Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UPV-INAOE - Check That: Preliminary Approach for Checking Worthiness of Claims

Journalists usually work for a long time to investigate presidential debates. Their main role is to extract the sentences in the debates that include information about facts or previous events. These sentences are called claims. The investigation process of these claims is important where it can reveal how credible is the speaker or the other candidates. Therefore, proposing systems for extracting these claims can certainly improve the press work. In this paper, we will present our approach for CLEF-2018 Check That lab for Task 1. We propose an approach that uses a text distortion technique to detect claims that are worthy for checking. Our approach has achieved an acceptable results taking into account the complexity of this task.
An intuitive general rank-based correlation coefficient

Correlation analysis is an effective mechanism for studying patterns in data and making predictions. Many interesting discoveries have been made by formulating correlations in seemingly unrelated data. We propose an algorithm to quantify the theory of correlations and to give an intuitive, more accurate correlation coefficient. We propose a predictive metric to calculate correlations between paired values, known as the general rank-based correlation coefficient. It fulfills the five basic criteria of a predictive metric: independence from sample size, value between −1 and 1, measuring the degree of monotonicity, insensitivity to outliers, and intuitive demonstration. Furthermore, the metric has been validated by performing experiments using a real-time dataset and random number simulations. Mathematical derivations of the proposed equations have also been provided. We have compared it to Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The comparison results show that the proposed metric fares better than the existing metric on all the predictive metric criteria.
The Role of Pulmonary and Systemic Immunosenescence in Acute Lung Injury

Acute lung injury (ALI) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality in the elderly (> 65 years), but the knowledge about origin and effects of immunosenescence in ALI is limited. Here, we investigated the immune response at pulmonary, systemic and cellular level in young (2-3 months) and old (18-19 months) C57BL/6J mice to localize and characterize effects of immunosenescence in ALI. ALI was induced by intranasal lipopolysaccharide (LPS) application and the animals were sacrificed 24 or 72 h later. Pulmonary inflammation was investigated by analyzing histopathology, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) cytometry and cytokine expression. Systemic serum cytokine expression, spleen lymphocyte populations and the gut microbiome were analyzed, as well as activation of alveolar and bone marrow derived macrophages (BMDM) in vitro. Pulmonary pathology of ALI was more severe in old compared with young mice. Old mice showed significantly more inflammatory cells and pro-inflammatory cyto- or chemokines (TNFα, IL-6, MCP-1, CXCL1, MIP-1α) in the BALF, but a delayed expression of cytokines associated with activation of adaptive immunity and microbial elimination (IL-12 and IFNγ). Alveolar macrophages, but not BMDM, of old mice showed greater activation after in vivo and in vitro stimulation with LPS. No systemic enhanced pro-inflammatory cytokine response was detected in old animals after LPS exposure, but a delayed expression of IL-12 and IFNγ. Furthermore, old mice had less CD8+ T-cells and NK cells and more regulatory T-cells in the spleen compared with young mice and a distinct gut microbiome structure. The results of our study show an increased alveolar macrophage activation and pro-inflammatory signaling in the lungs, but not systemically, suggesting a key role of senescent alveolar macrophages in ALI. A decrease in stimulators of adaptive immunity with advancing age might further promote the susceptibility to a worse prognosis in ALI in elderly.
Childhood Maltreatment Predicts Poor Economic and Educational Outcomes in the Transition to Adulthood

Objectives To test whether childhood maltreatment was a predictor of (1) having low educational qualifications and (2) not being in education, employment, or training among young adults in the United Kingdom today. Methods Participants were from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a nationally representative UK cohort of 2232 twins born in 1994 to 1995. Mothers reported on child maltreatment when participants were aged 5, 7, 10, and 12 years. Participants were interviewed about their vocational status at age 18 years. Results The unadjusted odds of having low educational qualifications or of not being in education, employment, or training at age 18 years were more than 2 times greater for young people with a childhood history of maltreatment versus those without. These associations were reduced after adjustments for individual and family characteristics. Youths who reported having a supportive adult in their lives had better education outcomes than did youths who had less support. Conclusions Closer collaboration between the child welfare and education systems is warranted to improve vocational outcomes for maltreated youths.
Multiband SAS Imagery

Advances in unmanned synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imaging platforms allow for the simultaneous collection of multiband SAS imagery. The imagery is collected over several octaves and the phenomenology's interactions with the sea floor vary greatly over this range -- higher frequencies resolve proud and fine structure of the seafloor while lower frequencies resolve subsurface features and often induce internal resonance in man-made objects. Currently, analysts examine multiband imagery by viewing a single band at a time. This method makes it difficult to ascertain correlations between any pair of bands collected over the same location. To mitigate this issue, we propose methods which ingest high frequency (HF) and low frequency (LF) SAS imagery and generates a color composite creating what we call a multiband SAS (MSAS) image. The MSAS image contains the relevant portions of the HF and LF images required by an analyst to interpret the scene and are defined using a spatial saliency metric computed for each image. We then combine the saliency and acoustic backscatter measures to form the final MSAS image.
Spleen and Liver Volumetrics as Surrogate Markers of Hepatic Venous Pressure Gradient in Patients With Noncirrhotic Portal Hypertension

Noncirrhotic portal hypertension (NCPH) is a rare disease that may lead to serious clinical consequences. Currently, noninvasive tools for the assessment of NCPH are absent. We investigated the utility of spleen and liver volumetrics as a marker of the presence and severity of portal hypertension in this population. A cohort of NCPH patients evaluated between 2003 and 2015 was retrospectively studied. The association of spleen and liver volumes with the hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG) level was evaluated using locally weighted scatterplot smoothing curves. A cohort of patients with viral hepatitis‐related liver disease was used as controls. Of the 86 patients with NCPH evaluated during the study period, 75 (mean age, 35 ± 17; 73% males) were included in the final analysis. Patients with portal hypertension had significantly higher spleen and liver to body mass index (BMI) ratios compared to patients with HVPG <5 mm Hg (39.5 ± 27.9 versus 22.8 ± 10.6 cm3/kg/m2, P = 0.003; 91.1 ± 40.1 versus 71.4 ± 16.7 cm3/kg/m2, P = 0.014, for spleen/BMI and liver/BMI, respectively). In contrast to the patients with viral hepatitis, a positive linear correlation was observed in the NCPH cohort between spleen/BMI and liver/BMI (above a cutoff of 25 and 80 cm3/kg/m2, respectively) and HVPG level. Additionally, only in the NCPH cohort was an increase in spleen/BMI range quartile predictive of a higher prevalence of portal hypertension and clinically significant portal hypertension (trend, P = 0.014 and 0.031, respectively). Conclusion: Spleen and liver volumetrics may have utility in the assessment of NCPH as a noninvasive biomarker that can be performed using routine radiologic examinations. Further studies are needed to validate these findings. (Hepatology Communications 2018; 00:000‐000)
PEIMEX at eRisk2018: Emphasizing Personal Information for Depression and Anorexia Detection

The early detection of risks behaviors can significantly contribute to prevent serious psychological and health consequences. This paper reports our participation at eRisk 2018 in the tracks of early detection of anorexia and depression in social media. Our approach considers that the sentences where users refer to themselves contain terms that better expose their interests and habits and, therefore, are able to reveal characteristics of their personality, and social and psychological states. The main idea is to emphasize the value of these terms by using novel feature selection and term weighting techniques. The approach achieved a competitive performance, it obtained results higher than average values of the competition. These results evidence that terms related to personal information are important for risk detection.
IRIT at e-Risk 2018

The 2018 CLEF eRisk is composed of two tasks: (1) early de-tection of signs of depression and (2) early detection of signs of anorexia.In this paper, we present the methods we developed when participatingto these two tasks. We used two types of representations of the texts:one uses linguistic features and the other uses text vectorization. Theserepresentations are combined in different ways in models that are trainedusing a machine learning approach. These models are then used to builtthe 5 runs we submitted for task (1) and the 2 runs for task (2), whichdifferences are also detailed in this paper. For task (1), best results wereobtained when combining the methods based on features and text vec-torization, and for task (2), the method based on text vectorization givesthe best results.
Effect of Aging and Glucagon-like Peptide 2 on Intestinal Microbiota in SD Rats

Recent research suggests that intestinal microbiota affect the aging process. Glucagon-like peptide 2 (GLP-2), a growth factor found in the intestinal mucosal epithelium, reduces intestinal permeability and affects intestinal microbiota. The relationship between aging, GLP-2, and intestinal microbiota are still not well understood. The current study examined the influence of aging and GLP-2 on the intestinal microbiota of rats. Twelve 3-month old male SD rats were randomly divided into two groups: a young control group (group C) and a young GLP-2 treatment group (group G). Twelve 26-month old male SD rats were randomly divided into two groups: an aged control group (group L) and an aged GLP-2 treatment group (group T). GLP-2 was intraperitoneally injected into rats from group G and group T for 14 days. Plasma GLP-2 concentration was evaluated by ELISA tests. Fresh intestinal stool samples were collected from each group and total fecal bacterial genomic DNA was extracted from the associated rats. The bacterial composition of fecal samples was analyzed by Miseq high-throughput sequencing and comparison with SRA databases. Overall, the diversity of intestinal microbiota significantly decreases with age in SD rats, while GLP-2 has no significant effect on the diversity of intestinal microbiota. Upon aging, there is a reduction in probiotic bacteria and a concomitant increase in pathogenic bacteria in rats. Treatment with GLP-2 results in a significant reduction in the prevalence of pathogenic bacterial genera and an increase in some potential benefit bacteria in aged rats. In addition, treatment with GLP-2 results in an increase in several probiotics and a reduction in the prevalence of pathogenic bacterial genera in young rats.
Quality of life and functional outcome after single-radius and multi-radius total knee arthroplasty

Purpose: The main objective of this study was to compare quality of life and functional outcome in patients who have undergone a single-radius (SR) or multi-radius (MR) total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The secondary objective was to observe changes in knee range of movement (ROM) and standardized knee scores (KSCs) in these patients. The hypothesis was that there would be no statistically significant difference between the two patient groups in quality of life and functional outcome. Methods: One hundred three SR TKAs were performed by a single surgeon between August 2008 and December 2012. A propensity score matching algorithm was used to select 103 MR TKAs performed during the same period. Preoperative and postoperative variables such as standardized knee and quality of life scores were captured prospectively and then analyzed via both the Student’s t-test and paired t-test to look for statistically significant differences between the SR and MR patient groups. Results: At 2 years postoperatively, there was no statistically significant difference between the SR and MR patient populations in knee extension, Oxford Knee Score, Knee Society Clinical Rating Scores, and the Physical Component Summary of the Short Form 36 Health Survey (SF-36). There was a statistically significant difference between the two patient groups in postoperative knee flexion in favor of the MR design (p = 0.011). Conclusion: While an SR femoral implant design has several theoretical biomechanical advantages, postoperative standardized KSCs and quality of life scores in this single-surgeon series do not show a clear advantage of one design over the other. Level of evidence: III.
Highly-sensitive gas sensor based on two-dimensional material field effect transistor

Atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials are ideal gas sensing materials for achieving an ultra-low detection limit, due to the high surface-to-volume ratio, low electronic noise and sensitively tunable Fermi level. However, the sensitivity of 2D materials to their surrounding environment may also severely degrade the long-term stability of sensing devices, since most of them use the same 2D material flake as both the sensing and conduction material. In this work, we report a gas sensor based on a 2D material field effect transistor (FET) which uses few-layer black phosphorus (BP), boron nitride (BN) and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) as the top-gate, dielectric layer and conduction channel, respectively. In this device configuration, the top-gate of BP with a superior gas adsorption capability serves as the sensing material, while the conduction channel of MoS2 is isolated from ambient environment by the coverage of the BN dielectric layer. The separation of the sensing and conduction materials not only improves the long-term stability of the device, but also enables us to use different materials for gas adsorption and conduction purposes to achieve optimum sensing performances. In addition, the adsorption kinetics of the gas molecules on the sensing channel can be sensitively detected by the current/resistance variation of the conduction channel, since the adsorbed gas molecules can effectively tune the Fermi level of sensing and conduction materials (BP and MoS2, respectively) through band alignment. We experimentally demonstrated that the proposed 2D material FET not only achieved a detection limit of 3.3 ppb to NO2, but was also capable to differentiate oxidizing and reducing gases.
Effects of Different Cognitive Trainings on Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment in the Elderly: A One-Year Longitudinal Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Study

Background Cognitive training has been focused on the interventions of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) in recent years, with poor understanding. Material/Methods The study participants with aMCI were screened in a previous intervention trial. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was adopted to investigate effects of single-domain cognitive training (SDCT) and multi-domain cognitive training (MDCT) on aMCI and to explore potential mechanisms. Results There were significant differences in the grey matter volume of the middle frontal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, inferior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and ventral V3 between the MDCT/SDCT group and the control group (P<0.05). Regional homogeneity (ReHo) increased significantly in the right and left inferior frontal gyrus as well as in the left and right precentral gyrus after intervention in the MDCT group and the SDCT group. ReHo increased significantly in the right and left lingual gyrus of the MDCT group and the control group. ReHo reduced significantly in the right middle temporal gyrus of the MDCT group but increased significantly in the left middle temporal gyrus in the SDCT group and the control group. The voxel of grey matter in the precuneus was positively related to the language scores on RBANS (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status), and amygdala, fusiform gyrus, and hippocampus also had a positive relationship with delayed memory scores in RBANS of the MDCT group. In the MDCT group, the attention and reasoning scores were also positively related to the ReHo of middle temporal gyrus. Conclusions Both MDCT and SDCT may improve the aMCI at brain functional and structural levels; however, the MDCT group exhibited higher ReHo values in middle temporal gyrus and superior occipital gyrus. Also, it was confirmed that MDCT leads to better results than SDCT, showing a significant correlation of cognitive functions such as attention, memory, reasoning, and visual-spatial ability.
JUST at VQA-Med: A VGG-Seq2Seq Model

This paper describes the VGG-Seq2Seq system for the Medical Domain Visual Question Answering (VQA-Med) Task of ImageCLEF 2018. The proposed system follows the encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoders fuses a pretrained VGG network with an LSTM network that has a pretrained word embedding layer to encode the input. To generate the output, another LSTM network is used for decoding. When used with a pretrained VGG network, the VGG-Seq2Seq model managed to achieve reasonable results with 0.06, 0.12, 0.03 BLEU, WBSS and CBSS, respectively. Moreover, the VGG-Seq2Seq is not expensive to train.
CUNI team: CLEF eHealth Consumer Health Search Task 2018

In this paper, we present our participation in CLEF Consumer Health Search Task 2018, mainly, its monolingual and multilingual subtasks: IRTask1 and IRTask4. In IRTask1, we use language-model based retrieval model, vector-space model and Kullback-Leiber divergence query expansion mechanism to build our runs. In IRTask4, we submitted 4 runs for each language of Czech, French and German. We follow query-translation approach in which we employ a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system to get a ranked list of translation hypotheses in English. We use this list for two systems: the ﬁrst one uses 1-best-list translation to construct queries, and the second one uses a hypotheses reranker to select the best translation (in terms of retrieval performance) to construct queries. We also present our term reranking model for query expansion, in which we deploy feature set from diﬀer-ent resources (the document collection, Wikipedia articles, translation hypotheses). These features are used to train a logistic regression model that can predict the performance when a candidate term is added to a base query.
ImageCLEF2018: Transfer Learning for Deep Learning with CNN for Tuberculosis Classification

The diagnosis of Multi Drug Resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is challenging. We present our method for classifying whether a patient has MDR tuberculosis or drug sensitive (DS) tuberculosis based on a CT scan of that person's chest, which achieved the best accuracy and the second-best AUC at the ImageCLEF 2018 Tuberculosis MDR detection task. Our approach consists of reformatting the images in the coronal plane, converting them to png format and using transfer learning to train a ResNext 50 convolutional neural network to classify images as MDR or DS tuberculosis.
Online patient resources for deceased donor and live donor kidney recipients: a comparative analysis of readability

Abstract Background The Internet has extensive resources for kidney transplantation recipients. Half of the population reads below a seventh-grade level. Previous studies showed that living donor recipients have higher health literacy rates compared with deceased donor recipients. There has been no study comparing the readability of online living donor recipient materials versus deceased donor recipient materials. Methods Analysis was performed using eight readability scales on the top 10 websites for live donor and deceased donor kidney transplantation. Analysis was performed through the Readability Studio Software. USA reading grade level was determined for each site. Results Overall, the mean reading level for the living donor materials was 12.54 (range 9.2–17) and for the deceased donor materials, 12.87 (range 8.7–17, P = 0.73), corresponding to a university level. None of the sites met the seventh-grade level recommended by the National Institute of Health. Conclusions The readability of online materials remains too high for the corresponding health literacy rates among patients requiring kidney transplantation. Specifically, the lower health literacy rates among deceased donor recipients does not mirror the readability of online materials provided at a university level. This may affect decision-making, contributing to a smaller proportion of patients of a lower socioeconomic status and those with poor English language skills pursuing live donor organs.
Chimeric analysis with newly established EGFP/DsRed2-tagged ES cells identify HYDIN as essential for spermiogenesis in mice

The CRISPR/Cas9 system can efficiently introduce biallelic mutations in ES cells (ESCs), and its application with fluorescently-tagged ESCs enables phenotype analysis in chimeric mice. We have utilized ESCs that express EGFP in the cytosol and acrosome [EGR-G101 129S2 × (CAG/Acr-EGFP) B6] in previous studies; however, the EGFP signal in the sperm cytosol is weak and the signal in the acrosome is lost after the acrosome reaction, precluding analysis between wild type and ESC derived spermatozoa. In this study, we established an ESC line from RBGS (Red Body Green Sperm) transgenic mice [B6D2-Tg (CAG/Su9-DsRed2, Acr3-EGFP) RBGS002Osb] whose spermatozoa exhibit green fluorescence in the acrosome and red fluorescence in the mitochondria within the flagellar midpiece that is retained after the acrosome reaction. We utilized these new ESCs to analyze HYDIN, which is reported to function in sperm motility in humans. Analysis of Hydin-disrupted spermatozoa in mice is difficult as Hydin-mutant mice (hy3) die within 3 weeks, before sexual maturation, due to hydrocephaly. To circumvent the early lethality of the whole-body knockout, we disrupted Hydin in RBGS-ESCs and generated chimeric mice, which survived into sexual maturity. Hydin-disrupted spermatozoa obtained from the chimeric mice possessed short tails and were immotile. When we injected Hydin-disrupted spermatozoa into oocytes, heterozygous pups were obtained, which suggests that the genome of Hydin-disrupted spermatozoa can produce viable pups. Consequently, RBGS-ESCs can be a useful tool for screening and analysis of male-fertility related genes in chimeric mice.
A note on the deductive strength of the Nielsen‐Schreier theorem

We show that the Boolean Prime Ideal Theorem ( BPI ) does not imply the Nielsen‐Schreier Theorem ( NS ) in ZF , thus strengthening the result of Kleppmann from “Nielsen‐Schreier and the Axiom of Choice” that the (strictly weaker than BPI ) Ordering Principle ( OP ) does not imply NS in ZF . We also show that NS is false in Mostowski's Linearly Ordered Model of ZFA+BPI . The above two results also settle the corresponding open problems from Howard and Rubin's “Consequences of the Axiom of Choice”.