Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of regorafenib for patients with refractory metastatic colorectal cancer in clinical practice

Aim Patients in clinical practice are relatively vulnerable compared to those enrolled in clinical trials. We focused on analyzing the pattern of regorafenib use in routine clinical practice, which included initial starting dose and follow-up schedule. We also evaluated the efficacy and safety according to clinical regimen. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 134 Korean heavily pretreated metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) patients who had received regorafenib monotherapy as salvage treatment in routine clinical practice between January 2014 and January 2018. Results Among the 134 mCRC patients, the median age was 55 years (range, 22–80 years), and 51% had previously received four or more chemotherapy treatments. Thirty-eight (28.3%) patients had more than three metastatic lesions. As an initial starting dose, 120 mg regorafenib was mostly frequently used (n=65, 48.5%), followed by 80 mg (32.8%) and 160 mg (18.7%). The first follow-up after regorafenib initiation was most frequently at 28 days (45.5%), followed by 14 days (29.9%), 7 days (13.4%), and 21 days (11.2%). There was no significant difference in response rate according to initial dose of regorafenib (80 mg vs 120 mg vs 160 mg, 4.5% vs 1.5% vs 4.0%, P=0.596) or disease control rate (80 mg vs 120 mg vs 160 mg, 38.6% vs 29.2% vs 31.6%, P=0.299). Progression-free survival did not differ according to initial dose (80 mg vs 120 mg vs 160 mg, 2.8 months [95% CI 2.1–3.5] vs 2.2 months [95% CI 1.7–2.8] vs 1.9 months [95% CI 1.3–2.4], P=0.076). Grade 3/4 adverse events occurred in 17 (12.7%) patients and were not related to initial dose of regorafenib (P=0.126). Conclusion Here, we present efficacy and safety data according to different initial doses of regorafenib in clinical practice. These data may provide useful information when using regorafenib for refractory mCRC in clinical practice.
The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership Behavior of Project Managers in Construction Project

Emotional intelligence has been suggested that a number of factors of behaviors considered vital for project management however few studies have been conducted to examine the relationship between EI and transformational leadership behavior of project managers. This study investigated that whether there can exist the relationship among each dimension of EI and transformational leadership behavior in construction project. A sample of project managers coming from construction companies in China is involved in this study. Using a pre/post test research design, positive effects were found 3 months later between EI and transformational leadership behavior of project managers. In other words, the results suggest that each dimension of EI has different influences on transformational leadership behavior of project managers.
Healthcare utilization for common infectious disease syndromes in Soweto and Klerksdorp, South Africa

Introduction Understanding healthcare utilization helps characterize access to healthcare, identify barriers and improve surveillance data interpretation. We describe healthcare-seeking behaviors for common infectious syndromes and identify reasons for seeking care. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional survey among residents in Soweto and Klerksdorp, South Africa. Households were interviewed about demographic characteristics; recent self-reported episodes of pneumonia, influenza-like illness (ILI), chronic febrile respiratory illness and meningitis in individuals of all ages; recent diarrhea in children aged < 5 years; and consultation with healthcare facilities and providers. Results From July-October 2012, we interviewed 1,442 households in Klerksdorp and 973 households in Soweto. Public clinics were consulted most frequently for pneumonia, ILI and diarrhea in a child <5 years old at both sites; public hospitals were most frequently consulted for chronic respiratory and meningitis syndromes. Of all illness episodes reported, there were 110 (35%) in Klerksdorp and 127 (32%) in Soweto for which the person did not seek care with a licensed medical provider. Pharmacies were often consulted by individuals with pneumonia (Klerksdorp: 17, 16%; Soweto: 38, 22%) or ILI (Klerksdorp: 35, 24%; 44, 28%). Patients who did not seek care with a licensed provider reported insufficient time (Klerksdorp: 7%; Soweto, 20%) and lack of medications at the facility (Klerksdorp: 4%; Soweto: 8%) as barriers. Conclusion Public government healthcare facilities are commonly consulted for infectious syndromes and pharmacies are frequently consulted particularly for respiratory diseases. Improving medication availability at healthcare facilities and streamlining healthcare delivery may improve access of licensed providers for serious illnesses.
BioDig : architecture for integrating heterogeneous biological data repositories using ontologies

ly, the FDBS is made up of three layers: data, export, and integration. The data layer consists of the component databases. Each database has an export schema that defines how the data are accessed and viewed by the outside world. Therefore, the export layer allows different data models to be unified consistently into the canonical data model defined by the integration layer. The integration layer is a unified view of the information available in the data layer based on the definitions and mappings in the export layer. The FDBS can be either loosely coupled or tightly coupled, depending on who defines the integrated schema. If the integrated schema is defined by the user, then the system is considered to be a loosely coupled FDBS. On the other
Four New Records of Ascomycete Species from Korea

Abstract While evaluating fungal diversity in freshwater, grasshopper feces, and soil collected at Dokdo Island in Korea, four fungal strains designated CNUFC-DDS14-1, CNUFC-GHD05-1, CNUFC-DDS47-1, and CNUFC-NDR5-2 were isolated. Based on combination studies using phylogenies and morphological characteristics, the isolates were confirmed as Ascodesmis sphaerospora, Chaetomella raphigera, Gibellulopsis nigrescens, and Myrmecridium schulzeri, respectively. This is the first records of these four species from Korea.
Satellite image fusion to detect changing surface permeability and emerging urban heat islands in a fast-growing city

Rapid and extensive urbanization has adversely impacted humans and ecological entities in the recent decades through a decrease in surface permeability and the emergence of Urban Heat Islands (UHI). While detailed and continuous assessments of surface permeability and UHI are crucial for urban planning and management of landuse zones, they mostly involve time consuming and expensive field studies and single sensor derived large scale aerial and satellite imageries. We demonstrated the advantage of fusing imageries from multiple sensors for landuse and landcover (LULC) change assessments as well as for assessing surface permeability and temperature and UHI emergence in a fast growing city, i.e. Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India. IRS-LISSIII and Landsat-7 ETM+ imageries were fused for 2007 and 2017, and classified using a Rotation Forest (RF) algorithm. Surface permeability and temperature were then quantified using Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST) index, respectively. Finally, we assessed the relationship between SAVI and LST for entire Tirunelveli as well as for each LULC zone, and also detected UHI emergence hot spots using a SAVI-LST combined metric. Our fused images exhibited higher classification accuracies, i.e. overall kappa coefficient values, than non-fused images. We observed an overall increase in the coverage of urban (dry, real estate plots and built-up) areas, while a decrease for vegetated (cropland and forest) areas in Tirunelveli between 2007 and 2017. The SAVI values indicated an extensive decrease in surface permeability for Tirunelveli overall and also for almost all LULC zones. The LST values showed an overall increase of surface temperature in Tirunelveli with the highest increase for urban built-up areas between 2007 and 2017. LST also exhibited a strong negative association with SAVI. Southeastern built-up areas in Tirunelveli were depicted as a potential UHI hotspot, with a caution for the Western riparian zone for UHI emergence in 2017. Our results provide important metrics for surface permeability, temperature and UHI monitoring, and inform urban and zonal planning authorities about the advantages of satellite image fusion.
Correlation Between MELD and UNa/K Ratio in Predicting Renal Dysfunction in Cirrhotic Patients

Abstract Background Renal dysfunction is one of the dreaded complications of cirrhosis. MELD is a validated chronic liver disease (CLD) severity scoring system. Urinary (U) Na/K ratio closely correlates with renal dysfunction in terms of low GFR in cirrhotic patients. Patients and Methods All consecutive patients with decompensated cirrhosis between the age of 18 to 70 years, of either gender, presenting in the outpatients’ department of Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, Karachi, from June 2015 to June 2017 were included. The MELD score was calculated and the UNa/K ratio less than 1 was taken as surrogate marker of renal dysfunction. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS (version 20.0). Results A total of 71 patients were enrolled. The mean age was 43.79 years and majority were male (67.6%). The most common cause of liver cirrhosis was HCV, found in 42 (59.2%) patients. The mean CTP score was 10.48 ± 2.069 (range: 6–14) with majority of the patients following in class C, that is, 48 (67.6%). Mean MELD score was 21.75 ± 8.96 (range: 8–43). In 57 patients (80.3%), MELD score was > 15.The mean serum creatinine and mean serum sodium were 1.5 ± 1.1 mg/dl (range: 0.37–5.3) and 133.79 ± 6.9 mmol/L (range: 112–152), respectively. Mean urinary sodium and urinary potassium were 38.60 ± 46.64 mmol/L (range: 5–181) and 38.15 ± 23.9 mmol/L (range: 4.3–112), respectively. In majority of study population, UNa/K ratio was below 1, that is, in 52 patients (73.2%). Statistically significant correlation was documented between MELD score and UNa/K ratio (ɤ = 0.34, P = 0.004). Conclusion The inverse correlation between MELD scores and UNa/K ratio indicates that patients with CLD and higher MELD scores might have renal dysfunction. This finding however should be corroborated by large scale studies.
Comparison of sampling plans by variables using the bootstrap and Monte Carlo simulations

We consider two sampling plans by variables to inspect batches of products from an industrial process under a context of unknown distribution underlying the measurements of the quality characteristic under study. Through the use of the bootstrap methodology and Monte Carlo simulations we evaluate and compare the performance of those sampling plans in terms of probability of acceptance of lots and average outgoing quality level.
Characterization and technological properties of predominant lactic acid bacteria isolated from traditional fermented foods from Ecuador.

Noventa y seis muestras de alimentos fermentados tradicionales de Ecuador fueron colectados de 20 diferentes provincias de Ecuador. Un total de 119 bacterias acido lacticas (LABs) fueron aisladas y caracterizadas por fenotipo y amplificacion de 16S ribosomal DNA. (rDNA). 47% de los aislados fueron identificados como heterofermentativos facultativos Lactobacillus sp. El siguiente grupo predominante de LABs (31%) fueron cocos homofermentativos pertenecientes al genero Pediococcus, Lactococcus y Enterococcus, 11% fueron bacterias heterofermentativas obligatorias tales como algunas especies de Lactobacillus sp. y el 11% de cocos heterofermentativos (Weissella y Leuconostoc). Propiedades bioquimicas tales como produccion de bacteriocinas, exopolisacaridos, proteinasas y acidificacion fueron evaluadas in vitro con el proposito de identificar cepas con potencial de cultivos iniciador. La mayoria de cepas (82%) mostraron actividad caseinolitica, en contraste produccion de EPS y bacteriocinas fueron caracteristicas poco frecuentes. Este trabajo representa la primera caracterizacion de alimentos tradicionales fermentados asociados a LABs usando metodos fenotipicos y genotipicos.
Fast dictionary mechanism for Chinese word segmentation

With the development of global networking through Internet,the amount of articles in Chinese or other native languages is increasing rapidly.As the lack of explicit separator,word segmentation is a precondition for the processing of these character-based languages and thus it affects the whole system in performance.In this paper,we propose a new solution for Chinese word segmentation problem based on Lexicon named double-character-and-long-word-hash-indexing(DCLWHI). Compared with traditional lexicon mechanism,DCLWHI improves the speed and efficiency of word segmentation without extra memory spending and gains the same accuracy.
A Survey on Opinion Mining

The number of customer reviews has been increased in the recent years with the popularity of e-commerce and social media. There are many social networks in which people tend to express their personal opinion. Reviews on products help the new user to know well about the product. It helps the customers to choose the best products based on the reviews. At present, there are huge amount of opinions available in the review sites, blogs, forums etc., when the number of opinions or reviews increase to large amount, it becomes difficult to go through all the reviews and get a clear idea. Hence it is essential to summarize the opinions and provide a clear and general view for quick and better understanding. Opinion mining is the art of extracting useful opinions. This paper presents a survey on opinion mining, the techniques used and the challenges faced.
Sensing and modeling human networks

Knowledge of how groups of people interact is important in many disciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social network analysis, knowledge management and ubiquitous computing. Existing studies of social network interactions have either been restricted to online communities, where unambiguous measurements about how people interact can be obtained (available from chat and email logs), or have been forced to rely on questionnaires, surveys or diaries to get data on face-to-face interactions between people. The aim of this thesis is to automatically model face-to-face interactions within a community. The first challenge was to collect rich and unbiased sensor data of natural interactions. The “sociometer”, a specially designed wearable sensor package, was built to address this problem by unobtrusively measuring face-to-face interactions between people. Using the sociometers, 1518 hours of wearable sensor data from 23 individuals was collected over a two-week period (66 hours per person). This thesis develops a computational framework for learning the interaction structure and dynamics automatically from the sociometer data. Low-level sensor data are transformed into measures that can be used to learn socially relevant aspects of people's interactions—e.g. identifying when people are talking and whom they are talking to. The network structure is learned from the patterns of communication among people. The dynamics of a person's interactions, and how one person's dynamics affects the other's style of interaction are also modeled. Finally, a person's style of interaction is related to the person's role within the network. The algorithms are evaluated by comparing the output against hand-labeled and survey data. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Nuclear factor‐κB as a molecular target for migraine therapy

Nitric oxide (NO) generated from inducible NO synthase (iNOS) participates in immune and inflammatory responses in many tissues. The NO donor glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) provokes delayed migraine attacks when infused into migraineurs and also causes iNOS expression and delayed inflammation within rodent dura mater. Sodium nitroprusside, an NO donor as well, also increases iNOS expression. Because inflammation and iNOS are potential therapeutic targets, we examined transcriptional regulation of iNOS following GTN infusion and the consequences of its inhibition within dura mater. We show that intravenous GTN increases NO production within macrophages. L‐N(6)‐(1‐iminoethyl)lysine, a selective iNOS inhibitor, attenuates the NO signal, emphasizing the importance of enzymatic activity to delayed NO production. iNOS expression is preceded by significant nuclear factor kappa B (NF‐κB) activity, as reflected by a reduction in the inhibitory protein‐κ‐Bα (IκBα) and activation of NF‐κB after GTN infusion. IκBα degradation, NF‐κB activation, and iNOS expression were attenuated by parthenolide (3mg/kg), the active constituent of feverfew, an anti‐inflammatory drug used for migraine treatment. These findings suggest that GTN promotes NF‐κB activity and inflammation with a time course consistent with migraine attacks in susceptible individuals. We conclude, based on results with this animal model, that blockade of NF‐κB activity provides a novel transcriptional target for the development of anti‐migraine drugs.
Social Selfishness Aware Multi-copy Routing in Mobile Social Networks

With the development of the technologies of handheld devices, Mobile Social Networks (MSNs), as a new type of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), have aroused great attention. And the study of effective data forwarding scheme in MSNs becomes a focus. Different from conventional DTNs, the routings in MSNs need to consider nodes’ social selfishness. Social selfishness often causes nodes are just willing to forward packets for their own trust nodes, which makes routing in MSNs become a challenge. To adapt to the social selfishness in MSNs, we propose TBMC, a Trust Based Multi-copy protocol. In our design, node trust degree is firstly defined to demonstrate the data forwarding capacity of a node in social selfishness environment. Then, based on the node trust degree, TBMC is presented, which consists of two phases: the adaptive binary spray phase and the direct delivery phase. In order to avoid node social selfishness leads to binary spray inefficient, a scheme of trust degree threshold is introduced in TBMC, which makes TBMC is adaptive to various social selfishness degrees. Moreover, effective copy number control scheme ensures packets delivery within specific delay targets with minimum traffic cost.
Multiaxial behavior of concrete

ABSTRACT Interface elements for discrete fracture plus meso-level geometric representation are emerging as a powerful tool for the modeling of the behavior of heterogeneous materials such as concrete. The group of mechanics of materials at ETSECCPB has been developing such tools in which meso-geometry is generated numerically via Voronoi/Delaunay approach, and all lines in the FE mesh are considered as potential crack lines with traction-separation constitutive models based on principles of non-linear fracture mechanics. Results of mechanical analysis turn out very realistic, both mesoscopically (distributed microcrack, coalescence, localization) and macroscopically (average stress-strain curves for specimen). On-going extensions aim at modeling diffusion-driven and coupled phenomena such as drying shrinkage.
Initial default among tuberculosis patients diagnosed in selected medical colleges of Puducherry: issues and possible interventions

Background: India accounts for one-fourth of the global incident tuberculosis (TB) case load and tops the list of high-burden countries. Initial default and loss to follow-up are important challenges in achieving the objectives of the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP). Objective: A study was carried out to estimate the proportion of initial defaulters, reasons for initial default, and recommendations to reduce initial default. Materials and Methods: A record-based study was carried out to identify the initial defaulters among new sputum-positive TB patients diagnosed during 1 year (2013) in four medical colleges of Puducherry. On the basis of the completeness of recorded residential address and availability of the patients, 38 patients were contacted and enrolled in the study. A pretested and predesigned questionnaire was used to interview the patients and open-ended questions were used to elicit the reason for initial default. Results: The proportion of initial default among all the four medical colleges was 15.1%. Patient-related factors for initial default were long distance to the health facility, lack of support from the family members, being advised against alcohol consumption while taking treatment, monetary constraints, job constraints, not convinced about results by the health facility, stigma related to TB, and lack of awareness regarding TB. Health system-related factors were unpleasant experience with the health system, lack of dissemination of adequate information regarding further course of action to the patients, and nonavailability of the laboratory staff. Conclusion: The magnitude of initial default was found to be high in Puducherry and most of the reasons for initial default found in this study were preventable. Systematic methods to prevent initial default need to be chalked out by program managers in collaboration with various medical colleges under the RNTCP.
Beliefs about Jinn, black magic and evil eye in Bangladesh: the effects of gender and level of education

The study was aimed to examine beliefs among 320 attendees of a large University Hospital in Dhaka about Jinn, black magic and evil eye among Muslims in Bangladesh, using a self-completed questionnaire. The majority believed in the existence of Jinn (72%) and in Jinn possession (61%). In contrast, a relatively smaller proportion believed in the existence of black magic and evil eye (50% and 44%, respectively). Women were more likely than men to believe in the existence of Jinn and to cite religious figures as the treating authority for diseases attributed to affliction by black magic. Participants with a higher educational attainment were less likely than those with lower attainment to believe in jinn possession; or to believe that Jinn, black magic, or evil eye could cause mental health problems. Mental health care practitioners need to be mindful of these beliefs to achieve the best outcome for their patients.
Measurement of Trust Transitivity in Trustworthy Networks

In this paper, we abstract the trust network as a weighted digraph. A path from node A to node B represents a transitive trust relationship. Parallel paths between a source and a target are associated with parallel trusts respectively. We introduce two measurements for computing the derived trust degree from a source to a target: Max- min trust degree and Max-mean trust degree. The Max operator formalizes the choice among parallel paths. The min and mean operators compute the transitive trust degree along a path. We focus on the analysis of the complexity of computing both kinds of trust degrees. We show that measuring the max-min trust degree is polynomial, however, measuring the max-mean one is NP-hard. Then we propose a matrix-based method to compute the max-mean trust degree, which can be done polynomially, but may produce non-simple paths. Finally, we give a simple example of a trust reputation network to illustrate the matrix-based method.