Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does improved glycaemic control lead to a better short-term quality of life in diabetes mellitus type 2?

The long-term benefit of glycemic control in diabetes mellitus is to reduce the risk of complications (e.g., cardiovascular disease, nephropathy, neuropathy). 2 Since these complications are known to reduce (health-related) quality of life (QOL), 4 intensified glycaemic control is an important way to reduce risk of complications and improve QOL. However, what is the short-term effect of glycaemic control on QOL? In their oneyear cohort study of the “Association between glycaemic control and quality of life in diabetes mellitus”, Lau et al observed an improvement in mental QOL but not physical QOL following reduction in HbA1c. While one is tempted to infer a cause-effect relationship, it is worthwhile to contemplate on other possible reasons for this finding. Possible explanations include chance, bias, and a non-causative association. Although the p-value of 0.042 is smaller than alpha=0.05, it indicates a 4.2% chance of seeing these results given no association between HbA1c and mental QOL. A larger sample size would resolve this problem. The association may also be due to bias (particularly selection bias). Despite some comparability in patient characteristics between study population and source population, it is still possible that the study population is unrepresentative of all patients. Minimal attrition and not a larger study population would rectify this; integration of QOL measurements into daily practice could also help. A third explanation is a non-causative association. Such an association between change in HbA1c and change in mental QOL is possible, since lifestyle changes and therapy may influence both parameters.
Feasibility of Full Percutaneous Segmental Stabilization of the Lumbar Spine With a Combination of an Expandable Interbody Cage and an Interspinous Spacer: Preliminary Results

ABSTRACT Introduction: We evaluated the feasibility of a full percutaneous approach with an expandable interbody cage and an interspinous spacer for a segmental stabilization of the anterior and posterior columns of the lumbar spine, respectively, with local anesthesia. Methods: Patients were prospectively included between 2012 and 2018 in this single-center, feasibility case series. An expandable interbody cage was inserted with endoscopy-based, facet-sparing percutaneous transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (pTLIF). An interspinous spacer was percutaneously placed through the same skin incision. Pre- and postoperative Visual Analog Scale (VAS) and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) outcomes at 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months were obtained and evaluated with the Student t test. Postoperative outcome was classified according to modified Macnab criteria. Results A total of 16 patients were included, presenting mean preoperative scores for VAS back of 6.9 ± 2.5, VAS leg 7.9 ± 1.2, and ODI 30.1 ± 4.5. Postoperative mean scores for VAS back of 1.9 ± 2.1, VAS leg 2.1 ± 3.4, and ODI 14.8 ± 13.0 significantly (P < .001) decreased with a mean follow-up of 18.1 ± 16.6 months (range 1-65.2). Postoperative outcome was excellent and good for 13 (81%) cases, fair for 2 (13%), and poor for 1 (6%) case with a preoperative spondylolisthesis, which required revision surgery due to persisting instability. Postoperative complications included 3 cases with transitory, ipsilateral dysesthesia and 2 cases with radiologic cage subsidence but no clinical symptoms. Median postoperative time until hospital discharge was 16 hours. Conclusion Our preliminary results for this full percutaneous technique show a similar outcome compared to conventional surgery with a fast patient recovery and early postoperative hospital discharge, opening the way to instrumented, outpatient surgery.
Heart Rate Monitoring Using Motion Artifact Modeling with MISO Filters

Measuring the heart rate during exercise is important to properly control the amount of exercise. With the recent advent of smart device usage, there is a dramatic increase in interest in devices for the real-time measurement of the heart rate during exercise. During intensive exercise, accurate heart rate estimation from wrist-type photoplethysmography (PPG) signals is a very difficult problem due to motion artifact (MA). In this study, we propose an efficient algorithm for an accurate estimation of the heart rate from wrist-type PPG signals. For the twelve data sets, the proposed algorithm achieves the average absolute error of 1.38 beat per minute (BPM) and the Pearson correlation between the estimates and the ground-truth of heart rate was 0.9922. The proposed algorithm presents the strengths in an accurate estimation together with a fast computation speed, which is attractive in application to wearable devices
Velocity estimation: Assessing the performance of non model-based techniques

The performance of modern motion control systems are strongly related to the resolution of the position sensor and to the digital filtering algorithm used to estimate the velocity. Despite the crucial importance of velocity estimation, however, a systematic approach to analyse and assess the performance of these estimators is still lacking. The present work proposes a new methodology to analytically characterise the velocity estimation error of a generic non model-based estimator, both in the time and in the frequency domain. A simulation case study is also presented, focusing on the velocity control loop of a washing machine, to validate the proposed methodology.
An Investigation of the Association between Adult Attachment Styles, Emotional Intelligence and Marital Satisfaction as an outcome

Objective: The purpose of the study was to examine the role of adult attachment styles (secure, avoidant and anxious) and emotional intelligence in the prediction of marital satisfaction. Method: A survey including E.I, attachment and marital adjustment measures, was administered and completed online. A cross sectional design was used for this study and the sample consisted of 151 married Irish individuals (119 females, 32 males). Results: Correlational analyses revealed a negative association between anxious attachment and marital satisfaction and a positive relationship between avoidant attachment and marital satisfaction. Findings also revealed that secure attachment style and emotional intelligence significantly predict marital satisfaction, with EI being the strongest predictor. The implications for family and couples counselling is discussed. A more up-to date large-scale longitudinal study is recommended to examine these variables and how they interact over time.
Inequalities in medication adherence to statin treatment after stroke: A nationwide observational study

Introduction The objective was to investigate differences in adherence to statins after stroke based on age, sex, socioeconomic status and country of birth. Patients and methods Patients with ischemic stroke in 2009–2010 were included from the Swedish stroke register. Adherence to statin treatment was measured over two years as proportion of days covered with 80% as cut-off for adherence. Income, education, and country of birth were obtained from official registers. Factors associated with adherence were controlled for in multivariable logistic regression. Results Of 15,192 included patients, 73.9% had an adherence rate ≥80%. The oldest (85+ years) and youngest (18–54 years) had the lowest adherence, and a smaller proportion of women were adherent (odds ratio (OR) 0.84; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.77–0.92). Adherence was less common in patients born in Nordic countries (OR 0.82; 95% CI (0.68–0.97), Europe (OR 0.78; 95% CI 0.65–0.93), and in non-European countries (OR 0.65; 95% CI 0.50–0.84) compared to Sweden-born. Patients with university education were to a lower extent adherent compared to patients with primary school education (OR 0.81; 95% CI 0.72–0.91). There was no association between adherence and income. Discussion The study was based on individual level real-life data with national coverage. Adherence was estimated from data on filled prescriptions, but filled prescription does not mean that drugs are used as intended. Conclusion Adherence to statin treatment over two years was suboptimal, and adherence was less common among women, patients born outside of Sweden and patients with university education.
Investigating the use of vector analysis to assess students’ understanding

Context: Many methods have been proposed in the study of linguistics for the representation of words and sentences. Most classical methods are symbolic and consist in things like dictionaries, thesauri, ontologies and syntax trees. Another approach is to represent words and sentences via the use of high dimensional vectors, which capture the distributional statistics of words and sentences. One application of representing words as vectors is to automatically evaluate text, which can further be applied to the assessment of students' text-based answers. Purpose: This study investigated approaches to automatically analyse student responses to questions in the signal processing domain. Approach: We investigated vector analysis approaches to capture various semantic and syntactic features of words, such that these representations can be compared and scored in a graded fashion, as distinct to simply true/false or same/different. The approaches used in this study can be trained in a semisupervised fashion, where minimal human input is typically required. Results: The data investigated in this study consisted of student responses to short-answer questions in text form with associated metadata indicating the correctness for answers. Difficulties encountered when automatically assessing student short answers, either for correctness or knowledge gaps, were a) variations in vocabulary b) variations in grammatical structures c) precisely determining when specific concepts occur and don't occur, and d) relevant concept modifiers that may alter the assessment of the short answer. One element - important for addressing these difficulties - is how words and sentences are represented in short-answer question responses. Conclusions: The study described in this paper focused on vector space representations for text. We recommend the development an agile methodology to be employed so that regular outputs be produced and sent for comment, which can then be used to inform further work. We suggest the best approach is to make use of a combination of methods including the many classical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as part of speech (POS) tagging, and phrase chunking.
Individualized three-dimensional printed cage for spinal cervical fusion

[INLINE:1] Uwe Spetzger, MD, is the Chairman of Department of Neurosurgery, Klinikum Karlsruhe, and Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany. Uwe Spetzger received his medical degree in 1989 at the Medical Faculty, University of Heidelberg, Germany. He passed the US American medical exam (ECFMG) in 1990. He has started his neurosurgical training in 1990 at the Department of Neurosurgery, Technical University (RWTH) Aachen and got his board certification of neurosurgeon in 1996. The Grant of the Wilhelm-Tonnis-Foundation of the German Society of Neurosurgery (DGNC) enables his scientific internship in 1999 at Department of Neurosurgery, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In June 1999, he passed the European Examination in Neurosurgery (EANS). From 1999 - 2002 he was vice-chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Freiburg and the director of the interdisciplinary centre for skull base surgery at Freiburg University. Since 2002 he is Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery, Klinikum Karlsruhe and in 2003 he became an active member of the Faculty of Computer Science, Humanoids and Intelligence Systems Lab - Institute for Anthropomatics at KIT. Prof. Spetzger became the president of the international Society of Medical Innovation and Technology iSMIT in 2013 and the congress president of the 66th Annual Meeting of German Society of Neurosurgery DGNC in 2015 and the Vice-President of the International Society of Digital Medicine in 2016. He is member of several national and international neurosurgical and medical technological societies. His main surgical and research interests are cerebrovascular surgery, skull base surgery, computer-assisted and robotic surgery, neuronavigation and spinal microsurgery.
Internationalization and English as a Medium of Instruction in Mongolian Higher Education

In the growing global trend of internationalization, Mongolian universities plan to increase courses and programs in English in order to improve their competitiveness and ultimately to become internationally visible, at least in Asia. This study discusses the current process of internationalization at Mongolian universities and explores the rationales of implementing English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at Mongolian universities. The analysis focuses on how the top-down national-level policies to internationalize the higher education sector influence both national and private universities, and what drives universities to adopt EMI policies. This paper intends to answer these questions through document analysis and an online survey at two private universities in Mongolia. Forty faculty members participated in the survey. All data went through the qualitative document analysis, “describing, classifying and connecting” (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996) to portray a comprehensive picture of the internationalization of higher education and the concept of EMI in Mongolia. The findings revealed that the Mongolian government is the key player in internationalization at the national level by making policies, taking initiatives, and encouraging national universities. However, the process of internationalization is much slower at private universities. The two private universities in Mongolia implement EMI for the following four reasons, 1) increasing the employability of domestic graduates, 2) promotion of international collaboration, 3) generating more income, and 4) increasing domestic and international profile. The faculty members of the two leading private universities understood that the introduction of EMI at their universities aimed to equip their graduates with English language skills to operate globally and to improve their universities’ international profile.
Improved BGP convergence via ghost flushing

In (Ref.1), (Ref.2) it was noticed that sometimes it takes BGP a substantial amount of time and messages to converge and stabilize following the failure of some node in the Internet. In this paper we suggest a minor modification to BGP that eliminates the problem pointed out and substantially reduces the convergence time and communication complexity of BGP. Roughly speaking, our modification ensures that bad news (the failure of a node/edge) propagate fast, while good news (the establishment of a new path to a destination) propagate somewhat slower. This is achieved in BGP by allowing withdrawal messages to propagate with no delay as fast as the network forwards them, while announcements propagate as they do in BGP with a delay at each node of one minRouteAdver (except for the first wave of announcements).
Clientelism by Committee: The Effect of Legislator–Constituent Relationships on Legislative Organization

In this paper, we analyze how legislator–voter relationships influence legislative organization. We argue that legislators who engage in clientelistic practices to gain votes will create much larger committee systems, with more committees, than legislators who engage in more programmatic practices. We test these arguments using an original dataset on the number of committees in the lower chambers of seventy-seven democracies throughout the world. Our analysis demonstrates that the number of committees is higher in legislatures with clientelistic practices than in legislatures with programmatic practices. The results provide a new understanding of how legislator–voter relationships influence legislative organization and lay the groundwork for a series of studies that examine how the clientelism-programmatic spectrum influences legislative organization.
PAVIA: a control system for active vision

A cooperation between the Microcomputer Laboratory and the Artificial Vision Laboratory of the Informatics and Systemics Department of the University of Pavia led to a design project for a control system for active vision, named PAVIA (Project for an Active VIsion Apparatus). The system allows one to control the movements and the independent positioning of two cameras. A workstation network processes the data received from the cameras and consequentially sends commands to drive four step motors to implement independent 4-axis movements. Furthermore, it is possible to control the shot parameters.
Internetbasierte Interventionen bei psychischen Störungen

Der Einsatz und die Erforschung internetbasierter Interventionen bei psychischen Storungen haben in den letzten Jahren rapide zugenommen. In einigen Landern wurde die Behandlung via Internet bereits in die psychosoziale Versorgung integriert. Der Band bietet einen Uberblick uber verschiedene Ansatze der Online-Therapie und -Beratung und zeigt auf, wie die Interventionen bei der Pravention, Therapie und Nachsorge psychischer Storungen praktisch umgesetzt werden konnen. Zunachst geht der Band auf die Vor- und Nachteile, Besonderheiten, auf rechtliche und ethische Aspekte sowie auf Qualitatskriterien von Internet-Interventionen ein. In knapper Form werden Theorien und Modelle der computervermittelten Kommunikation vorgestellt und deren Implikationen fur die Praxis der Online-Beratung und -Therapie aufgezeigt. Es folgen konkrete Anleitungen zum diagnostischen Vorgehen, wie z.B. zum Einsatz von Online-Fragebogendiagnostik und zur Durchfuhrung diagnostischer Interviews per Telefon. Anhand von Beispielen werden verschiedene internetbasierte Interventionen, wie z.B. webbasierte Selbsthilfeprogramme, E-Mail-, Chat-Therapie oder die Therapie via Videokonferenzsysteme, die entweder vollstandig via Internet oder erganzend zu traditionellen Psychotherapien und Beratungen realisiert werden konnen, vorgestellt. Abschliesend werden Behandlungsempfehlungen gegeben und wichtige Fragen, die sich bei der konkreten Ausgestaltung dieser neuen Behandlungsform stellen, geklart.
Network Analysis of an Interactive Health Network

Social network applications have gained popularity in the health domain as they bring health information seekers (patients and alike) and medication advice providers (physicians and other relevant actors) together. The effects of information and communications technologies (ICT) on health information and/or advice-seeking behaviors have been examined at such levels as organizational, group or individual (Dunn and Westbrook 2011). At the individual level, it is essential to understand such effects in terms of establishments of interactions Abstract
Role of neuropilins in zebrafish heart regeneration

BACKGROUND: Unlike adult mammals, zebrafish can regenerate their heart. Several mechanisms are essential to achieve regeneration; these include: • the de-differentiation and proliferation of cardiomyocytes contributing to new myocardium, • angiogenesis to provide a blood supply to the injured area • epicardial activation, leading to the establishment of a scaffold for the proliferating cardiomyocytes, vessel supporting mural cells and cytokine secretion. Platelet-derived growth factor (Pdgf), Vascular endothelial growth factor (Vegf), Transforming Growth Factor beta (Tgfβ) and Fibroblast growth factor (Fgf) signalling play critical roles in the zebrafish heart regeneration. Neuropilins (NRPs) are cell surface co-receptors that have been implicated in VEGF, PDGF, FGF, TGFβ signalling. AIMS: I hypothesised that neuropilins are required for the regenerative response, and investigated the role of neuropilins in zebrafish heart regeneration following cryoinjury. RESULTS: Zebrafish have four neuropilins isoforms, nrp 1a, 1b, 2a and 2b. I found that all isoforms were upregulated in the ventricle following cardiac cryoinjury. Neuropilins were strongly expressed, at both the mRNA and protein level, by the activated epicardium and endocardium and at the injured/healthy myocardium border. Neuropilin upregulation coincides with leucocyte infiltration to the injured area, epicardial activation and initiation of neovascularisation, implicating a role of nrps in these processes. A nrp1a mutant, encoding a truncated, non-functional protein, showed a significant delay in heart regeneration in comparison to wild type fish. Furthermore, epicardial cells from nrp1a mutant zebrafish heart explants displayed an impaired response to activation by cryoinjury. CONCLUSIONS: Nrp1 plays a key role in zebrafish heart regeneration, mediated through epicardial activation and migration and likely contributes to further physiological processes in other cardiac cell-types. This is the first report of an injury-induced epicardial activation phenotype caused by the disruption of a single allele in zebrafish.
Human Value Manifest in Instagram: A Visual Content Analysis of DMO Photography

The relationship of social media and tourism marketing through image projection by which visual content is produced was well documented. However, minimal research was reported on the human values promoted through the usage of social media in the context of marketing tourism by various elements of Destination Management Organization (DMO), such as government, tourism industry, and official marketing agency. Since visual content was widely used to attract visitors, this paper aims to highlight and discuss the prominent human values within photographs posted on Instagram of the three categories of DMO. Visual content analysis was applied to measure those values promoted through the collected photograph. Findings of this study shown values classified into self-transcendence and conservation categories are more prominent than those of self-enhancement and openness within Instagram of all marketer categories. Both theoretical and managerial implications of this study to tourism study were discussed. Keywords: Instagram, Human Value, Photography, Tourism Marketing DOI : 10.7176/NMMC/80-06 Publication date :May 31 st 2019
Patient experience of MDT care and decision-making

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore physical and mental health patients’ experience of multidisciplinary team (MDT) care and decision making in order to highlight factors underlying effective care and to identify areas in which patient experience could be improved. Design/methodology/approach – Totally, 12 MDTs within the North Thames area participated; the authors recruited 13 patients from physical health MDTs and seven patients from mental health MDTs. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with each participant and thematically analysed the transcripts. Findings – The study found a marked contrast in patient experience: physical health patients emphasised their faith in the judgement of MDT clinicians, described experiencing high quality care and expressed a strong preference not to attend MDT meetings; mental health patients highlighted a range of negative experiences, were frequently sceptical about their diagnosis, and expressed a desire to have greater involvement in the de.
Obesity and obesity-related markers associated with breast and colorectal cancer occurence and mortality

7 Introduction . 9 Methods . 11 Results . 17 Discussion . 20 CHAPTER 2: METABOLIC SYNDROME AMONG BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS . 30 Abstract . 30. 30 Introduction . 32 Materials and Methods . 34 Results . 38 Discussion . 40
A Survey on Web Content Extraction and Noise Reduction from Webpage

A Web Page has large amount of information. Only some information in web pages is useful in real world applications. Web Page has some additional contents like hyperlinks, header footer, navigational panel; advertisements may cause the content extraction to be complicated. This irrelevant data is available with original content which is known as noisy data of website. This paper discusses various approaches for extracting informative