Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Patient and Caregiver Transfer Training Provided by a Physical Therapist in the Hospice Setting

Background: As patients in hospice become increasingly dependent upon caregivers, physical therapy interventions can minimize the risk of injury to the patient or caregiver that may occur during transfers between surfaces. Case Description: A 68-year-old male hospice patient was referred to physical therapy for strengthening and transfer training after a fall that resulted in the patient remaining in bed for 5 weeks due to an increased fear of falling. Treatments focused on caregiver training for correct transfer techniques. Outcome: During 10 treatment sessions, the patient and caregiver became independent and safe with all transfers. Although the patient’s health declined, his risk for and fear of falling decreased. Confidence with transfers improved for the patient and caregiver. Discussion: Physical therapy “benefits were immeasurable” for the patient and caregiver by teaching them how to safely perform patient transfers with reduced risk of injury.
Reversible centriole depletion with an inhibitor of Polo-like kinase 4

Giving an old organelle the old heave-ho Centrioles are ancient cellular organelles that build centrosomes, the major microtubule-organizing centers in animal cells. Duplication of centrioles is tightly controlled to ensure that each dividing cell has precisely two centrosomes. Human cancer cells often have extra centrosomes, which has been hypothesized to confer a proliferative advantage. Wong et al. developed small molecules (centrinones) that allowed them to reversibly “delete” centrioles from cells (see the Perspective by Stearns). Surprisingly, cancer cells continued to divide in the absence of centrosomes, whereas normal cells stopped dividing. Science, this issue p. 1155; see also p. 1091 An “organelle knockout” strategy reveals that cancer cells but not normal cells can divide in the absence of centrosomes. [Also see Perspective by Stearns] Centrioles are ancient organelles that build centrosomes, the major microtubule-organizing centers of animal cells. Extra centrosomes are a common feature of cancer cells. To investigate the importance of centrosomes in the proliferation of normal and cancer cells, we developed centrinone, a reversible inhibitor of Polo-like kinase 4 (Plk4), a serine-threonine protein kinase that initiates centriole assembly. Centrinone treatment caused centrosome depletion in human and other vertebrate cells. Centrosome loss irreversibly arrested normal cells in a senescence-like G1 state by a p53-dependent mechanism that was independent of DNA damage, stress, Hippo signaling, extended mitotic duration, or segregation errors. In contrast, cancer cell lines with normal or amplified centrosome numbers could proliferate indefinitely after centrosome loss. Upon centrinone washout, each cancer cell line returned to an intrinsic centrosome number “set point. ” Thus, cells with cancer-associated mutations fundamentally differ from normal cells in their response to centrosome loss.
Photoacoustic-Imaging-Based Temperature Monitoring for High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Therapy

Temperature monitoring during high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) application is necessary to ensure effective therapy while minimizing thermal damage to adjacent tissue. In this study, we demonstrate a noninvasive approach for temperature measurement during HIFU therapy based on photoacoustic imaging (PAI). Because of the dependence of photoacoustic (PA) signal amplitude on temperature of the source tissue and the linearity of the PAI system, changes in temperature will cause changes in PA image intensity. Experiments have been conducted in ex-vivo bovine tissue to characterize the linear dependence of PA image pixel values on temperature and subsequently to convert the PA image to a real-time temperature map.
Neuromodulation and Palliative Medicine

The palliative care population is generally vulnerable to experiencing medication-induced adverse effects and drug–drug interactions. Neuromodulation may offer particular advantages over systemic medications in this population. Spinal cord stimulation and peripheral nerve stimulation have long been utilized in efforts to provide analgesia for various painful conditions. More recently, deep brain stimulation/motor cortex stimulation has anecdotally been utilized for certain intractable pain states. Although brain electrical stimulation has not been adequately trialed or in some cases even tried at all for management of a variety of symptoms, it is conceivable that in the future it may be a potential therapeutic option in efforts to palliate various severe refractory symptoms (eg, intractable pain, nausea, dyspnea, delirium).
Sulcal curve extraction using Laplace Beltrami eigenfunction level sets

The complexity of the human cortex is demonstrated in the intricate pattern of gyri and sulci that arise from the cortical folding process during development. Quantitative assessment of cortical folding is important in the definition of normal brain development and provides insight into neurodevelopmental disorders. In this work, a method for sulcal curve extraction is proposed that combines the advantages of previously proposed depth based and curvature based methods. The technique, derived from Laplace Beltrami eigenfunction level sets, maps mean curvature on the level sets, and incorporates depth information using extracted sulci and gyri, a characteristic previously attributed only to depth based methods. The use of Laplace Beltrami eigenfunction level sets requires neither definition of an outer hull surface nor correspondence between the cortical surface and outer hull, both of which are required by depth based methods. The utility of the method for extracting sulcal curves is demonstrated by application to fetal sheep brain MRI data, imaged at key time points during development.
Impact of physical and virtual carrier sensing on the route discovery mechanism in noisy MANETs

In cellular consumer devices, one of the limiting factors for efficiency is that of overhead on the network layer that effects on the performance of the network. A substantial design issue is that, with cellular consumer devices, the discovery phase of the routing process, when attempting to establish a mobile ad hoc network, a high demand is placed on the network layer. Hence, a challenge for the designer is to reduce this demand, thus increasing overall device availability. Routing algorithms, and hence the performance of the networks are adversely affected by inefficient carrier sensing methods which can lead to increasing packet loss within the network environment. In this paper, the effect of physical and virtual carrier sensing on the route discovery mechanism has been identified and this paper suggests that choosing a suitable carrier sensing threshold in a high density and noisy mobile ad hoc network yields a better performance than if the default value is used1.
Automatic recognition of pleasant content of odours through ElectroEncephaloGraphic activity analysis

This study presents a machine learning approach applied to ElectroEnchephaloGraphic (EEG) response in a group of subjects when exposed to a controlled olfactory stimulation experiment. In the literature, in fact, there are controversial results on EEG response to odorants. This study proposes a robust leave-one-subject-out classification method to recognize features extracted from EEG signals belonging to pleasant or unpleasant olfactory stimulation classes. An accuracy of 75% has been achieved in a group of 32 subjects. Moreover a set of features extracted from lateral electrodes emphasized that right and left hemispheres behave differently when the subjects are exposed to pleasant or unpleasant odours stimuli.
Multi-direction hand movement classification using EEG-based source space analysis

Recent advances in the brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have demonstrated the inference of movement related activity using non-invasive EEG. However, most of the sensorspace approaches that study sensorimotor rhythms using EEG do not reveal the underlying neurophysiological phenomenon while executing or imagining the movement with finer control. Therefore, there is a need to examine feature extraction techniques in the cortical source space which can provide more information about the task compared to sensor-space. In this study, we extend the traditional sensor-space feature extraction method, Common Spatial Pattern (CSP), to the source space, using various regularization approaches. We use Weighted Minimum Norm Estimate (wMNE) as a source localization technique. We show that for a multi-direction hand movement classification problem, the source space features can result in an increase of over 10% accuracy compared to sensor space features. Fisher's Linear Discriminant (FLD) classifier with the One-versus-rest approach is used for the classification.
Self-improvement of voice interface with user-input spoken query at early stage of commercialization

This paper concerns the self-improvement of voice interface by using acoustic model re-training with user-input spoken query at early stage of commercialization, when the conventional confidence measure-based acoustic model re-training is not reliable. This paper analyzes error patterns in user-input spoken queries, categorizes these error patterns, defines a quantitative measurement for each category of error patterns and proposes a filter-based approach over this quantitative measurement. The proposed filter-based method includes four distinctive filters: filter over environmental noise level, filter over non-pitch ratio within utterance, filter over average phoneme duration function score and filter over clipped frame composition ratio. For the evaluation, the initial performance of the acoustic model was measured at 66.1% in terms of speech recognition rate. The overall performance is demonstrated as 73.8% when all of the proposed filters are applied for the re-training of the acoustic model. This result demonstrates 3.1% better recognition rate than a confidence measure-based acoustic model re-training method. Our proposed method is applicable to other data-driven classification services of consumer electronic products in other mediums (e.g. image) at their early stage of commercialization.
A cysteine-clamp gene drives embryo polarity in the midge Chironomus

How to generate head-to-tail polarity in a midge Animal genomes do not remain static but gain and lose essential genes over time. One such case is the bicoid gene of flies. Bicoid plays an important role in early Drosophila development during the generation of head-to-tail polarity, but most flies lack bicoid. Which genes then serve the same function in other insects? Now, Klomp et al. report a structurally unrelated gene that serves essentially the same function as bicoid in a mosquito-related midge but does so through a different genetic mechanism. Science, this issue p. 1040 Structurally unrelated genes in fly and a mosquito-related midge serve the same function by different mechanisms. In the fruit fly Drosophila, head formation is driven by a single gene, bicoid, which generates head-to-tail polarity of the main embryonic axis. Bicoid deficiency results in embryos with tail-to-tail polarity and no head. However, most insects lack bicoid, and the molecular mechanism for establishing head-to-tail polarity is poorly understood. We have identified a gene that establishes head-to-tail polarity of the mosquito-like midge, Chironomus riparius. This gene, named panish, encodes a cysteine-clamp DNA binding domain and operates through a different mechanism than bicoid. This finding, combined with the observation that the phylogenetic distributions of panish and bicoid are limited to specific families of flies, reveals frequent evolutionary changes of body axis determinants and a remarkable opportunity to study gene regulatory network evolution.
Fuzzy fusion based high dynamic range imaging using adaptive histogram separation

In this work, a high dynamic range (HDR) image generation method using a single input image is presented. The proposed approach generates over- and under-exposed images by making use of a novel adaptive histogram separation scheme. Thus, it becomes possible to eliminate ghosting effects which generally occur when several input image containing camera/object motion are utilized in HDR imaging. Additionally, it is proposed to utilize a fuzzy logic based approach at the fusion stage which takes visibility of the inputs pixels into account. Since the proposed approach is computationally light-weight, it is possible to implement it on mobile devices such as smart phones and compact cameras. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide ghost-free and improved HDR performance compared to the existing methods.
Disparities Among Those With Advance Directives in a Medicare Supplement Population

Advance directives (ADs) detail patients’ end-of-life (EOL) care preferences. We estimated AD prevalence rates among a Medicare Supplement population and determined characteristics associated with having ADs. We also estimated the impact of having an AD on EOL Medicare expenditures among respondents who later died. Survey respondents with an AD (72%) were significantly more likely to be female, older, nonminority, higher income and education, and have more comorbid conditions. Following regression adjustments, EOL expenditures were significantly lower for those with ADs in the last 3 months (−US$11 189) and 1 month (−US$6092) prior to death. Patients with ADs specifying their wishes for EOL care had significantly lower medical expenditures during the last few months of life. However, disparities exist among those with ADs that may warrant interventions.
Spirochetes in Body Fluids and Tissues: Manual of Investigative Methods.

In January 1969, an ad hoc seminar and workshop on Spiral Organisms in Body Fluids was held at the Venereal Disease Research Laboratories in Atlanta. The committee was made up of many of the recognized experts in the field: James N. Miller, Virginia H. Falcone, Bruce Golden, Charles W. Israel, U.S.G. Kuhn III, and Robert M. Smibert. Within two years this committee, under the leadership of Dr. Miller, has produced an excellent manual of investigative methods in spirochetal disease. The text is well organized and indexed, written in concise outline form, and covers the pathogenesis and clinical manifestations of experimentally induced treponemal disease in rabbits and primates as well as detailed descriptions of laboratory techniques of obtaining, handling, and evaluating body tissues and fluids. Forty-two pertinent references are given as well as the names and locations of commercial companies where reagents and sera may be obtained and reference laboratories where
Combining UCT and Nested Monte Carlo Search for Single-Player General Game Playing

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) has been recently very successful for game playing, particularly for games where the evaluation of a state is difficult to compute, such as Go or General Games. We compare nested Monte Carlo (NMC) search, upper confidence bounds for trees (UCT-T), UCT with transposition tables (UCT+T), and a simple combination of NMC and UCT+T (MAX) on single-player games of the past General Game Playing (GGP) competitions. We show that transposition tables improve UCT and that MAX is the best of these four algorithms. Using UCT+T, the program Ary won the 2009 GGP competition. MAX and NMC are slight improvements over this 2009 version.
HoningStone: Building Creative Combos With Honing Theory for a Digital Card Game

In recent years, online digital games have left behind the status of entertainment sources to become also professional electronic sports. Worldwide championships offer prizes up to millions of dollars for the best competitors and/or teams among different game categories such as digital collectible card games (DCCG), multiplayer online battle arena, etc. Hearthstone, by Blizzard Entertainment, is a DCCG that has an increasing number of players up to the millions. In this game, individual players compete in one-versus-one matches in alternating turns, until a player is defeated. The greatest challenge in this game is to build a deck of cards and a strategy to combine these cards in order to be competitive against other players without a priori knowledge about their decks and strategies. This is a daunting task that requires deep knowledge of each existing card and great amount of creativity to surprise adversaries in this very adaptive environment. This paper presents a computational system, called HoningStone, that automatically generates creative card combos based on the honing theory of creativity. Our experimental results show that HoningStone can generate combos that are more creative than a greedy randomized algorithm driven by a creativity metric.
An $O(1/k)$  Gradient Method for Network Resource Allocation Problems

We present a fast distributed gradient method for a convex optimization problem with linear inequalities, with a particular focus on the network utility maximization (NUM) problem. Most existing works in the literature use (sub)gradient methods for solving the dual of this problem which can be implemented in a distributed manner. However, these (sub)gradient methods suffer from an O(1/√k) rate of convergence (where k is the number of iterations). In this paper, we assume that the utility functions are strongly concave, an assumption satisfied by most standard utility functions considered in the literature. We develop a completely distributed fast gradient method for solving the dual of the NUM problem. We show that the generated primal sequences converge to the unique optimal solution of the NUM problem at rate O(1/k).
Multidisciplinary Training on Spiritual Care for Patients in Palliative Care Trajectories Improves the Attitudes and Competencies of Hospital Medical Staff: Results of a Quasi-Experimental Study

Objectives: Patients value health-care professionals’ attention to their spiritual needs. However, this is undervalued in health-care professionals’ education. Additional training is essential for implementation of a national multidisciplinary guideline on spiritual care (SC) in palliative care (PC). Aim of this study is to measure effects of a training program on SC in PC based on the guideline. Methods: A pragmatic multicenter trial using a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design as part of an action research study. Eight multidisciplinary teams in regular wards and 1 team of PC consultants, in 8 Dutch teaching hospitals, received questionnaires before training about perceived barriers for SC, spiritual attitudes and involvement, and SC competencies. The effect on the barriers on SC and SC competencies were measured both 1 and 6 months after the training. Results: For nurses (n = 214), 7 of 8 barriers to SC were decreased after 1 month, but only 2 were still after 6 months. For physicians (n = 41), the training had no effect on the barriers to SC. Nurses improved in 4 of 6 competencies after both 1 and 6 months. Physicians improved in 3 of 6 competencies after 1 month but in only 1 competency after 6 months. Significance of Results: Concise SC training programs for clinical teams can effect quality of care, by improving hospital staff competencies and decreasing the barriers they perceive. Differences in the effects of the SC training on nurses and physicians show the need for further research on physicians’ educational needs on SC.
Allosteric transcriptional regulation via changes in the overall topology of the core promoter

Transcription factor shape-shifts DNA Controlling when a gene is expressed or repressed is vital for cellular metabolism and development. In Escherichia coli, a copper-sensing transcription factor, CueR, can repress or activate expression when bound at exactly the same site in the gene promoter. Philips et al. used x-ray crystallography to show that CueR dramatically changes the topology of the DNA upon binding copper but does not affect protein-DNA contacts. The DNA shape change allows RNA polymerase to bind the promoter and transcribe the gene. Science, this issue p. 877 A transcription factor activates gene expression by dramatically changing the shape of promotor DNA. Many transcriptional activators act at a distance from core promoter elements and work by recruiting RNA polymerase through protein-protein interactions. We show here how the prokaryotic regulatory protein CueR both represses and activates transcription by differentially modulating local DNA structure within the promoter. Structural studies reveal that the repressor state slightly bends the promoter DNA, precluding optimal RNA polymerase-promoter recognition. Upon binding a metal ion in the allosteric site, CueR switches into an activator conformation. It maintains all protein-DNA contacts but introduces torsional stresses that kink and undertwist the promoter, stabilizing an A-form DNA–like conformation. These factors switch on and off transcription by exerting dynamic control of DNA stereochemistry, reshaping the core promoter and making it a better or worse substrate for polymerase.
A CLINICAL COMPARISON BETWEEN TUBOCURARINE AND PANCURONIUM IN CHILDREN

SUMMARY Tubocurarine 0.8 mg/kg and pancuronium 0.13 mg/kg have been studied in a blind trial in 244 children aged 2–15 years undergoing routine surgery. No statistically significant difference could be detected between the two drugs in respect of onset of relaxation and conditions for intubation. Pancuronium was shown to be associated with a markedly lower incidence of local histamine-like response. The systolic blood pressure following tubocurarine tended either to remain at the preoperative level or to fall, whilst following pancuronium the systolic blood pressure tended to rise. This pressor effect with pancuronium was less marked in children in the older age group. The study did not permit valid conclusions to be made concerning the degree of reversibility of the myoneural block. In the dose range used rubocurarine seemed to be longer-acting than pancuronium. Younger children appeared to be more sensitive to tubocurarine than older children, an effect not shown by pancuronium. No difference in cumulative effect could be detected.
Collecting disability data from parents

This article describes the development and national trial of a methodology for collecting disability data directly from parents, enabling schools and local authorities to meet their obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA; 2005) to promote equality of opportunity for all children. It illustrates the complexities around collecting this information and also highlights the dangers of assuming that special educational needs (SENs) equate to disability. The parental survey revealed children with medical and mental health needs, but no SENs, who were unknown to schools. It also revealed children with a recorded SEN whose parents did not consider that they had a disability in line with the DDA definition. It identified a number of children whose disability leads to absences from school, making them vulnerable to underachievement. These findings highlight the importance of having appropriate tools with which to collect these data and developing procedures to support their effective use. We also draw attention to the contextual nature of children’s difficulties and the importance of retaining and respecting the place of subjective information. This is central to adopting a definition of disability that hinges on experience or impact.