%). A linear relationship between number of within-chamber plants and percent ultrafine particle reduction was proven (r2 = 0.95) for juniper plants, four plants achieved the maximum Finfp reduction (19.9%). Plant surface area was associated with ultrafine particle reduction (r2 = 0.85) when comparing statistically significant results. Humidity and temperature were irrelevant to reduction. Household ultrafine particle reduction was estimated using juniper plants (11%). Results indicate that plants may provide a small, yet statistically significant ultrafine particle reduction in homes with the co-benefit of greening the indoor environment.
Preparation of baicalin-loaded ligand-modified nanoparticles for nose-to-brain delivery for neuroprotection in cerebral ischemia

Abstract Neuroprotection in cerebral ischemia (CI) has received increasing attention. However, efficient delivery of therapeutic agents to the brain remains a major challenge due to the complex environment of the brain. Nose-to-brain-based delivery is a promising approach. Here, we optimized a nanocarrier formulation of neuroprotective agents that can be used for nose-to-brain delivery by obtaining RVG29 peptide-modified polyethylene glycol–polylactic acid-co-glycolic acid nanoparticles (PEG–PLGA RNPs) that have physicochemical properties that lead to stable and sustained drug release and thereby improve the bioavailability of neuroprotective agents. The brain-targeting ability of PEG–PLGA RNPs administered through nasal inhalation was verified in a rat model of CI. It was found that delivery to the whole brain can be achieved with little delivery to the peripheral circulation. Baicalin (BA) was selected as the neuroprotective agent for delivery. After intranasal administration of BA–PEG–PLGA RNPs, the neurological dysfunction of rats with ischemic brain injury was significantly alleviated, the cerebral infarction area was reduced, and nerve trauma and swelling were relieved. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the neuroprotective effects of BA in a rat model of CI may be mediated by inhibition of inflammation and alleviation of oxidative stress. The immunohistochemical results obtained after treatment with nanoparticles loaded with BA showed that Nrf2/HO-1 was activated in the area in which ischemic brain damage had occurred and that its expression was significantly higher in the group treated with BA–PEG–PLGA RNPs than in the other groups. The ELISA results showed that the levels of IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α were abnormally increased in the serum of rats with cerebral ischemia. After treatment with BA-loaded nanoparticles, IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α levels decreased significantly. Oxidative stress was alleviated; the levels of glutathione and superoxide dismutase increased; and the levels of reactive oxygen species and malondialdehyde decreased, in animals to which BA–PEG–PLGA RNPs were delivered by intranasal inhalation. In conclusion, BA–PEG–PLGA RNPs can effectively deliver BA to rats and thereby exert neuroprotective effects against CI. Graphical Abstract
Acuity-Based Staffing in Labor and Delivery Using Electronic Health Record Data

Abstract Background: Planning safe and effective nurse staffing can be challenging for nurse leaders of labor and delivery units due to the dynamic nature of birth and unpredictable fluctuations in census and acuity. The electronic health record (EHR) has a vast source of patient data that can be used to retrospectively review patient needs and nurse staffing gaps that can serve as a basis for prospective planning for nurse staffing. Purpose: This quality improvement project was initiated with the goal of developing real-time and longitudinal reports to quantify hourly nurse staffing needs based on patient census, acuity, and required clinical interventions from data that are contained with the EHR. The plan was to determine trends and nurse staffing needs for each 24-hour period every day of the week and identify ongoing staffing patterns to meet the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses' (AWHONN) staffing guidelines. Methods: The obstetric nursing leadership team worked with the information technology specialists and developed an algorithm that identifies patient acuity level, indicated clinical interventions, and outlines necessary staffing requirements to provide safe high-quality care. Various reports were built in the EHR to inform the nursing leadership team about nurse staffing on a real-time and historical basis. Results: The reports provided quantitative data that supported a budgetary increase in nurse staffing and a more flexible nurse staffing scheduling system to meet the needs of the patients. The project was successfully implemented in all four of the hospital system maternity units. Clinical Implications: Use of EHR in labor and delivery units is nearly universal. Working with the information technology specialists to integrate nurse staffing data into the EHR is one way to align nurse staffing with the AWHONN nurse staffing standards in real-time and for projections of nurse staffing needs based on unit historical patient data. The electronic health record (EHR) has a vast source of patient data that can be used to retrospectively review patient needs and nurse staffing gaps that can serve as a basis for prospective planning for nurse staffing. In this quality improvement project, data from the EHR were used to evaluate real-time and prospective nurse staffing needs and to be consistent with the nurse staffing guidelines from the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses. Reports from the EHR provided quantitative data that supported a budgetary increase in nurse staffing and a more flexible nurse staffing scheduling system to meet the needs of the patients.
Effectiveness and Safety of Memantine for Headache: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Studies

Objective The effectiveness and safety of memantine for headache are elusive, and this meta-analysis aimed to explore the influence of memantine versus placebo for headache. Methods We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of science, EBSCO, and Cochrane library databases through May 2021 and included randomized controlled trials reporting memantine versus placebo for headache patients. This meta-analysis was performed using the random-effects model. Results Our meta-analysis included 4 randomized controlled trials and 229 patients. Compared with control group for headache, memantine treatment could substantially reduce headache days (mean difference [MD] = −3.10; 95% confidence interval [CI] = −5.46 to −0.75; P = 0.01), pain intensity (MD, −0.43; 95% CI, −0.85 to −0.01; P = 0.04), monthly attack frequency (MD, −2.14; 95% CI, −2.83 to −1.46; P < 0.00001), and Migraine Disability Assessment Test (MD, −5.63; 95% CI, −6.46 to −4.79; P < 0.00001) but revealed no significant influence on days for acute pain medications, adverse events, or nausea/vomiting. Conclusions Memantine treatment is effective and safe to treat headache.
Streptococcus pyogenes Hijacks Host Glutathione for Growth and Innate Immune Evasion

During infection, microbes must escape host immune responses and survive exposure to reactive oxygen species produced by immune cells. Here, we identify the ABC transporter substrate binding protein GshT as a key component of the glutathione salvage pathway in glutathione-auxotrophic GAS. ABSTRACT The nasopharynx and the skin are the major oxygen-rich anatomical sites for colonization by the human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes (group A Streptococcus [GAS]). To establish infection, GAS must survive oxidative stress generated during aerobic metabolism and the release of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by host innate immune cells. Glutathione is the major host antioxidant molecule, while GAS is glutathione auxotrophic. Here, we report the molecular characterization of the ABC transporter substrate binding protein GshT in the GAS glutathione salvage pathway. We demonstrate that glutathione uptake is critical for aerobic growth of GAS and that impaired import of glutathione induces oxidative stress that triggers enhanced production of the reducing equivalent NADPH. Our results highlight the interrelationship between glutathione assimilation, carbohydrate metabolism, virulence factor production, and innate immune evasion. Together, these findings suggest an adaptive strategy employed by extracellular bacterial pathogens to exploit host glutathione stores for their own benefit. IMPORTANCE During infection, microbes must escape host immune responses and survive exposure to reactive oxygen species produced by immune cells. Here, we identify the ABC transporter substrate binding protein GshT as a key component of the glutathione salvage pathway in glutathione-auxotrophic GAS. Host-acquired glutathione is crucial to the GAS antioxidant defense system, facilitating escape from the host innate immune response. This study demonstrates a direct link between glutathione assimilation, aerobic metabolism, and virulence factor production in an important human pathogen. Our findings provide mechanistic insight into host adaptation that enables extracellular bacterial pathogens such as GAS to exploit the abundance of glutathione in the host cytosol for their own benefit.
“It Felt More like a Revolution.” How Behavioral Ecology Succeeded Ethology, 1970–1990

As soon as ethology's status diminished in the early 1970s, it was confronted with two successor disciplines, sociobiology and behavioral ecology. They were able to challenge ethology because it no longer provided markers of strong disciplinarity such as theoretical coherence, leading figures and a clear identity. While behavioral ecology developed organically out of the UK ethological research community into its own disciplinary standing, sociobiology presented itself as a US competitor to the ethological tradition. I will show how behavioral ecology took the role of legitimate heir to ethology by rebuilding a theoretical core and an intellectual sense of community, while sociobiology failed to use its public appeal to reach disciplinary status. Meanwhile, ethology changed its disciplinary identity to encompass all biological studies of animal behavior.
Does Childhood Maltreatment Lead to Low Life Success? Comparing Agency and Self-Reports

Background The long-term mental and physical health consequences of childhood maltreatment have been well documented. Less known are the longer-term consequences of childhood maltreatment, specifically the extent to which childhood maltreatment predicts adult life success. Objectives To prospectively assess the extent to which childhood experiences of physical, sexual, emotional abuse and childhood neglect predict life success at 30 years of age. Participants and Setting Data are from the Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy (MUSP), a pre-birth cohort study which follows children from conception to 30 years of age. Methods Details of childhood maltreatment are from two sources; child safety agency notifications (and substantiations) linked to the survey data with self-reports of childhood experiences of maltreatment obtained at the 30-year follow-up using the Child Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Life success is a 9-item composite measure (alpha = 0.76) obtained at the 30-year follow-up. We use logistic regression models (with control for covariates) to examine the association between overall as well as specific forms of childhood maltreatment on adult life success. We further test these models using different cut-offs and propensity analyses to adjust for loss to follow-up. Results Childhood maltreatment whether measured by agency report or self-report predicts overall low life success; agency substantiation OR = 1.88(1.14,3.08) & self-report OR = 2.60 (2.10,3.25). Self-report physical abuse, OR = 2.37(1.72,3.28); sexual abuse, OR = 2.85(2.05,3.96); emotional abuse, OR = 2.53(1.85,3.45) and neglect, OR = 2.36(1.83,3.03) all predict higher levels of low life success. Conclusions Our findings suggest that the long-term consequences of childhood maltreatment extend to a wide range of day-to-day circumstances and extend into mid- to later life.
Benefit of cognitive behavioral therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorders in Huntington’s disease: a case report

ABSTRACT We describe the management of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD), through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in a Huntington’s disease (HD) patient.Even with a psychopharmacological treatment to manage PTSD and OCD, psychiatric disorders remained in the HD patient. We proposed CBT essentially based on progressive exposure. The symptomatology disappeared shortly after starting the psychotherapeutical treatment and was maintained over time. We discuss the benefits of CBT on this patient considering the therapeutical alliance and the cognitive disorders.This clinical case gives positive impetus for future research concerning the non-pharmacological management of psychiatric comorbidities in Huntington’s disease.
A chest-shape target automatic detection method based on Deformable Part Models

Automatic weapon platform is one of the important research directions at domestic and overseas, it needs to accomplish fast searching for the object to be shot under complex background. Therefore, fast detection for given target is the foundation of further task. Considering that chest-shape target is common target of shoot practice, this paper treats chestshape target as the target and studies target automatic detection method based on Deformable Part Models. The algorithm computes Histograms of Oriented Gradient(HOG) features of the target and trains a model using Latent variable Support Vector Machine(SVM); In this model, target image is divided into several parts then we can obtain foot filter and part filters; Finally, the algorithm detects the target at the HOG features pyramid with method of sliding window. The running time of extracting HOG pyramid with lookup table can be shorten by 36%. The result indicates that this algorithm can detect the chest-shape target in natural environments indoors or outdoors. The true positive rate of detection reaches 76% with many hard samples, and the false positive rate approaches 0. Running on a PC (Intel(R)Core(TM) i5-4200H CPU) with C++ language, the detection time of images with the resolution of 640 × 480 is 2.093s. According to TI company run library about image pyramid and convolution for DM642 and other hardware, our detection algorithm is expected to be implemented on hardware platform, and it has application prospect in actual system.
Impact of the external school food environment on the associations of internal school food environment with high schoolers’ diet and BMI

Abstract Objective: To examine associations of school food availability with student intake frequency and BMI, and whether the number of neighbourhood food outlets modifies these associations. Design: Baseline assessment of a nationally representative cohort study of US 10th graders. Students reported intake frequency of fruits and vegetables (FV), snacks and soda. BMI was calculated from measured height and weight. Administrators of seventy-two high schools reported the frequency of school availability of FV, snacks and soda. The number of food outlets within 1 km and 5 km were linked with geocoded school addresses. Data were analysed using adjusted linear and logistic mixed models with multiple imputation for missing data. Setting: US 2009–2010. Participants: Totally, 2263 US 10th graders from the Next Generation Health Study (NEXT). Results: Greater school FV availability was positively associated with student FV intake. Food outlets within 5 km of schools (but not 1 km) attenuated the association of school FV availability with student intake; this was no longer significant at schools with > 58 food outlets within 5 km. School food availability was not associated with student BMI or student snack or soda intake. Conclusions: School food availability was associated with student intake of FV, but not with snacks, soda or BMI. Attenuation of the observed associations by the school neighbourhood food environment indicates a need to find ways to support healthy student eating behaviours in neighbourhoods with higher food outlet density.
Epidemiology of major entero‐pathogenic viruses and genetic characterization of Group A rotaviruses among children (≤5 years) with acute gastroenteritis in eastern India, 2018–2020

This study was carried out from January 2018 to March 2020 in Kolkata, eastern India to determine the prevalence rates and epidemiological patterns associated with the major viral agents of gastroenteritis among children ≤5 years of age. Molecular characterization of GARV, the predominant agent of viral gastroenteritis, was done to understand their genotype diversity.
Heart disease diagnosis using optimized features of hybridized ALCSOGA algorithm and LSTM classifier

ABSTRACT Cardiac disease is the predominant cause of global death mainly due to its hidden symptoms and late diagnosis. Hence, early detection is important to improve quality of life. Though traditional researches attempted to predict heart disease, most of them lacked with respect to accuracy. To solve this, the present study proposes a hybridized Ant Lion Crow Search Optimization Genetic Algorithm (ALCSOGA) to perform effective feature selection. This hybrid optimization encompasses Ant Lion, Crow Search and Genetic Algorithm. Ant lion algorithm determines the elite position. While, the Crow Search Algorithm utilizes the phenomenon of position and memory of each crow for evaluating the objective function. Both these algorithms are fed into Genetic Algorithm to improve the performance of feature selection process. Then, Stochastic Learning rate optimized Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is proposed to classify the extracted optimized features. Finally, comparative analysis is performed in terms of accuracy, recall, F1-score, and precision. Moreover, statistical analysis is performed with respect to Sum of Squares (SS), degree of freedom (df), F Critical (F crit), F Statistics (F), p, and Mean Square (MS) value. Analytical results revealed the efficiency of proposed system over conventional methods and thereby confirming its efficiency for predicting heart disease.
A high-density, matched hexagonal transistor structure in standard CMOS technology for high-speed applications

In this paper, a very dense CMOS hexagonal transistor structure is presented. The main advantages of the transistors are the low parasitic drain and source capacitance caused by the small area. The matching properties of this structure have been investigated, and these results have been compared with those for traditional finger-style structures. Exploiting the advantages, these transistors are very well suited for high-speed applications with a demand for both good matching and a small area, such as multibit current steering D/A converters or wireless applications. The test chips have been implemented in a standard 0.5-/spl mu/m CMOS technology. No adaptations to the standard technology have been made to realize the structures.
Drink Bleach or Do What Now? COVID-HeRA: A Study of Risk-Informed Health Decision Making in the Presence of COVID-19 Misinformation

Given the widespread dissemination of inaccurate medical advice related to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), such as fake remedies, treatments and prevention suggestions, misinformation detection has emerged as an open problem of high importance and interest for the research community. Several works study health misinformation detection, yet little attention has been given to the perceived severity of misinformation posts. In this work, we frame health misinformation as a risk assessment task. More specifically, we study the severity of each misinformation story and how readers perceive this severity, i.e., how harmful a message believed by the audience can be and what type of signals can be used to recognize potentially malicious fake news and detect refuted claims. To address our research questions, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, accompanied with detailed data analysis. We evaluate several traditional and state-of-the-art models, and show there is a significant gap in performance when applying traditional misinformation classification models to this task. We conclude with open challenges and future directions.