Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ALS skeletal muscle shows enhanced TGF-β signaling, fibrosis and induction of fibro/adipogenic progenitor markers

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease in which upper and lower motoneurons degenerate leading to muscle wasting, paralysis and eventually death from respiratory failure. Several studies indicate that skeletal muscle contributes to disease progression; however the molecular mechanisms remain elusive. Fibrosis is a common feature in skeletal muscle under chronic damage conditions such as those caused by muscular dystrophies or denervation. However, the exact mechanisms of fibrosis induction and the cellular bases of this pathological response are unknown. We show that extracellular matrix (ECM) components are augmented in skeletal muscles of symptomatic hSOD1G93A mice, a widely used murine model of ALS. These mice also show increased TGF-β1 mRNA levels, total Smad3 protein levels and p-Smad3 positive nuclei. Furthermore, platelet-derived growth factor receptor-α (PDGFRα), Tcf4 and α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) levels are augmented in the skeletal muscle of symptomatic hSOD1G93A mice. Additionally, the fibro/adipogenic progenitors (FAPs), which are the main producers of ECM constituents, are also increased in these pathogenic conditions. Therefore, FAPs and ECM components are more abundant in symptomatic stages of the disease than in pre-symptomatic stages. We present evidence that fibrosis observed in skeletal muscle of symptomatic hSOD1G93A mice is accompanied with an induction of TGF-β signaling, and also that FAPs might be involved in triggering a fibrotic response. Co-localization of p-Smad3 positive cells together with PDGFRα was observed in the interstitial cells of skeletal muscles from symptomatic hSOD1G93A mice. Finally, the targeting of pro-fibrotic factors such as TGF-β, CTGF/CCN2 and platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) signaling pathway might be a suitable therapeutic approach to improve muscle function in several degenerative diseases.
Avoidable 30-Day Readmissions Among Patients With Stroke and Other Cerebrovascular Disease

Background: There are limited data on factors associated with 30-day readmissions and the frequency of avoidable readmissions among patients with stroke and other cerebrovascular disease. Methods: University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) database records were used to identify patients discharged with a diagnosis of stroke or other cerebrovascular disease at a university hospital from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2009 and readmitted within 30 days to the index hospital. Logistic regression models were used to identify patient and clinical characteristics associated with 30-day readmission. Two neurologists performed chart reviews on readmissions to identify avoidable cases. Results: Of 2706 patients discharged during the study period, 174 patients had 178 readmissions (6.4%) within 30 days. The only factor associated with 30-day readmission was the index length of stay >10 days (vs <5 days; odds ratio [OR] 2.3, 95% CI [1.4, 3.7]). Of 174 patients readmitted within 30 days (median time to readmission 10 days), 92 (53%) were considered avoidable readmissions including 38 (41%) readmitted for elective procedures within 30 days of discharge, 27 (29%) readmitted after inadequate outpatient care coordination, 15 (16%) readmitted after incomplete initial evaluations, 8 (9%) readmitted due to delayed palliative care consultation, and 4 (4%) readmitted after being discharged with inadequate discharge instructions. Only 5% of the readmitted patients had outpatient follow-up recommended within 1 week. Conclusions: More than half of the 30-day readmissions were considered avoidable. Coordinated timing of elective procedures and earlier outpatient follow-up may prevent the majority of avoidable readmissions among patients with stroke and other cerebrovascular disease.
Body mass index and mortality after acute coronary syndromes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Objective: The association between body mass index (BMI) and mortality after acute coronary syndromes (ACS) is controversial. The objective of this analysis is to summarize the available evidence of this association and perform meta-analysis using adjusted estimates. Methods and results: Systematic review from MEDLINE and EMBASE through May 2015 was performed. Studies were considered eligible if they described the association between BMI and all-cause mortality after ACS, and those reporting adjusted estimates were included in the meta-analysis. We included 35 articles with 316,455 participants, with overall poor to moderate quality. No study reported that overweight, type-I or type-II obesity was related to an increased risk of mortality compared to normal weight. Pooled adjusted estimates from 18 studies (137,975 participants) showed lower adjusted mortality both overweight (RR: 0.83; 95% CI: 0.75–0.91; p < .001; I2 51%) and obese (RR: 0.79; 95% CI: 0.71–0.88; p < .001; I2 33%) categories when compared to normal weight. Heterogeneity was not explained in pre-specified subgroups analysis. Conclusions: Increased BMI was associated with increased adjusted survival after ACS when compared to normal BMI. Unexplained heterogeneity and suboptimal quality of studies limit the strength of the results. This seemingly paradoxical finding needs to be confirmed with further research.
Murine Asb-17 expression during mouse testis development and spermatogenesis

In this study we isolated a murine mAsb-17 from mouse testis by RT-PCR using primers designed based on the sequences from the GenBank database. The sequence analysis showed that mAsb-17 encodes a 295 amino acid polypeptide with a molecular weight of approximately 34 kDa containing two ankyrin repeats and one SOCS box. The amino acid sequence of mASB-17 showed 87.5%, 98.3% and 92.9% identity with that of human, rat and dog, respectively. Interestingly, northern blot analysis showed that mAsb-17 was expressed only in the testis. The expression analysis by RT-PCR for mAsb-17 in mouse indicates that mAsb-17 is expressed from the fourth week after birth to adult, with the highest expression in round spermatids. Both northern blot and RT-PCR analyses suggest that mASB-17 may play essential roles in testis development and spermatogenesis.
Service personalisation of assistive robot for autism care

This paper demonstrates an innovative application in the context of autism using a Humanoid robot. A nine-month long home-based care trial with 191 hours of interaction is conducted to investigate the engagement with two young people with autism through adaptation on service design (e.g., change from narrative voice to more interactive story telling using emotion expressions, sounds effects and background music) and service personalization (service novelty). It involves big data collected to learn the participants' preferences and activity patterns. The experimental evidence on how to improve the long-term benefits of use of social robots is reported. The research establishes that in home-based care a Humanoid robot can maintain their engagement with young people with autism through service personalization over long periods of time.
A polymerase chain reaction assay for simultaneous detection and quantitation of proto‐oncogene and GAPD mRNAs in different cell growth rates

A reverse transcriptase followed by a polymerase chain‐reaction (RT‐PCR) assay was developed for the simultaneous detection and quantitation of proto‐oncogene (c‐fos and c‐myc) mRNAs using an internal standard mRNA glycer‐aldehyde‐6‐phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPD). Total cellular RNA was reverse transcribed and PCR amplified with oligonucleotide primers specific to GAPD and either c‐fos or c‐myc genes. In contrast to Northern blot analysis, the RT‐PCR assay is rapid and sensitive enough to quantitate specific proto‐oncogene levels from as little as 12–25 ng of total cellular RNA. The reliability of the assay was tested by measuring c‐fos and c‐myc expression in C3H 10T1/2 mouse embryo fibroblast cells under two different growth states: (a) quiescent cell entry into the proliferative cycle, and (b) plateau phase. Furthermore, the assay was used in measuring variations in c‐fos or c‐myc expression in HA‐1 hamster cells following exposure to the cellular stressing agent, nitric oxide. In serum‐stimulated cells, the RT‐PCR measurements of transient increase in c‐fos (16‐fold at 30 min) and c‐myc (10‐fold at 1 h) mRNA levels were comparable to previously reported results in the literature using a Northern blotting assay. In addition, a two‐ to fivefold increase in c‐fos mRNA levels was observed in plateau phase cells when compared to log phase growth. Furthermore, a transient increase in c‐fos mRNA levels (threefold at 2 h) was also observed following cells’ exposure to the stressing agent nitric oxide. These results suggest that the multiplex RR‐PCR assay represents a significant improvement over current methods to quantitate specific cellular mRNAs under different growth conditions or following environmental insults.
Microblogging Temporal Summarization: Filtering Important Twitter Updates for Breaking News

Title of dissertation: Microblogging Temporal Summarization: Filtering Important Twitter Updates for Breaking News Tan Xu, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Douglas W. Oard College of Information Studies While news stories are an important traditional medium to broadcast and consume news, microblogging has recently emerged as a place where people can discuss, disseminate, collect or report information about news. However, the massive information in the microblogosphere makes it hard for readers to keep up with these real-time updates. This is especially a problem when it comes to breaking news, where people are more eager to know “what is happening”. Therefore, this dissertation is intended as an exploratory effort to investigate computational methods to augment human effort when monitoring the development of breaking news on a given topic from a microblog stream by extractively summarizing the updates in a timely manner. More specifically, given an interest in a topic, either entered as a query or presented as an initial news report, a microblog temporal summarization system is proposed to filter microblog posts from a stream with three primary concerns: topical relevance, novelty, and salience. Considering the relatively high arrival rate of microblog streams, a cascade framework consisting of three stages is proposed to progressively reduce quantity of posts. For each step in the cascade, this dissertation studies methods that improve over current baselines. In the relevance filtering stage, query and document expansion techniques are applied to mitigate sparsity and vocabulary mismatch issues. The use of word embedding as a basis for filtering is also explored, using unsupervised and supervised modeling to characterize lexical and semantic similarity. In the novelty filtering stage, several statistical ways of characterizing novelty are investigated and ensemble learning techniques are used to integrate results from these diverse techniques. These results are compared with a baseline clustering approach using both standard and delay-discounted measures. In the salience filtering stage, because of the real-time prediction requirement a method of learning verb-noun usage from past relevant news reports is used in conjunction with some standard measures for characterizing writing quality. Following a Cranfield-like evaluation paradigm, this dissertation includes a series of experiments to evaluate the proposed methods for each step, and for the endto-end system. New microblog novelty and salience judgments are created, building on existing relevance judgments from the TREC Microblog track. The results point to future research directions at the intersection of social media, computational journalism, information retrieval, automatic summarization, and machine learning. MICROBLOGGING TEMPORAL SUMMARIZATION : FILTERING IMPORTANT TWITTER UPDATES FOR BREAKING NEWS
Asymmetric Least Squares Estimation and Testing

This paper considers estimation and testing using location measures for regression m odels that are based on an asymmetric least-squares criterion functio n. These estimators have properties that are analogous to regression quantiles, but are easier to calculate, as are the corresponding test statistics. Asymmetric least-squares tests of homoskedasticity and s ymmetry compare quite favorably with other tests of these hypotheses in terms of asymptotic relative efficiency. Consequently, asymmetric least-squares estimation provides a convenient and relatively efficie nt method of characterizing the conditional distributi on of a dependent variable given some regressors. Copyright 1987 by The Econometric Society.
An Analysis of Camera Noise

The class of cameras that are based on ionization sensors, which includes the most common charge-coupled device (CCD) and vidicon cameras, is examined. Camera signals are shown to be corrupted by direction-dependent stationary electronic noise sources and fluctuations due to the statistical nature of the sensing process. The authors develop and test a model of the inherent noises in cameras. These results are confirmed by measurement, and they suggest a locally stationary model of noise for adaptive signal processing. >
APPLICATION OF A NOVEL IMPEDANCE SENSOR FOR MEASURING INTERFACIAL DIFFUSION AND ADHESION LOSS OF PRESSURE SENSITIVE ADHESIVES IN AGGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

The lifetime of an adhesive joint can be significantly reduced by environmental stresses such as temperature, moisture, and/or other aggressive fluids. Therefore, it is of great interest to know the concentration of such fluids in the bulk adhesive and at the interface of the adhesive joint. Changes in the concentration of absorbed fluid with exposure time were correlated to the measured capacitance and resistance utilizing interfacial impedance spectroscopy (IIS) and a novel interdigitated electrode sensor. The IIS sensors measure the impedance of mapped areas of the sensor defined with respect to the sensor edge. This is accomplished using a series of independent conductive gold traces arranged parallel to the sensor edge. The adhesive is applied to the surface of the IIS sensor and is then exposed to the aggressive environment. The sensor indicates changes in concentration of fluid as a function of distance from edge of the sensor. This provides a capability to measure bulk and interfacial rates of diffusion and to detect regions of adhesive debonding. In this work an aluminum foil backing pressure sensitive adhesive tape was exposed to acetone at room temperature. Because the backing is impermeable, diffusion was confined to one dimension, parallel to the surface. The change in the relative concentration of acetone verses exposure time is resolved spatially with respect to the exposed edge, and the results were correlated with the 90° peel test experiments.
ATP-Based Chemotherapy Response Assay in Patients with Unresectable Gastric Cancer

scribed previously [4] . Tumor tissue was obtained with biopsy forceps during endoscopy. The following drugs were used: 5-fluorouracil, cisplatin, docetaxel, doxorubicin, etoposide, mitomycin, paclitaxel, irinotecan and oxaliplatin. The regimens consisted of two chemotherapeutic agents which have proven to inhibit cancer cell growth most effectively. A total of 24 patients were enrolled between April 2003 and April 2006. Median age was 58 years (range: 33–71 years). Regimens used are summarized in table 1 . The overall response rate was 29.2%. Two cases (8.3%) achieved a complete response. They are still alive without evidence of recurrence 38 and 50 months after six cycles of doxorubicin plus docetaxel and nine cycles of doxorubicin plus cisplatin treatment, respectively. Treatment responses are summarized in table 2 . Median overall survival lasted 6.3 months. Oneand 2year survival rates were 18.5 and 13.9%, respectively. Median time to tumor progression was 3.2 months. Both 1and 2-year progression-free survival rates were 10.6%. In most cases, regimens administered were tolerable. One case of grade 3 neutropenia was noted. In this study, the response rates did not reach the results suggested by ATP-CRA. Since the heterogeneity of tumor cells also Patients with unresectable gastric cancer receive chemotherapy to relieve symptoms and improve survival. However, the susceptibility of individual tumors is expected to be different, and it is highly unlikely to find a universally applicable regimen. The individualized tumor response test (ITRT) has been introduced to help in the selection of the appropriate drug for each individual patient [1] . There are technical differences among the various ITRTs, but they all require a tissue sample of the tumor to be able to process tumor cells and subsequently select the appropriate chemotherapeutic agents following culturing of those cells in vitro. ATP-based ITRT determines the degree of cell inhibition by comparing the ATP remaining in the test compared to the control wells to predict the response to each chemotherapeutic agent. Recently, an ATP-based chemotherapy response assay (ATP-CRA), a modified form of the ATP-based ITRT, has been proven to be useful in lung and breast cancer [2, 3] . Since results can be obtained from a small amount of tissue in a short period of time, the ATP-CRA enables to accelerate treatment initiation to meet clinical requirements. We prospectively conducted a clinical trial of ATP-CRA in unresectable gastric cancer. ATP-CRA was performed as deReceived: November 14, 2007 Accepted after revision: December 3, 2007 Published online: June 3, 2008
Design of dual-band CPS-fed dipole antenna for 2.4/5.2 GHz WLAN operation

This paper presents a balanced dipole antenna fed by coplanar strips for dual-band applications. The bandwidths can be determined from return loss which was less than 10 dB. The operation in the WLAN frequency bands were 2.40–2.484 GHz and 5.15–5.35 GHz, respectively. Moreover, the antenna is a simple planar structure and occupies a small size of about 48 mm × 16 mm including the finite ground coplanar strip line feeding.
Lesion Explorer: A Video-guided, Standardized Protocol for Accurate and Reliable MRI-derived Volumetrics in Alzheimer's Disease and Normal Elderly

Obtaining in vivo human brain tissue volumetrics from MRI is often complicated by various technical and biological issues. These challenges are exacerbated when significant brain atrophy and age-related white matter changes (e.g. Leukoaraiosis) are present. Lesion Explorer (LE) is an accurate and reliable neuroimaging pipeline specifically developed to address such issues commonly observed on MRI of Alzheimer's disease and normal elderly. The pipeline is a complex set of semi-automatic procedures which has been previously validated in a series of internal and external reliability tests1,2. However, LE's accuracy and reliability is highly dependent on properly trained manual operators to execute commands, identify distinct anatomical landmarks, and manually edit/verify various computer-generated segmentation outputs. LE can be divided into 3 main components, each requiring a set of commands and manual operations: 1) Brain-Sizer, 2) SABRE, and 3) Lesion-Seg. Brain-Sizer's manual operations involve editing of the automatic skull-stripped total intracranial vault (TIV) extraction mask, designation of ventricular cerebrospinal fluid (vCSF), and removal of subtentorial structures. The SABRE component requires checking of image alignment along the anterior and posterior commissure (ACPC) plane, and identification of several anatomical landmarks required for regional parcellation. Finally, the Lesion-Seg component involves manual checking of the automatic lesion segmentation of subcortical hyperintensities (SH) for false positive errors. While on-site training of the LE pipeline is preferable, readily available visual teaching tools with interactive training images are a viable alternative. Developed to ensure a high degree of accuracy and reliability, the following is a step-by-step, video-guided, standardized protocol for LE's manual procedures.
GaN/AlN short-period superlattices for intersubband optoelectronics: A systematic study of their epitaxial growth, design, and performance

We have studied the effect of growth and design parameters on the performance of Si-doped GaN/AlN multiquantum-well (MQW) structures for intersubband optoelectronics in the near infrared. The samples under study display infrared absorption in the 1.3–1.9 μm wavelength range, originating from the photoexcitation of electrons from the first to the second electronic level in the QWs. A commonly observed feature is the presence of multiple peaks in both intersubband absorption and interband emission spectra, which are attributed to monolayer thickness fluctuations in the quantum wells. These thickness fluctuations are induced by dislocations and eventually by cracks or metal accumulation during growth. The best optical performance is attained in samples synthesized with a moderate Ga excess during the growth of both the GaN QWs and the AlN barriers without growth interruptions. The optical properties are degraded at high growth temperatures (>720 °C) due to the thermal activation of the AlN etching of GaN. Fr.
A Nonlocal Filter-Based Hybrid Strategy for Depth Map Enhancement

This paper presents a novel hybrid strategy for depth map enhancement. Given a low resolution and noisy depth map, we improve its spatial resolution and quality with a registered high resolution color image. The unreliable pixels are removed firstly based on the local structure of center pixel. Then the initial depth map is mapped to color image's coordinate. And the holes created by up sampling and unreliable invalidation are filled by nonlocal filter-based method. Different from the previous local filter-based methods, nonlocal filter does not require the optimal support window and more natural pixel similarity measure metric is given. By quantitative and qualitative experiments on publicly available test sequences, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method on the depth enhancement task, compared with the existing methods.
Test-retest reliability of alcohol measures: is there a difference between internet-based assessment and traditional methods?

This study compared Web-based assessment techniques with traditional paper-based methods of commonly used measures of alcohol use. Test-retest reliabilities were obtained, and tests of validity were conducted. A total of 255 participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: paper-based (P&P), Web-based (Web), or Web-based with interruption (Web-I). Follow-up assessments 1 week later indicated reliabilities ranging from . 59 to . 93 within all measures and across all assessment methods. Significantly high test-retest reliability coefficients support the use of these measures for research and clinical applications. Furthermore, no significant differences were found between assessment techniques, suggesting that Web-based methods are a suitable alternative to more traditional methods. This cost-efficient alternative has the advantage of minimizing data collection and entry errors while increasing survey accessibility.