Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychological Variables Associated With Health-Related Quality-of-Life in Uruguayan Women Surgically Intervened for Breast Cancer

Aim: This study described demographic, clinical, psychological and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) characteristics in women surgically intervened for breast cancer, and the present study was conducted to examine the association between these characteristics. Method: Uruguayan women (N = 116) diagnosed and surgically intervened for breast cancer were assessed on demographic, clinical and psychological indicators and HRQOL, by self-report questionnaires (i.e., BDI-II, PSS, Brief-COPE, and SF-36). Study was conducted adopting a non-experimental, cross-sectional methodology. After studying associations between variables assessed, hierarchical regression analyses were performed to identify HRQOL predictors. Results: HRQOL Physical Health Component (SF-36) was predicted by perceived stress and depression, above and beyond demographic and clinical factors. And HRQOL Mental Health Component (SF-36) was predicted by education, time elapsed since diagnosis of breast cancer, time hospitalized during the past year, perceived stress and depression. Conclusion: Results suggest that psychological variables may have a significant role for HRQOL prediction, and need to be taken into account along with demographic and clinical markers in order to explain HRQOL outcomes in women with breast cancer.
Mobility Support for Fog Computing: An SDN Approach

The emerging real-time and computation-intensive services driven by the Internet of Things, augmented reality, automatic driving, and so on, have tight quality of service and quality of experience requirements, which can hardly be supported by conventional cloud computing. Fog computing, which migrates the features of cloud computing to the network edge, guarantees low latency for location-aware services. However, due to the locality feature of fog computing, maintaining service continuity when mobile users travel across different access networks has become a challenging issue. In this article, we propose a novel software-defined-networking-based fog computing architecture by decoupling mobility control and data forwarding. Under the proposed architecture, we design efficient signaling operations to provide seamless and transparent mobility support to mobile users, and present an efficient route optimization algorithm by considering the performance gain in data communications and system overhead in mobile fog computing. Numerical results from extensive simulations have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can not only guarantee service continuity, but also greatly improve handover performance and achieve high data communication efficiency in mobile fog computing.
Association between a common missense variant in LOXL3 gene and the risk of non‐syndromic cleft palate

To investigate possible association between functional common variants in the lysyl oxidase like 3 gene and non‐syndromic cleft palate we selected a common missense variant p.Ile615Phe (rs17010021), which was predicted to have a probably damaging effect on the lysyl oxidase like 3 enzyme. We genotyped 258 non‐syndromic cleft palate case‐parent triads of European origin and tested genetic association using the transmission disequilibrium test and log‐linear regression analyses of genotypic relative risks and of parent‐of‐origin effects. The observed genotype frequency in parents was in Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. Compared with wild‐type Ile/Ile homozygotes, the relative risks for Phe/Phe homozygote infants was 6.87 (P value 3.0 × 10−3), while that for Ile/Phe heterozygotes was not significant. Assuming an autosomal recessive model, the relative risks for Phe/Phe genotype resulted 10.54 (P value 2.9 × 10−5), with a 3.6% population attributable risk. No parent‐of‐origin effect was observed. The identification in lysyl oxidase like 3 of a missense variant which under a recessive model associates with 10‐fold increased risk of non‐syndromic cleft palate supports the hypothesis that the genetic etiology of this congenital anomaly includes relatively uncommon recessive variants with moderate penetrance and located in genes which are also involved in syndromes that include cleft palate as part of the phenotype. Our findings require functional validation and replication in a larger independent genetic association study.
Analysis of Leishmania mimetic neoglycoproteins for the cutaneous leishmaniasis diagnosis

Abstract Oligosaccharides are broadly present on Leishmania cell surfaces. They can be useful for the leishmaniases diagnosis and also helpful in identifying new cell markers for the disease. The disaccharide Galα1-3Galβ is the immunodominant saccharide in Leishmania cell surface and is the unique non-reducing terminal glycosphingolipids structure recognized by anti-α-Gal. This study describes an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) used to measure serum levels of anti-α-galactosyl (α-Gal) antibodies in patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL). Optimal ELISA conditions were established and two neoglycoproteins (NGP) containing the Galα1-3Gal terminal fraction (Galα1-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc-HAS and Galα1-3Gal-HAS) and one Galα1-3Gal NGP analogue (Galα1-3Galβ1-3GlcNAc-HAS) were used as antigens. Means of anti-α-Gal antibody titres of CL patients were significantly higher (P < 0.05) than the healthy individuals for all NGPs tested. Sensitivity and specificity of all NGPs ranged from 62.2 to 78.4% and 58.3 to 96.7%, respectively. In conclusion, the NGPs can be used for CL diagnosis.
Ionomic Screening of Field‐Grown Soybean Identifies Mutants with Altered Seed Elemental Composition

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr. ] seeds contain high levels of mineral nutrients essential for human and animal nutrition. High throughput elemental profiling (ionomics) has identified mutants in model plant species grown in controlled environments. Here, we describe a method for identifying potential soybean ionomics mutants grown in a field setting and apply it to 975 N‐nitroso‐N‐methylurea (NMU) mutagenized lines. After performing a spatial correction, we identified mutants using either visual scoring of standard score (z‐score) plots or computational ranking of putative mutants followed by visual confirmation. Although there was a large degree of overlap between the methods, each method identified unique lines. The visual scoring approach identified 22 out of 427 (5%) potential mutants, 70% (16 out of 22) of which were confirmed when seeds from the same parent plant were regrown in the field. We also performed simulations to determine an optimal strategy for screening large populations. All data from the screen is available at the Ionomics Hub File Transfer Page (http://www.ionomicshub.org/home/PiiMS/dataexchange).
Towards Measuring the Role of Phone Numbers in Twitter-Advertised Spam

The telephony channel has become an attractive target for cyber criminals, who are using it to craft a variety of attacks. In addition to delivering voice and messaging spam, this channel is also being used to lure victims into calling phone numbers that are controlled by the attackers. One way this is done is by aggressively advertising phone numbers on social media (e.g., Twitter). This form of spam is then monetized over the telephony channel, via messages/calls made by victims. We refer to this type of attacks as outgoing phone communication (OPC) attacks. By collecting approximately 70M tweets containing over 5,786 phone numbers over a period of 14 months, we are able to measure properties of multiple spam campaigns, including well-known tech support scams. Our contributions include a novel data collection technique that amplifies tweets containing phone numbers, clustering of tweets that are part of a given OPC attack campaign, and brief analysis of particularly interesting campaigns. We also show that some of the campaigns we analyze appear to attempt to avoid account suspension by Twitter, by including reputable URLs in their tweets. In fact, we find that Twitter suspended only about 3.5% of the accounts that participated in the top 15 spam campaigns we measured. Our results not only demonstrate a new kind of abuse exploiting the telephony channel but also show the potential benefits of using phone numbers to fight spam on Twitter.
Full-Duplex Communications: Performance in Ultradense mm-Wave Small-Cell Wireless Networks

Full-duplex (FD) communications can double the spectral efficiency (SE) of a wireless link if self-interference (SI) is completely eliminated. Recent developments in SI cancellation (SIC) techniques have allowed for FD communications on low-power transceivers, such as small-cell base stations (SCBSs) under residual SI (RSI). Consequently, FD technology is considered a key enabler of fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks.
Production biomolecule with inhibitory activity against Gram-negative bacteria isolated from faeces of broilers and swine

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of lactic acid bacteria, bacilli and yeasts isolates to produce antimicrobial substances, especially against Gram-negative bacteria isolated from the animal faeces, searching for a new alternative to control the enteritis diseases in animal health. Evaluations were performed by microdilution in broth using crude extract obtained from the cultivation of 272 strains against Escherichia coli, S. Typhimurium, S. Enteritidis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Thirty-five lactic acid bacteria presented some antimicrobial action. One Lactobacillus isolate, named FLPB-1, was selected to studies the kinetics of the production. An important increase in the production was obtained when the producer strain had cell-to-cell contact with a Gram-positive inducer culture. Maximal production of antimicrobial compounds was obtained in the beginning of stationary phase and the addition of urea in the medium increased the inhibition rate. Key words: antimicrobial, enteritis, lactic acid bacteria, bacteriocin.
An Immortalized Genetic Mapping Population for Perennial Ryegrass: A Resource for Phenotyping and Complex Trait Mapping

To address the lack of a truly portable, universal reference mapping population for perennial ryegrass, we have been developing a recombinant inbred line (RIL) mapping population of perennial ryegrass derived via single seed descent from a well-characterized F2 mapping population based on genetically distinct inbred parents in which the natural self-incompatibility (SI) system of perennial ryegrass has been overcome. We examined whether it is possible to create a genotyping by sequencing (GBS) based genetic linkage map in a small population of the F6 generation of this population. We used 41 F6 genotypes for GBS with PstI/MspI-based libraries. We successfully developed a genetic linkage map comprising 6074 SNP markers, placing a further 22080 presence and absence variation (PAV) markers on the map. We examined the resulting genetic map for general and RIL specific features. Overall segregation distortion levels were similar to those experienced in the F2 generation, but segregation distortion was reduced on linkage group 6 and increased on linkage group 7. Residual heterozygosity in the F6 generation was observed at a level of 5.4%. There was a high proportion of chromosomes (30%) exhibiting the intact haplotype of the original inbred parents of the F1 genotype from which the population is derived, pointing to a tendency for chromosomes to assort without recombining. This could affect the applicability of these lines and might make them more suitable for situations where repressed recombination is an advantage. Inter- and intra-chromosomal linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis suggested that the map order was robust. We conclude that this RIL population, and subsequent F7 and F8 generations will be useful for genetic analysis and phenotyping of agronomic and biological important traits in perennial ryegrass.
LSTM Networks for Vessel Traffic Flow Prediction in Inland Waterway

Vessel traffic flow reflects the congestion and security of traffic in waterway, accurate prediction can help ensure the waterway safe and smooth. A novel deep learning model based on long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) was proposed for wide predictions from aspects of short-term, long-term and influence of water level factor. To improve the performance, traffic flow sequences were pretreated to remove trend and seasonality as stationary ones, and a time-window method was applied to provide multi-step lag observations as features to increase temporal correlation. Results show that vessel traffic flow is applicable for wide prediction terms with high precision, and demonstrate that the proposed method has strong memorizing ability to describe traffic flow features. Furthermore, LSTMs achieved better performance compared with some well-known prediction models, such as GRU, DBNs, LR, RBF-SVR and ARIMA, which illustrates LSTMs has excellent generalization.
An in Vitro Assay of hERG K+ Channel Potency for a New EGFR Inhibitor FHND004

FHND004 is a newly synthesized epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitor for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The aim of the present study was to investigate the impacts of FHND004 on human ether-à-go-go-related gene (hERG) K+ channels and the molecular mechanisms underlying of its action. Whole-cell patch clamp recording was performed on wild type (WT), mutant hERG channels heterologously expressed in human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cells or IKr endogenously expressed in HL-1 cells, respectively. FHND004 inhibited hERG K+ currents in a concentration-dependent manner with IC50 values of 8.46 ± 0.33 μM in HEK293 cells and 7.52 ± 1.27 μM in HL-1 cells, respectively. However, the inhibitory potency of FHND004 on hERG channels was significantly less than its precursor AZD9291. FHND004-induced inhibition was state-dependent with a preference within open state, but did not alter other kinetics including activation, inactivation, and recovery from inactivation or deactivation. In addition, FHND004 exhibited more potent inhibitory effects on WT/A422T and WT/H562P-hERG, two known long QT syndrome (LQTS) associated KCNH2 mutations, than WT alone. Mutations of the residues at pore regions (F656C, Y652A, S624A, and F557L) in hERG channels attenuated block effects of FHND004. Taken together, our results demonstrate the evidence that FHND004 is a less potent hERG blocker than its precursor AZD9291. There is, however, a need for caution in the potential use of FHND004 for treating NSCLC patients, especially in those with other concurrent triggering factors.
YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2018 Task 2: Multi-ensemble Bi-GRU Model with Attention Mechanism for Multilingual Emoji Prediction

This paper describes our approach to SemEval-2018 Task 2, which aims to predict the most likely associated emoji, given a tweet in English or Spanish. We normalized text-based tweets during pre-processing, following which we utilized a bi-directional gated recurrent unit with an attention mechanism to build our base model. Multi-models with or without class weights were trained for the ensemble methods. We boosted models without class weights, and only strong boost classifiers were identified. In our system, not only was a boosting method used, but we also took advantage of the voting ensemble method to enhance our final system result. Our method demonstrated an obvious improvement of approximately 3% of the macro F1 score in English and 2% in Spanish.
Mathematical Modeling Reveals the Role of Hypoxia in the Promotion of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Long-Term Expansion

Many experimental studies have found that human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in long-term culture exhibited enhanced cell proliferation and prolonged lifespan under hypoxia (around 1%–7% oxygen) against the normoxic condition (about 21% oxygen). Inspired by the experimental findings, we aimed to investigate the hypoxic effects on MSC expansion quantitatively through mathematical modeling to elucidate the corresponding biological mechanism. A two-compartment model based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs), which incorporate cellular division and senescence via state transition, was developed to describe the MSC expansion process. Parameters of this model were fitted to experimental data and used to interpret the different proliferative capacities of MSCs under hypoxia and normoxia along with model sensitivity analysis. The proposed model was tested on data from two separate experimental studies, and it could reproduce the observed growth characteristics in both conditions. Overall, this compartmental model with a logistic state transition rate was sufficient to explain the experimental findings and highlighted the promotive role of hypoxia in MSC proliferation. This in silico study suggests that hypoxia can enhance MSC long-term expansion mainly by delaying replicative senescence, which is indicated by the slowdown of the state transition rate in our model. Therefore, this explanatory model may provide theoretical proof for the experimentally observed MSC growth superiority under hypoxia and has the potential to further optimize MSC culture protocols for regenerative medicine applications.
Performance Analysis of Ten Common QRS Detectors on Different ECG Application Cases

A systematical evaluation work was performed on ten widely used and high-efficient QRS detection algorithms in this study, aiming at verifying their performances and usefulness in different application situations. Four experiments were carried on six internationally recognized databases. Firstly, in the test of high-quality ECG database versus low-quality ECG database, for high signal quality database, all ten QRS detection algorithms had very high detection accuracy (F1 >99%), whereas the F1 results decrease significantly for the poor signal-quality ECG signals (all <80%). Secondly, in the test of normal ECG database versus arrhythmic ECG database, all ten QRS detection algorithms had good F1 results for these two databases (all >95% except RS slope algorithm with 94.24% on normal ECG database and 94.44% on arrhythmia database). Thirdly, for the paced rhythm ECG database, all ten algorithms were immune to the paced beats (>94%) except the RS slope method, which only output a low F1 result of 78.99%. At last, the detection accuracies had obvious decreases when dealing with the dynamic telehealth ECG signals (all <80%) except OKB algorithm with 80.43%. Furthermore, the time costs from analyzing a 10 s ECG segment were given as the quantitative index of the computational complexity. All ten algorithms had high numerical efficiency (all <4 ms) except RS slope (94.07 ms) and sixth power algorithms (8.25 ms). And OKB algorithm had the highest numerical efficiency (1.54 ms).
NETASPNO: Approximate Strict Pattern Matching Under Nonoverlapping Condition

In pattern matching, a gap constraint is a more flexible wildcard than traditional wildcards “? ” and “*”. Pattern matching with gap constraints is more difficult to handle and fulfills user’s enquiries more easily. Pattern matching with gap constraints has therefore been carried out in numerous research works, such as music information retrieval, searching protein sites, and sequence pattern mining. Strict pattern matching under a nonoverlapping condition, as a type of pattern matching with gap constraints, is a key issue of sequence pattern mining with gap constraints since it can be used to compute the frequency of a pattern. Exact matching limits the flexibility of the match to some extent since it requires each character to be matched exactly. We therefore address approximate strict pattern matching under the nonoverlapping constraints (ASPNO) and propose an effective algorithm, named NETtree for ASPNO (NETASPNO), which first transforms the problem into a Nettree data structure, an extensive tree structure. To find the nonoverlapping occurrences effectively, we propose the concept of number of roots paths with distance constraints (NRPDC) which indicates the number of path from a node to the roots with distance $d$ and can be used to delete useless parent-child relationships and useless nodes. We iteratively recalculate the NRPDCs of each node on the subnettree with the rightmost root. Then we can get a path from the rightmost leaf to its rightmost root without using the backtracking strategy. NETASPNO therefore iteratively gets the rightmost root-leaf-path and prunes the path on the Nettree. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that NETASPNO has better performance than the other competitive algorithms.
The Need for Early Tracheostomy in Patients with Traumatic Cervical Cord Injury

Background In patients who need sustained endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation due to respiratory failure after traumatic cervical spinal cord injury, tracheostomy can be performed to reduce the duration of mechanical ventilation and respiratory complications. The purpose of this study was to determine criteria and timing of tracheostomy in patients with severe traumatic cervical spinal cord injury accompanied by motor weakness. Methods We reviewed 22 patients who underwent tracheostomy (study group) and 27 patients who did not (control group) from January 2005 to March 2016. We assessed the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) impairment scale score and investigated accompanying thoracic injury, paradoxical respiration, postoperative endotracheal intubation and other clinical parameters. The study group was also subdivided into the early tracheostomy group and late tracheostomy group depending on whether the tracheostomy was performed within or later than 7 days after surgery. Results Twenty-two patients in the study group had a mean ASIA impairment scale score of 14.1 points, which was lower than the control group's 23.4 points. Paradoxical respiration was observed in 77% of the patients in the study group compared to 18% in the control group. Postoperative intubation was maintained in 68% in the study group; 32% underwent endotracheal intubation due to respiratory failure within 4 days after surgery and had a tracheostomy. In the control group, postoperative intubation was maintained in 22%, and all of them were weaned off intubation within 4 days after surgery. The duration of intensive care unit hospitalization was 11.4 days for the early tracheostomy group, which was shorter than the late tracheostomy group's 19.7 days. Conclusions In patients with severe traumatic cervical spinal cord injury, tracheostomy may be needed when the motor grade of the ASIA scale is low, above the C4 segment is injured, or paradoxical respiration occurs after injuries. In addition, if endotracheal extubation is not feasible within 4 days after surgery, an early tracheostomy should be considered.
Use of a Scalable Replicon-Particle Vaccine to Protect Against Lethal Lassa Virus Infection in the Guinea Pig Model

Lassa fever is a viral zoonosis that can be transmitted from person to person, especially in the hospital setting. The disease is endemic to several countries in West Africa and can be a major contributor to morbidity and mortality in affected areas. There are no approved vaccines to prevent Lassa virus infection. In this work, we present a vaccine candidate that combines the scalability and efficacy benefits of a live vaccine with the safety benefits of single-cycle replication. The system consists of Lassa virus replicon particles devoid of the virus essential glycoprotein gene, and a cell line that expresses the glycoprotein products, enabling efficient vaccine propagation. Guinea pigs vaccinated with these particles showed no clinical reaction to the inoculum and were protected against fever, weight loss, and lethality after infection with Lassa virus.