Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Benefits and Sustainability of a Learning Collaborative for Implementation of Treat‐to‐Target in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Results of a Cluster‐Randomized Controlled Phase II Clinical Trial

We conducted a 2‐phase randomized controlled trial of a learning collaborative to facilitate implementation of treat‐to‐target (T2T) to manage rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We found substantial improvement in implementation of T2T in phase I. Here, we report on a second 9 months (phase II), where we examined the maintenance of response in phase I and predictors of greater improvement in T2T adherence.
Sphingolipid Metabolic Pathway Impacts Thiazide Diuretics Blood Pressure Response: Insights From Genomics, Metabolomics, and Lipidomics

Background Although hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) is a well‐established first‐line antihypertensive in the United States, <50% of HCTZ treated patients achieve blood pressure (BP) control. Thus, identifying biomarkers that could predict the BP response to HCTZ is critically important. In this study, we utilized metabolomics, genomics, and lipidomics to identify novel pathways and biomarkers associated with HCTZ BP response. Methods and Results First, we conducted a pathway analysis for 13 metabolites we recently identified to be significantly associated with HCTZ BP response. From this analysis, we found the sphingolipid metabolic pathway as the most significant pathway (P=5.8E‐05). Testing 78 variants, within 14 genes involved in the sphingolipid metabolic canonical pathway, with the BP response to HCTZ identified variant rs6078905, within the SPTLC3 gene, as a novel biomarker significantly associated with the BP response to HCTZ in whites (n=228). We found that rs6078905 C‐allele carriers had a better BP response to HCTZ versus noncarriers (∆SBP/∆DBP: −11.4/−6.9 versus −6.8/−3.5 mm Hg; ∆SBP P=6.7E‐04; ∆DBP P=4.8E‐04). Additionally, in blacks (n=148), we found genetic signals in the SPTLC3 genomic region significantly associated with the BP response to HCTZ (P<0.05). Last, we observed that rs6078905 significantly affects the baseline level of 4 sphingomyelins (N24:2, N24:3, N16:1, and N22:1; false discovery rate <0.05), from which N24:2 sphingomyelin has a significant correlation with both HCTZ DBP‐response (r=−0.42; P=7E‐03) and SBP‐response (r=−0.36; P=2E‐02). Conclusions This study provides insight into potential pharmacometabolomic and genetic mechanisms underlying HCTZ BP response and suggests that SPTLC3 is a potential determinant of the BP response to HCTZ. Clinical Trial Registration URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00246519.
Tyrosine phosphorylation of the herpes simplex virus type 1 regulatory protein ICP22 and a cellular protein which shares antigenic determinants with ICP22

At least eight herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and five HSV-2 proteins were tyrosine phosphorylated in infected cells. The first viral tyrosine phosphoprotein identified was the HSV-1 regulatory protein ICP22. Also, two novel phosphotyrosine proteins were bound by anti-ICP22 antibodies. H(R22) is a cellular protein, while the F(R10) protein is observed only in HSV-1-infected cells.
THE BACTERIAL OXIDATION OF RUBBER.

Abstract In studying the biological oxygen demand of sea water, it has been observed that rubber stoppers increase the amount of oxygen consumed. In fact, the small amount of rubber gasket exposed to the water in citrate of magnesia bottles perceptibly increases the amount of oxygen consumed after 5 to 10 days' incubation. Heat-sterilized as well as formaldehyde-preserved controls proved that the increased oxygen consumption is attributable to biological activity. One-gram samples of various kinds of rubber, cut in small pieces to give a surface area of approximately 10 sq. cm. , were placed in 160-cc. glass-stoppered bottles. After sterilizing in an autoclave at 120° C for 20 minutes, the bottles were filled with sterile water saturated with oxygen. Half the bottles were inoculated; the others were left sterile. Duplicate bottles were analyzed for oxygen immediately by the Winkler technique, and the others were incubated in the water bath for one to five days at 22° C, after which the amount of oxygen con.
Lyme Disease: Beyond Erythema Migrans

Background: With the recent discoveries of Borrelia burgdorferi and other spirochetes in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and with a recent analysis showing the very same pathology in both syphilitic and Alzheimer’s dementia it seems both rational and urgent to consider all aspects of Lyme disease in a new light, especially the concept of “overdiagnosis”. The very presence of the organisms in the brains following supposedly effective treatment for Lyme disease is contradictory and should be the starting point for diagnosis and treatment. Also for consideration is the reliance on erythema migrans and serologies in the diagnosis of Lyme disease inasmuch as they occur in less than half the patients.
Healing Complications After Internal Fixation of Trochanteric Hip Fractures: The Prognostic Value of Osteoporosis

Summary: In a 3-year prospective randomized trial, the prognostic value of osteoporosis in terms of predicting healing complications due to implant failures or loss of fracture reduction has been studied in 113 patients with intertrochanteric hip fractures treated with either a sliding screwplate or Ender nailing. According to the Barnet and Nordin's osteoporosis index, 66 patients were considered to have moderate or severe osteoporosis. There were no differences between patients with or without osteoporosis as regards the number of fractures with collapse in varus >10°, redislocation >10 mm, or compression exceeding 10 mm. Six months after surgery, 48 patients failed in healing or healed with complications. These cases disclosed increased osteoporosis in comparison with those showing noncomplicated healing. Patients with osteoporosis who had unstable fractures treated by Ender nailing were found to have the worst prognosis for healing complications (p=0.006). Of the 33 fractures with implant failures, 25 (76%) occurred in patients with osteoporosis (p=0.04). In patients with osteoporosis, the frequency of mechanical failures was significantly higher in fractures with the device positioned incorrectly. Independently of the device used, patients with unstable trochanteric hip fractures and osteoporotic bone were the group with the highest risk for failures of the implant.
Optical fiber amplifiers for WDM optical networks

In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in the development of broadband erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), which form the backbone of high-capacity lighwave communication systems. Initially, the use of gain equalization filters increased the bandwidth of amplifiers by a factor of three (relative to first-generation amplifiers deployed in the field). Subsequently, the introduction of a two-band architecture, which includes amplifier sections for the C-band and the L-band, resulted in a further doubling of the bandwidth. In addition, this amplifier provides high output power and low noise figure to support the ever-increasing capacity demand on lightwave systems. Commercial systems with up to 80 wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels having a total capacity of up to 400 Gb/s are currently available, and terabit systems have been demonstrated in the laboratory. The recently discovered phenomenon of fast power transients in chains of EDFAs constituting an optical network has been shown to impair the performance of propagating channels in the event of channel failure or network reconfiguration. Several schemes to control the gain of EDFAs have been devised to mitigate the degradation caused by the fast power transient effect. Practical broadband amplifiers incorporating these and other control schemes, such as internal attenuation to control gain tilt, will enable future terabit and higher capacity networks.
Terrain analysis from curvature profiles

This paper describes a new algorithm which uses Gaussian and mean curvature values of the terrain surface to extract feature points. These points are then used for recognition of particular subregions of the terrain and in estimating relative positions of these subregions in the terrain. The Gaussian and mean curvatures are chosen because they are invariant under rotation and translation. In the Gaussian and mean curvature images, the points of maximum and minimum curvatures are extracted and used for matching. The stability of the position of these points in the presence of noise and with resampling is investigated. The input for this algorithm is 3D digital terrain data. Curvature values are calculated from the data by fitting a quadratic surface over a square window and calculating directional derivatives of this surface. A method of surface fitting that is invariant to sensor‐centered coordinate system transformation is suggested and implemented. Real terrain data are used in our experiments. The algorithm is tested with and without the presence of noise, and its performance is described.
Is speech enhancement pre-processing still relevant when using deep neural networks for acoustic modeling?

Using deep neural networks (DNNs) for automatic speech recognition (ASR) has recently attracted much attention due to the large performance improvement they provide for a variety of tasks. DNNs are known to be robust to overﬁtting and to be able to remove speaker variability. Another important cause of variability in speech is the presence of noise. A lot of research has been undertaken on noise robust ASR including front-end and back-end approaches. However most approaches have been developed or evaluated on traditional ASR systems based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). The question we try to address in this paper is whether conventional noise robust approaches can still be competitive when using recent DNN-based ASR systems. To this end, we compare experimentally the performance of DNN-based ASR systems in a distant speech recognition task, for DNNs trained with noise-free, noisy and enhanced speech. We conﬁrm that DNNs are powerful when the training and testing conditions are well matched. However, the performance degrades in the presence of noise. The use of a speech enhancement pre-processor to reduce the noise variability signiﬁcantly improves performance with performance improvement comparable to that observed with conventional GMM-based ASR systems.
Non‐receptor tyrosine kinases and the actin cytoskeleton in contractile vascular smooth muscle

The contractility of vascular smooth muscle cells within the walls of arteries is regulated by mechanical stresses and vasoactive signals. Transduction of these diverse stimuli into a cellular response occurs through many different mechanisms, one being reorganisation of the actin cytoskeleton. In addition to a structural role in maintaining cellular architecture it is now clear that the actin cytoskeleton of contractile vascular smooth muscle cells is a dynamic structure reacting to changes in the cellular environment. Equally clear is that disrupting the cytoskeleton or interfering with its rearrangement, has profound effects on artery contractility. The actin cytoskeleton associates with dense plaques, also called focal adhesions, at the plasma membrane of smooth muscle cells. Vasoconstrictors and mechanical stress induce remodelling of the focal adhesions, concomitant with cytoskeletal reorganisation. Recent work has shown that non‐receptor tyrosine kinases and tyrosine phosphorylation of focal adhesion proteins such as paxillin and Hic‐5 are important for actin cytoskeleton and focal adhesion remodelling and contraction.
Effects of antioxidant vitamins C and E on endothelial function and thrombosis/fibrinolysis system in smokers

Summary Smoking is associated with endothelial dysfunction and abnormalities in thrombosis/fibrinolysis system, possibly through increased oxidative stress. In this study we investigated the effect of combined antioxidant treatment with vitamins C and E on endothelial function and plasma levels of plasminogen activator inhibitor (PAI-1), von Willebrand factor (vWF), tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) and factor VII (fVII), in smokers. Forty-one healthy smokers were randomly divided into 4 groups receiving vitamin C 2g/day (group A), vitamin C 2g/day plus vitamin E 400IU/day (group B), vitamin C 2g/day plus vitamin E 800IU/day (group C) or no antioxidants (controls, group D), for 4 weeks. Forearm blood flow was measured using venous occlusion strain-gauge plethysmography. Forearm vasodilatory response to reactive hyperemia (RH%) or to sublingual nitroglycerin administration (NTG%) were considered as indexes of endothelium dependent or independent dilation respectively. After treatment, RH% was increased only in groups B (p <0.05) and C (p <0.001) but not in groups A and D. Plasma levels of PAI-1 and vWF were decreased only in group C (p <0.05 for both), while PAI-1/tPA ratio was significantly decreased in both groups B and C (p <0.05 for both). NTG% and plasma levels of tPA and fVII remained invariable in all groups. In conclusion, combined administration of vitamin C and vitamin E at high dosages, improved endothelial function and decreased plasma levels of PAI-1, vWF and PAI-1/tPA ratio in chronic smokers.
Norms for Values in Scientific Belief Acceptance

Although a strict dichotomy between facts and values is no longer accepted, less attention has been paid to the roles values should play in our acceptance of factual statements, or scientific descriptive claims. This paper argues that values, whether cognitive or ethical, should never preclude or direct belief on their own. Our wanting something to be true will not make it so. Instead, values should only be used to consider whether the available evidence provides sufficient warrant for a claim. This argument is made for all relevant values, including cognitive, ethical, and social values. The rational integrity of science depends not on excluding some values and including others in the reasoning process, but of constraining all values to their proper role in belief acceptance.
Identifying Topic-Specific Experts on Microblog

With the rapid growth of microblog, expert identification on microblog has been playing a crucial role in many applications. While most previous expert identification studies only assess global authoritativeness of a user, there is no way to differentiate the authoritativeness in a particular aspect of topics. In this paper, we propose a novel model, which jointly models text and following relationship in the same generative process. Furthermore, we integrate a similarity-based weight scheme into the model to address the popular bias problem, and use followee topic distribution as prior information to make user"s topic distribution more precisely. Our empirical study on two large real-world datasets shows that our proposed model produces significantly higher quality results than the prior arts.
Modified sharp method: factors influencing reproducibility and variability.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES In rheumatoid arthritis, joint radiography is still the most frequently used instrument to assess the progression of joint damage. Unfortunately, the poor quality of the radiographic scoring methods available has a negative impact on the power in clinical trials. This study focuses on the influence of the following 4 factors on radiographic scores according to van der Heijde's modification of the Sharp method: intraobserver variation, interobserver variation, follow-up time, and number of measurement occasions within a patient series. METHODS One hundred and seventy-two patients in the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis were followed up. During the first 3 years, radiographs of the hands and feet were taken twice yearly and scored by 3 observers. The scoring process was repeated after an additional 3-year period. Correlation coefficients and differences between observers were calculated to define variability. The influence of the 4 factors on variability was studied. RESULTS One observer assigned a significantly higher score than the other 2, who had been trained together. Interobserver variability decreased as follow-up time increased. Interobserver correlation coefficients became higher, with smaller differences between observers for progression scores than for absolute scores. Increasing the number of measurements within a patient series led to higher scores. Intraobserver correlation coefficients were high, and a training effect occurred when the time between measurements was 1 year, resulting in lower scores. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that, and shows how, the investigated factors influence the variability of the modified Sharp method. It is extremely important to take interobserver variation into account when designing protocols for multicenter clinical trials. A progression scoring method is recommended for studies assessing radiographic damage or clinical trials.
THE EFFECT OF ASCORBIC ACID ON METACHROMASIA IN SOLUTIONS OF PROTEIN AND ACID POLYSACCHARIDE

Under the conditions of these experiments the interaction between toluidine blue and heparin or chondroitin sulphate is affected quantitatively by the addition of albumin. This effect can be reversed by the addition of ascorbic acid to the solution. The mechanism of action of the ascorbic acid is a subject for further study.
Blood Transfusion during Aneurysm Surgery

INTRODUCTIONIncreasing costs and concerns about blood supply safety have led to a reevaluation of blood transfusion practices. This study was undertaken to examine blood use during aneurysm surgery. METHODSWe performed a retrospective analysis of hospital records including operative, anesthetic, and nursing notes, computed tomographic scans, and four-vessel angiographic films of 547 patients undergoing surgery for ruptured and unruptured cerebral aneurysms at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. During the review period, the transfusion threshold was not altered. RESULTSA total of 134 patients (24.5%) received an intraoperative blood transfusion (median number of units, 2; range, 1–17). Preoperative factors associated with intraoperative blood use included older patient age (P < 0.001), lower hematocrit level on admission (P = 0.007), ruptured rather than unruptured aneurysm (P = 0.004), severe intraventricular hemorrhage (P = 0.03), and larger aneurysm size (P = 0.004). Factors not associated with intraoperative blood transfusion included past medical history (including cardiac or pulmonary disease), admission clinical grade after aneurysm rupture, findings such as hydrocephalus on computed tomographic scanning, and aneurysm location and aneurysm neck-to-fundus ratio. Also associated with blood transfusion during surgery were intraoperative aneurysm rupture (P < 0.0001), intracerebral hematoma evacuation (P = 0.02), and obliteration of multiple aneurysms (P = 0.002). Among patients who received an intraoperative transfusion, those who experienced an aneurysm rupture required an average of 3.6 ± 0.35 units, whereas patients who did not have a rupture required 1.9 ± 0.12 units (P = 0.001). Postoperatively, a total of 244 patients (44.6%), including 77 who received blood intraoperatively, required a blood transfusion (median number of units, 2; range, 1–31). Postoperative blood transfusion was associated with the treatment of patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (P < 0.0001), particularly among poor-grade patients who developed medical complications. CONCLUSIONBlood transfusion can be expected in one in five patients undergoing aneurysm surgery. Reducing intraoperative rupture may reduce the need for blood products.
Determination of Antioxidant Activities of Different Urginea maritima (L.) Baker Plant Extracts

The subject handled in this study is the determination of antioxidant activities of extracts obtained from the Urginea maritima (L.) Baker plant's leaves and tubers. Extractions which were obtained using various solvents as methanol, ethanol, acetone and benzine. The antioxidant activity of the extracts was determined using β-karotene-linoleic acid system. Moreover, the free radical scavenging activity values were tested with DPPH. The concentrations of phenolic compounds in all extracts of UM, expressed as microgram of pyrocatechol equivalents (PEs) were determined with Folin-Ciocalteu reagent (FCR). The results demonstrated that the highest antioxidant activity in the U. maritima (L.) Baker showed in the tubers with ethanol solvent (%72,67) and the lowest in the benzine extract from the tubers (%31,12). The free radical scavenging activity of the methanol extract from the tubers of the U. maritima (L.) Baker plant (%66.89) was found lower than the BHT value (%91.12) but still the highest. However, the amount of total phenolic compounds of acetone extract of U. maritime (L.) Baker tubers was 6 times more than ethanol extract. This study demonstrated that U. maritime (L.) Baker species have high rate antioxidant capacity.
Network Monitoring of Adhesion/Growth‐Regulatory Galectins: Localization of the Five Canonical Chicken Proteins in Embryonic and Maturing Bone and Cartilage and Their Introduction as Histochemical Tools

Divergence from an ancestral gene leads to a family of homologous proteins. Whether they are physiologically distinct, similar, or even redundant is an open question in each case. Defining profiles of tissue localization is a step toward giving diversity a functional meaning. Due to the significance of endogenous sugar receptors (lectins) as effectors for a wide range of cellular activities we have focused on galectins. The comparatively low level of network complexity constituted by only five canonical proteins makes chicken galectins (CGs) an attractive choice to perform comprehensive analysis, here studied on bone/cartilage as organ system. Galectin expression was monitored by Western blotting and immunohistochemistry using non‐cross‐reactive antibodies. Overall, three galectins (CG‐1B, CG‐3, CG‐8) were present with individual expression patterns, one was found exclusively in the mesenchyme (CG‐1A), the fifth (CG‐2) not being detectable. The documented extents of separation are a sign for functional divergence; in cases with overlapping stainings, as for example in the osteoprogenitor layer or periosteum, cooperation may also be possible. Recombinant production enabled the introduction of the endogenous lectins as tools for binding‐site localization. Their testing revealed developmental regulation and cell‐type‐specific staining. Of relevance for research on mammalian galectins, this study illustrates that certain cell types can express more than one galectin, letting functional interrelationships appear likely. Thus, complete network analysis irrespective of its degree of complexity is mandatory. Anat Rec, 298:2051–2070, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Sparse antenna array design and combined range and angle estimation for FMCW radar sensors

In this paper the design of sparse antenna arrays and signal processing algorithms for non-parametric high resolution range and angle estimation algorithms for FMCW radar sensor arrays are presented. Since the performance of such systems strongly depends both on the antenna placement as well as the adequate algorithms, the close relation between antenna hardware and signal processing is exploited in the development of the whole system. The theory is verified by measurements utilizing a system operating at 24 GHz and using a four element array with interelement spacings larger than half a wavelength for each array element. The simulations and measurements show promising results which makes the system attractive for applications where only few channels are available and high gain and therefore large array elements are necessary, which would prohibit the use of classical half-wavelength spaced arrays.