Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiofrequency ablation in pancreatic cancer.

INTRODUCTION AND AIM Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is effective in the treatment of unresectable hepatic tumors and promising results have also been described in tumors of kidney, lung, brain, prostate, and breast. The radiofrequency destruction of solid pancreatic tumors sounds logical but also seems risky due to the friable pancreatic parenchyma, the fear of pancreatitis and the prejudiced myth of 'the pancreas is not your friend'. PATIENTS AND METHODS We present our initial experience and we describe our technique during intraoperative RFA in four patients with locally advanced and unresectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma (head of pancreas, three; body-tail, one; diameter, 3-12 cm). In all the patients, the RFA was followed by bypass palliative procedures (cholecystojejunostomy and Brown's anastomosis and/or gastrojejunostomy). A drainage tube was left close to the ablated area. Serum amylase and fluid amylase (drain) were measured for 5-7 days postoperatively. Sandostatin was also administered prophylactically for 3-5 days. RESULTS The postoperative period was uneventful in all the patients, without complications or evidence of pancreatitis. The post RFA CT scan showed remarkable changes in the density and the characteristics of the tumors in all the patients. All the patients are alive, at 12, 8, 5 and 3 months postoperatively, respectively. In one patient (with cancer of the body of the pancreas) who was receiving morphine because of intolerable pain, significant pain relief has been observed. CONCLUSIONS From our initial results, RFA seems to be a feasible, potentially safe and promising option in patients with locally advanced and unresectable pancreatic cancer. Nevertheless, larger series of cases are needed to secure our encouraging results.
Distinct modulatory roles for thyroid hormone receptors TR a and TR b in SREBP 1-activated ABCD 2 expression

Adrenoleukodystrophy-related protein, a peroxisomal ABC transporter encoded by ABCD2, displays functional redundancy with the disease-associated X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy protein, making pharmacological induction of ABCD2 a potentially attractive therapeutic approach. Sterol regulatory element (SRE)-binding proteins (SREBPs) induce ABCD2 through an SRE overlapping with a direct repeat (DR-4) element. Here we show that thyroid hormone (T3) receptor (TR)a and TRb bind this motif thereby modulating SREBP1-dependent activation of ABCD2. Unliganded TRb, but not TRa, represses ABCD2 induction independently of DNA binding. However, activation by TRa and derepression of TRb are T3-dependent and require intact SRE/DR-4 motifs. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays with nuclear extracts support a direct interaction of TR and SREBP1 at the SRE/DR-4. In the liver, Abcd2 expression is high in young mice (with high T3 and TRa levels) but downregulated in adults (with low T3 and TRa but elevated TRb levels). This temporal repression of Abcd2 is blunted in TRb-deficient mice, and the response to manipulated T3 states is abrogated in TRa-deficient mice. These findings show that TRa and TRb differentially modulate SREBP1-activated ABCD2 expression at overlapping SRE/DR-4 elements, suggesting a novel mode of cross-talk between TR and SREBP in gene regulation. r 2008 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
Bioethical Issues in Biostatistical Consulting: Development of a Survey

To develop a survey, the Bioethical Issues in Biostatistical Consulting Questionnaire, for investigating bioethical issues in analysis, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to specify areas of bioethics. Through a focus group study and the evaluation by 10 biostatisticians, the questionnaire was constructed. Validation must involve a panel of experts. Now, test-retest reliability and factor analysis should be conducted on a group of eligible subjects.
Learning Better Classification-based Reordering Model for Phrase-based Translation

Abstract Reordering is of a challenging issue in phrase-based statistical machine translation systems. This paper proposed three techniques to optimize classification-based reordering models for phrase-based translation under the bracket transduction grammar framework. First, a forced decoding technique is adopted to learn reordering samples for maximum entropy model training. Secondly, additional features are learned from the context of two consecutive phrases to enhance the prediction ability of the reordering classifier. Thirdly, the reordering model score is integrated as two feature functions (STRAIGHT and INVERTED) into the log-linear model to improve its discriminative ability. Experimental result demonstrates significant improvements over the baseline in two translation tasks such as Chinese to English and Chinese to Japanese translation.
Psychological interventions for coronary heart disease.

BACKGROUND Psychological interventions can form part of comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation programmes (CCR). These interventions may include stress management interventions, which aim to reduce stress, either as an end in itself or to reduce risk for further cardiac events in patients with heart disease. OBJECTIVES To determine the effectiveness of psychological interventions, in particular stress management interventions, on mortality and morbidity, psychological measures, quality of life, and modifiable cardiac risk factors, in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). SEARCH STRATEGY We searched CCTR to December 2001 (Issue 4, 2001), MEDLINE 1999 to December 2001 and EMBASE 1998 to the end of 2001, PsychINFO and CINAHL to December 2001. In addition, searches of reference lists of papers were made and expert advice was sought. SELECTION CRITERIA RCTs of non-pharmacological psychological interventions, administered by trained staff, either single modality interventions or a part of CCR with minimum follow up of 6 months. Adults of all ages with CHD (prior myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass graft or percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty, angina pectoris or coronary artery disease defined by angiography). Stress management (SM) trials were identified and reported in combination with other psychological interventions and separately. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Studies were selected, and data were abstracted, independently by two reviewers. Authors were contacted where possible to obtain missing information. MAIN RESULTS Thirty six trials with 12,841 patients were included. Of these, 18 (5242 patients) were SM trials. Quality of many trials was poor with the majority not reporting adequate concealment of allocation, and only 6 blinded outcome assessors. Combining the results of all trials showed no strong evidence of effect on total or cardiac mortality, or revascularisation. There was a reduction in the number of non-fatal reinfarctions in the intervention group (OR 0.78 (0.67, 0.90), but the two largest trials (with 4809 patients randomized) were null for this outcome, and there was statistical evidence of publication bias. Similar results were seen for the SM subgroup of trials. Provision of any psychological intervention or SM intervention caused small reductions in anxiety and depression. Few trials reported modifiable cardiac risk factors or quality of life. REVIEWERS' CONCLUSIONS Overall psychological interventions showed no evidence of effect on total or cardiac mortality, but did show small reductions in anxiety and depression in patients with CHD. Similar results were seen for SM interventions when considered separately. However, the poor quality of trials, considerable heterogeneity observed between trials and evidence of significant publication bias make the pooled finding of a reduction in non-fatal myocardial infarction insecure.
Graphene Visualizes the First Water Adlayers on Mica at Ambient Conditions

Icy Adsorption The highly mobile nature of adsorbed liquid water on surfaces has made structural studies using atomic force microscopy challenging, especially for the first adsorbed layer. Moreover, scanning probe methods are hindered by the strong interaction between the probe tip and the water molecules. When graphene flakes were deposited on mica, Xu et al. (p. 1188; see the Perspective by Katsnelson) found that they could use atomic force microscopy to image the first and second layers of introduced water. They consistently observed an islandike structure—0.34 nanometers in height, at low humidity—that corresponded to a single layer of ice. At higher humidity, thicker layers with a more liquid nature were observed. Water trapped between mica and graphene layers at ambient conditions was imaged with atomic force microscopy. The dynamic nature of the first water adlayers on solid surfaces at room temperature has made the direct detection of their microscopic structure challenging. We used graphene as an atomically flat coating for atomic force microscopy to determine the structure of the water adlayers on mica at room temperature as a function of relative humidity. Water adlayers grew epitaxially on the mica substrate in a layer-by-layer fashion. Submonolayers form atomically flat, faceted islands of height 0.37 ± 0.02 nanometers, in agreement with the height of a monolayer of ice. The second adlayers, observed at higher relative humidity, also appear icelike, and thicker layers appear liquidlike. Our results also indicate nanometer-scale surface defects serve as nucleation centers for the formation of both the first and the second adlayers.
Nightmares, dreams, and schizotypy.

The theory that psychosis and dreaming share some common underlying mechanism finds support in the observation that chronic nightmare sufferers are at increased risk for psychopathology. We examined this connection in a large general population sample, administering a battery of psychosis proneness and other personality scales, together with a nightmare distress scale; participants also answered a single question on pleasurable mood associated with dreaming. In addition, they completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory, to reinvestigate previously observed gender differences in nightmare susceptibility. It was found that, among the psychosis proneness scales, the best predictor of nightmare distress was STA, a mostly cognitive measure of schizotypy; this was true even after allowing for a strong influence in the data of general neuroticism. Other aspects of psychosis proneness--e.g. anhedonia--were unrelated to nightmares. However, sex and sex role differences did make a significant contribution, self-confessed feminine females and masculine males reporting, respectively, the highest and lowest nightmare distress. For schizotypy it was further shown that relationships were not confined to the nightmare experience; high (STA) schizotypes also significantly more often reported enjoyable dreaming. It was concluded that a unifying theme explaining the data is the schizotype's greater imaginativeness, which can have both positive and negative expression in sleep and consciousness.
Effective-medium theory of percolation on central-force elastic networks.

We show that effective-medium theory gives an excellent description of regular lattices when nearest-neighbor central-force springs are present with probability p. Effective-medium theory shows that all the elastic constants go to zero at ${p}_{\mathrm{cen}={\mathrm{dp}}_{c}}$ where d is the dimension and ${p}_{c}$ is the effective-medium estimate of the ordinary percolation threshold.
Enforced Pax6 expression rescues alcohol-induced defects of neuronal differentiation in cultures of human cortical progenitor cells.

BACKGROUND Alcohol is the most widely consumed substance of abuse, and its use during pregnancy can lead to serious disorders of brain development. The precise molecular action of alcohol on human brain development, however, is still unknown. We previously enriched multipotent progenitor cells, radial glia (RG) cells, from human fetal forebrain and demonstrated that they express transcription factor Pax6 that is necessary for their neurogenic fate. METHODS Enriched human fetal RG cells were maintained in vitro as either control or Pax6-expressing retrovirus infected cells. Cultures were treated with increasing doses of alcohol to evaluate Pax6 expression, proliferation, and differentiation of RG cells by immunocytochemistry, Western blot, and RT-PCR methods. RESULTS In vitro treatment with alcohol reduced the expression of transcription factor Pax6 and proliferation of RG cells, which decreased neurogenesis. Consistent with this finding, the overexpression of Pax6 in RG cells under alcohol treatment rescued cell proliferation and restored the generation of neurons. In contrast to this effect on neurogenesis, the overexpression of Pax6 inhibits the generation of astroglia regardless of alcohol treatment, implying lineage-specific effects. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that the effect of alcohol on human neurogenesis is partially due to the reduced expression of transcription factor Pax6 in RG cells.
When is a patient too well and when is a patient too sick for a liver transplant?

Key Points 1 Liver transplantation is currently offered as a therapeutic option for patients with a wide range of end‐stage liver diseases. 2 Conventional wisdom suggests that patients who receive a liver transplant have a greater expected lifetime when compared to comparable candidates on the waiting list. 3 The model for end‐stage liver disease (MELD) scoring system is an excellent predictor of mortality on the waiting list and also predicts mortality after liver transplantation. 4 The combination of waiting list mortality risk and posttransplant mortality risk assessed by MELD and other factors can be used to estimate whether candidates are likely to derive a survival benefit from a liver transplant. (Liver Transpl 2004;10:S69–S73.)
Submodularity andGreedyAlgorithms inSensor Scheduling forLinearDynamical Systems 1

This paper focuses on sensor scheduling for state estimation, which consists of a network of noisy sensors and a discrete-time linear system with process noise. As an energy constraint, only a subset of sensors can take a measurement at each time step. These measurements are fused into a common state estimate using a Kalman filter and the goal is to schedule the sensors to minimize the estimation error at a terminal time. A simple approach is to greedily choose sensors at each time step to minimize the estimation error at the next time step. Recent work has shown that this greedy algorithm outperforms other well known approaches. Results have been established to show that the estimation error is a submodular function of the sensor schedule; submodular functions have a diminishing returns property that ensures the greedy algorithm yields near optimal performance. As a negative result, we show that most commonly-used estimation error metrics are not, in general, submodular functions. This disproves an established result. We then provide sufficient conditions on the system for which the estimation error is a submodular function of the sensor schedule, and thus the greedy algorithm yields performance guarantees.
The MIND System

The MIND system is a single computer program incorporating an extensible set of fundamental linguistic processors that can be combined on command to carry out a great variety of tasks from grammar testing to question-answering and language translation. The program is controlled from a graphic display console from which the user can specify the sequence of operations, modify rules, edit texts and monitor the details of each operation to any desired extent. Presently available processors include morphological and syntactic analyzers, a semantic file processor, a transformational component, a morphological synthesizer, and an interactive disambiguator.
Association of vascular health and neurocognitive performance in overweight adults with high blood pressure

The relationship between vascular health—including flow-mediated dilation (FMD) and intima medial thickness (IMT)—and neurocognitive performance was examined in a sample of 124 sedentary, middle-aged adults with high blood pressure (systolic blood pressure, SBP, 130–159 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure, DBP, 85–99 mmHg) who were overweight or obese (body mass index 25.0–39.99 kg/m2). Patients completed a neuropsychological test battery, including measures of executive function and psychomotor speed, and measures of IMT and FMD were obtained. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to investigate the association between vascular measures and neurocognitive performance after controlling for demographic factors and cerebrovascular risk factors. Higher levels of FMD predicted better executive function (b = 0.90, p = .045). Greater IMT tended to be associated with slower psychomotor speed (b = −0.82, p = .084), with the effect attenuated after controlling for FMD. Impaired FMD is associated with worse neurocognitive functioning among overweight adults with high blood pressure.
Application of LVCSR to the Detection of Chinese Mandarin Reading Miscues

For a reading tutor, the most important task is to detect the reading miscues such as insertions, omissions, etc. This paper constructed a Chinese reading miscues detection system based on technologies of general large vocabulary continuous speech recognition and proposed two methods to improve the performance of the detection. The first is to align the reference to the confusion network resulted from the recognition instead of the 1-best result to find out the reading miscues. And the second is using the knowledge of reference to regulate the decoding by weighting the n-gram language model probability, if it exists in the reference. The experiments on a Chinese Mandarin reading corpus proved the effectiveness of these two modifications. The detection MDerr and FArate are depressed 50.1% and 70.8% totally by these two methods.
Planning Maximally Smooth Hand Movements Constrained to Nonplanar Workspaces

The article characterizes hand paths and speed profiles for movements performed in a nonplanar, 2-dimensional workspace (a hemisphere of constant curvature). The authors assessed endpoint kinematics (i.e., paths and speeds) under the minimum-jerk model assumptions and calculated minimal amplitude paths (geodesics) and the corresponding speed profiles. The authors also calculated hand speeds using the 2/3 power law. They then compared modeled results with the empirical observations. In all, 10 participants moved their hands forward and backward from a common starting position toward 3 targets located within a hemispheric workspace of small or large curvature. Comparisons of modeled observed differences using 2-way RM-ANOVAs showed that movement direction had no clear influence on hand kinetics (p < .05). Workspace curvature affected the hand paths, which seldom followed geodesic lines. Constraining the paths to different curvatures did not affect the hand speed profiles. Minimum-jerk speed profiles closely matched the observations and were superior to those predicted by 2/3 power law (p < .001). The authors conclude that speed and path cannot be unambiguously linked under the minimum-jerk assumption when individuals move the hand in a nonplanar 2-dimensional workspace. In such a case, the hands do not follow geodesic paths, but they preserve the speed profile, regardless of the geometric features of the workspace.
Improving the Automatic Procurement of Web Services Using Constraint Programming

Software solutions to automate the procurement of web services are gaining importance when technology evolves, the number of providers increases and the needs of the clients become more complex. There are several proposals in this field, but they all have important drawbacks, namely: many of them are not able to check offers and demands for internal consistency; selecting the best offer usually relies on evaluating linear objective functions, which is quite a naive solution; the language to express offers is usually less expressive than the language to express demands; and, last but not least, providers cannot impose constraints on their clients. In this article, we present a solution to overcome these problems that relies on constraint programming; furthermore, we present a run-time framework, some experimental results, and a comparison with other proposals.
Psychological characteristics of free diving athletes: a comparative study.

This study aimed to investigate the situational and stable psychological characteristics of free diving athletes. Specifically, stress level, state and trait anxiety, positive and negative affectivity, ways of coping with stress and locus of control among the free diving athletes were studied. 36 were free diving athletes and 41 non-athletes participated in the study. The situational and stable psychological characteristics which influence sport expertise were simultaneously included as dependent variables. Results showed that the scores of the free diving athletes on the state anxiety, stress level and negative affect were significantly lower than that of non-athletes. In addition, the free diving athletes obtained significantly higher scores on internal locus of control and self confident coping style. These results indicated that the free diving sport has positive effects on both situational and stable psychological characteristics.
Electrical impedance tomography (EIT): a review

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has been the subject of quite intensive research for about 20 years but has yet to become established as a routine tool in healthcare. None the less the volume of published research work in this area is still rising. This review takes a broad look at what has been achieved and attempts to give the reader sufficient information to form an opinion as to the likely future for this interesting area of research.
Constant envelope DCT- and FFT-based OFDM systems with frequency modulation in flat fading channels

In this paper Discrete Cosine Transform and Fast Fourier Transform based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DCT-OFDM and FFT-OFDM) systems with frequency modulation are examined. Frequency modulation is used in both systems to achieve constant envelope (CE) signals and hence 0 dB PAPR; well-suited for efficient power amplification. The performances of such systems are examined over flat fading channels for transmission of data using M-ary Pulse Amplitude Modulation (MPAM) mapper. Closed-form expressions for bit error rate over flat Ricean and Rayleigh channels are derived. The parameters that affect error performance are identified and illustrated. Results show that CE-DCT-OFDM system outperforms CE-FFT-OFDM system from the viewpoint of BER and has several advantages as well.
19S and 7S Anti-Toxoplasma Antibodies in Diagnosis of Acute Congenital and Acquired Toxoplasmosis.∗

Summary An attempt was made to determine if macroglobulin (19S) anti-Toxoplasma antibodies are produced during the acute stage of infection and, if so, if their demonstration is of diagnostic significance. Sera were obtained from established cases of acute congenital and acquired toxoplasmosis and separated by gradient ultracentrifugation or gel filtration. Serologic examination of the fractions obtained by these methods revealed that 19S anti-Toxoplasma antibodies are formed in both acute congenital and acquired infection with Toxoplasma. Only 7S antibodies were demonstrated in infants born of mothers with chronic toxoplasmosis and in adults with longstanding infection with this organism. The demonstration of such macroglobulin antibodies in suspect cases of acute toxoplasmosis appears to be a useful adjunct to the presently available serologic tests. ADDENDUM. Since submitting this manuscript, sera have been obtained from 5 additional cases of acute congenital toxoplasmosis; 19S as well as 7S antibodies were demonstrated in each case. Two of the mothers had only 7S antibodies and in three, they were of both the 19S and 7S class. 19S antibodies were demonstrated in acute phase sera in each of ten additional cases of acquired infection.