Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Management of thoracoabdominal neuroblastoma: a 13-year experience

Background Thoracoabdominal neuroblastoma is a unique surgical challenge. We reviewed our experience focusing on disease patterns and corresponding surgical approaches. Methods Among 310 patients in our neuroblastoma database, 30 (9.7%) had thoracoabdominal neuroblastoma. Patients’ clinical charts were reviewed and analyzed. Two disease patterns were identified: solitary thoracoabdominal tumor (group A, n=15) and multifocal tumors in thorax and abdomen (group B, n=15). Operative approaches were categorized based on routes of surgical access. Results Thirty patients with average age of 4.1 (range 0.8–12.8) years were studied. All received preoperative chemotherapy. Among 15 group A patients, four were stage 3 intermediate risk (IR) and 11 were stage 4 high risk (HR). Surgical approaches included single-incision thoracoabdominal approach (n=10), laparotomy-cum-transdiaphragmatic approach (n=3), and laparotomy-cum-thoracotomy approach (n=2). One patient had 10% residual disease and the rest achieved gross total resection. Postoperative complications included chylous ascites (n=3), intestinal obstruction (n=3), pneumonia (n=1), spinal cord infarction (n=1) scoliosis (n=2) and thoracoabdominal nerves palsy (n=3). Among 15 group B patients, all were stage 4 with five IR and 10 HR. Thoracic components were found in the posterior mediastinum (n=7), superior mediastinum (n=4), middle mediastinum (n=1), parietal pleura (n=3) and lungs (n=3). Surgical approaches included multi-incision laparotomy-cum-thoracotomy (n=14) and laparotomy-cum-transdiaphragmatic approach (n=1). Gross total resection was achieved in all surgeries. Postoperative complications included chylous ascites (n=3). Overall, all nine IR patients survived without evidence of disease and 9 (42.8%) HR patients died of disease. There was no perioperative mortality. Conclusion Surgical resection of thoracoabdominal neuroblastoma is feasible and safe. Despite its complexity, thoracoabdominal neuroblastoma has comparable treatment outcomes when compared with single-compartmental disease.
Which place for art in Medical Education? A narrative review

Using art for medical education is a part of the Medical Humanities approach, which fosters observation skills and a better relationship between health professionals and patients. This article summarises a body of research in the use of visual arts in medical education, including its neurobiological basis and reports about an experience at the medical curriculum of the University Sapienza of Rome. The use of art in medical training is widespread worldwide, but it is an innovation in the Italian university medical curricula. It is fundamental to teach observational skills, improve psychosocial abilities and lower stress in order to educate professional and resilient healthcare workers.
Effect of N-acetylcysteine on Hepatic Ischemiareperfusion Injury in Normal and Steatotic Rats

Background: Liver ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury occurs during major liver surgery, transplantation or following haemorrhagic shock with subsequent fluid resuscitation. Liver steatosis is a risk factor in liver transplantation and liver resection. Aim: This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) on hepatic I/R injury in both normal and steatotic rat livers. Material and methods: 48 male wistar rats, divided into 2 equal groups, steatosis was induced in one of them by high cholesterol diet for 8 weeks. Each of these 2 groups was subdivided into 3 subgroups; control, I/R, I/R+ NAC groups. At the end of experiment, liver enzymes, inflammatory, lipid peroxidation and oxidative parameters were assessed and histopathological examination of liver samples was done to prove the incidence of steatosis. Results: NAC produced significant reduction in liver enzymes, inflammatory, lipid peroxidation parameters and significant increase in antioxidant parameters in both normal and steatotic rats. Conclusion: NAC may be considered as a promising therapeutic candidate for chemoprevention of hepatic I/R injury through its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antifibrotic, antiapoptic and antisteatotic effects in either normal or steatotic livers.
Unsupervised Word Segmentation and Wordhood Assessment

This dissertation addresses the question of wordhood and unsupervised word identification in written corpora, with a focus on Modern Standard Chinese (MSC). The first part discusses the linguistic aspects of the question. It reviews previous works related to the notion of ``word" in MSC and Chinese script and relates it to general linguistics issues, especially that of Multi-Words Expressions. It then sketches the development of Chinese Word Segmentation in NLP and traditional evaluation procedures. We argue that a part of arbitrariness in the corpora annotation biases the evaluations in favor of supervised machine learning methods which are less relevant for linguistic studies compared to unsupervised ones. This first part advocate for a corpus-based definition of the minimal units based on a measure of the combinatoric autonomy of a form and its degree of membership in a distributional class. The second part presents a new unsupervised learning method to estimate this autonomy inspired by Harris theories. With a simple and fast segmentation algorithm solely based on this measure, we already achieve near state-of-the-art performances on the task of Unsupervised Chinese Word Segmentation. We discuss the importance of pre-processing and report experiments on the use of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) paradigm in unsupervised segmentation. Finally, we provide a refined methodology and tools for a qualitative evaluation of our output and results on languages others that MSC.
Importance of Evaluation of Urinary Iron and Transferrin in the Common Histopathological Types of Idiopathic Nephrotic Syndrome in Children

Nephrosis with minimal glomerular changes, minimal change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) and focal-segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) are by far the predominant causes of idiopathic nephrotic syndrome (INS). Recently there is an increasing interest in the role of iron in the causation of renal injury and deterioration of renal function in adults and children with nephrotic syndrome. Urinary excretion of Nacetyl--D-glucosaminidase (NAG) may be useful as a marker of tubular dysfunction and damage in idiopathic nephrotic syndrome (INS) which often characterizes steroid-resistant children. The present study was carried out to estimate the level of serum and urinary iron and transferrin to evaluate the effect of their excretion in the development of anemia in nephrotic children, also to clarify the prognostic value of urinary iron according to the histopathological type of the disease. The present work was also devoted to assess the role of immune system in the pathogenesis of idiopathic nephrotic syndrome by determination of serum 2-microglobulin and serum and urinary neopterin. The degree of tubular damage in the most common histopathological types of idiopathic nephrotic syndrome was assessed by estimation of urinary N-acetyl--D-glucosaminidase enzyme (NAG). The study was conducted on 45 children who were grouped as control group and nephrotic children group which was subdivided into two subgroups: minimal-change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) group and segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) group. The study included fifteen in each group with no significant difference in the mean age and sex between the three studied groups. All children in the study were subjected to thorough history taking, complete physical examination and laboratory investigations which included serum and urinary iron excretion per 24 hours, serum and urinary transferrin excretion per 24 hours, serum ferritin, total iron binding capacity, serum and urinary neopterin excretion per 24 hours, serum 2-microglobulin, urinary N-acetyl--Dglucosaminidase enzyme (NAG) excretion per 24 hours, stool analysis for occult blood to exclude gastrointestinal bleeding and finally renal biopsy was done for all nephrotic children enrolled in the study for histopathological examination. The results of our study showed that idiopathic nephrotic syndrome (INS) is associated with normocytic normochromic anemia despite the increased urinary losses of iron and transferrin. Also, the results of this study showed that both serum neopterin and 2-microglobulin were significantly higher in both nephrotic groups than the control subjects. Serum neopterin level was significantly higher in FSGS group than MCNS Bull. Egypt. Soc. Physiol. Sci. 29 (2) 2009 Abdel-Aleem et al. 132 group with no significant difference of serum 2-microglobulin between MCNS and FSGS groups. It could be concluded that estimation of urinary proteins, urinary iron and urinary NAG could be important for follow up and prediction of the prognosis in children with INS.
PhD Forum: Why TanH can be a Hardware Friendly Activation Function for CNNs

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) techniques improved accuracy and robustness of machine vision systems at the price of a very high computational cost. This motivated multiple research efforts to investigate the applicability of approximate computing and more particularly, fixed point-arithmetic for CNNs. In all this approaches, a recurrent problem is that the learned parameters in deep CNN layers have a significantly lower numerical dynamic range when compared to the feature maps. This problem prevents from using of a low bit-width representation in deep layers. In this paper, we demonstrate that using the TanH activation function is way to prevent this issue. To support this demonstration, three benchmark CNN models are trained with the TanH function. These models are then quantized using the same bit-width across all the layers. Efficiency of this method is demonstrated on an FPGA based accelerator, by inferring CNNs with the minimal amount of logic elements.
The relationship between product quality and transaction costs with vertical coordination in DOC Rioja winegrape industry

espanolEste trabajo analiza la relacion entre la calidad del producto y la eleccion del mecanismo de gobierno (mercado, modo hibrido o integracion vertical) utilizando los resultados de una encuesta realizada a 187 bodegas adscritas a la denominacion de origen calificada Rioja (DOC Rioja). Estimando un modelo logit ordenado generalizado, se concluye que las bodegas que producen vinos de alta calidad son mas probables de integrarse verticalmente que aquellas que producen vinos de baja calidad. Consistente con la economia de costes de transaccion, se encuentra evidencia de que la especificidad de activos y la incertidumbre son importantes determinantes de la integracion vertical. Finalmente, el tamano de la bodega es tambien un importante factor que determina la eleccion del modo de gobierno en viticultura EnglishThis paper analyzes the relationship between product quality and governance mode choice (market mode, hybrid mode or vertical integration) using the results of a survey of 187 qualified appellation of origin (DOC) Rioja wineries. By estimating a generalized ordered logit, it is concluded that wineries that produce high-quality wines are more likely to vertically integrate than are wineries that produce low-quality wines. Consistent with transaction cost economics, evidence is found that asset specificity and uncertainty are important determinants of vertical integration. Finally, the size of the winery is also an important factor that affects governance mode choice in viticulture
Lung ultrasound score-based perioperative assessment of pressure-controlled ventilation-volume guaranteed or volume-controlled ventilation in geriatrics: a prospective randomized controlled trial

Purpose Recent studies have shown the potential benefits of pressure-controlled ventilation-volume guaranteed (PCV-VG) compared to volume-controlled ventilation (VCV), but the results were not impressive. We assessed the effects of PCV-VG versus VCV in elderly patients by using lung ultrasound score (LUS). Patients and methods Elderly patients (aged 65–90 years) scheduled for hip joint surgery were randomly assigned to either the PCV-VG or VCV group during general anesthesia. LUS and mechanical ventilator parameters were evaluated before induction, 30 mins after a semi-lateral position change, during supine repositioning before awakening, and 15 mins after arrival to the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU). Pulmonary function tests were performed before and after surgery. Other recovery indicators were also assessed in the PACU. Results A total of 76 patients (40 for PCV-VG and 36 for VCV) were included this study. Demographic data showed no significant difference between the two groups. In both groups, LUSs before induction were significantly lower than those at other time points. LUSs of the VCV group were significantly increased during perioperative periods compared with the PCV-VG group (p=0.049). Visualized LUS modeling suggested an intuitive difference in the two groups and unequal distribution in lung aeration. Higher dynamic compliance and lower inspiratory peak pressure were observed in the PVC-VG group compared to the VCV group (33.54 vs 27.36, p<0.001; 18.93 vs 21.19, p<0.001, respectively). Postoperative forced vital capacity of the VCV group was lower than that of PCV-VG group, but this result was not significant (2.06 vs 1.79, respectively; p=0.091). The other respiratory data are comparable between the two groups. Conclusion The PCV-VG group showed better LUS compared with the VCV group. Moreover, LUS modeling in both groups suggests non-homogeneous and positional change in lung aerations during surgery. Clinical trial registration This study was registered at the UMIN clinical trials registry (unique trial number: UMIN000029355; registration number: R000033510)
Activity-Aware Sensor Networks for Smart Environments

The efficient designs of Wireless Sensor Network protocols and intelligent Machine Learning algorithms, together have led to the advancements of various systems and applications for Smart Environments. By definition, Smart Environments are the typical physical worlds used in human daily life, those are seamlessly embedded with smart tiny devices equipped with sensors, actuators and computational elements. Since human user is a key component in Smart Environments, human motion activity patterns have key importance in building sensor network systems and applications for Smart Environments. Motivated by this, in this thesis my work is focused on human motion activity-aware sensor networks for Smart Environments. The main contributions of this thesis are in two important aspects: (i) Designing event activity context-aware sensor networks for efficient performance optimization as well as resource usage; and (ii) Using binary motion sensing sensor networks’ collective data for device-free real-time tracking of multiple users. Firstly, I describe the design of our proposed event activity context-aware sensor network protocols and system design for Smart Environments. The main motivation behind this work is as follows. A sensor network, unlike a traditional communication network, provides high degree of visibility into the environmental physical processes. Therefore its operation is driven by the activities in the environment. In long-term operations, these activities usually show certain patterns which can be learned and effectively utilized to optimize network design. In this thesis I have designed several novel protocols: (i) ActSee [1] for activity-aware radio duty-cycling, (ii) EAR [2] for activity-aware and energy balanced routing, and (iii) ActiSen [3] complete working system with protocol suites for activity-aware sensing/ duty-cycling/ routing. Secondly, I have proposed and designed FindingHuMo [4] (Finding Human Motion), a Machine Learning based real-time user tracking algorithm for Smart Environments using Sensor Networks. This work has been motivated by increasing adoption of sensor network enabled Ubiquitous Computing in key Smart Environment applications, like Smart Healthcare. Our proposed FindingHuMo protocol and system can perform device-free tracking of multiple (unknown and variable number of) users in the hallway environments, just from non-invasive and anonymous binary motion sensor data. INDEX WORDS: Smart environments, Wireless sensor networks, Routing, Radio dutycycling, User tracking, Machine learning. TITLE: ACTIVITY-AWARE SENSOR NETWORKS FOR SMART ENVIRONMENTS
Systemic Thrombolysis for Intraoperative, High Risk Pulmonary Embolism, Clinical Case

A 68-year-old woman with intercondylar fracture of the femur suffers massive (high risk) pulmonary embolism (PE) during surgery and is suc-cessfully treated with systemic thrombolysis. After limb exsanguinations with Esmarch bandage, the patient presents with sudden oxygen desaturation (99% to 80%) with subsequent dyspnea and hypotension. She is intubated and requires continuous adrenalin perfusion while the surgery is finished and until she can be transferred to the reanimation ward. We decide to perform transthoracic echocardiogram (her general condition impedes transfer to tomography) which confirms right ventricular overload and pulmonary hypertension. These findings justify systemic thrombolysis, which is performed with good results. Surgery, and in particular orthopedic surgery, increase the risk of PE. When considering high risk PE, guidelines recommend primary reperfusion strategy through systemic thrombolysis (which can be contraindicated in surgery patients) or catheter-assisted thrombus removal (less widely available). Lately, surgical pulmonary embolectomy is being discussed as a treatment option for patients with contraindication to thrombolysis, but this practice is still uncommon.
The circulating level of interleukins 6 and 18 in ischemic and idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy

Introduction: By aging population, the heart failure and its life-threatening complications have become an enormous issue in public health. Regarding the inflammation as a major contributing pathological factor, the determination of most important inflammatory targets for immunomodulation is a problematic puzzle in the treatment of heart failure patients and the inflammatory pathways primarily involved in different underlying conditions contributing to heart failure can be an area which is worthy of focused research. Considering the dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) as a relatively high-incident disease leading to heart failure, the aim of this study is to determine the difference in the expression level of interleukin (IL)-6 and IL-18 in patients with ischemic and idiopathic DCM. Methods: 39 non-diabetic patients with ischemic and 37 ones with idiopathic DCM were enrolled in the study. 48 healthy individuals were also considered as control group. For quantitative determination of the mRNA expression level of IL-6 and IL-18 genes, an in-house- SYBR Green real-time PCR was used and Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) was considered as internal control gene. The left ventricular end-diastolic volume (LVEDV) and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was calculated by 2D echocardiographic assessment. Data were finally analyzed via SPSS statistical software version 19.0 using independent t test and 2-∆∆Ct method and P<0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: The IL-6 was significantly higher expressed in patients with ischemic and idiopathic DCM than in healthy controls (274.3 and 168.8 times, respectively, both P values <0.001). The same higher expression of IL-18 was observed in ischemic DCM (48.5 times) and idiopathic DCM (45.2 times) compared with healthy individuals (both P values <0.001). Conclusion: Both ischemic and idiopathic DCM associates with IL-6 and IL-18 overexpression. However, no significant difference was observed between these two subtypes of DCM in either interleukin expression level. There is certainly need to further studies for evaluating the uniformity of results and also assessing other molecules in determining their roles in pathophysiology and probable utility for management.
Vitamin E and Alzheimer’s disease: what do we know so far?

Abstract Vitamin E has been proposed as a potential clinical intervention for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) given the plausibility of its various biological functions in influencing the neurodegenerative processes associated with the condition. The tocopherol and tocotrienol isoforms of vitamin E have multiple properties including potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory characteristics, in addition to influences on immune function, cellular signalling and lowering cholesterol. Several of these roles offer a theoretical rationale for providing benefit for the treatment of AD-associated pathology. Diminished circulating concentrations of vitamin E have been demonstrated in individuals with AD. Reduced plasma levels have furthermore been associated with an increased risk of AD development while intake, particularly from dietary sources, may limit or reduce the rate of disease progression. This benefit may be linked to synergistic actions between vitamin E isoforms and other micronutrients. Nevertheless, randomised trials have found limited and inconsistent evidence of vitamin E supplementation as an effective clinical intervention. Thus, despite a strong rationale in support of a beneficial role for vitamin E for the treatment of AD, the evidence remains inconclusive. Several factors may partly explain this discrepancy and represent the difficulties of translating complex laboratory evidence and dietary interactions into clinical interventions. Methodological design limitations of existing randomised trials and restrictions to supplementation with a single vitamin E isoform may also limit the influence of effect. Moreover, several factors influence individual responsiveness to vitamin E intake and recent findings suggest variation in the underlying genetic architecture attenuates vitamin E biological availability and activity which likely contributes to the variation in clinical responsiveness and the failure of randomised trials to date. Importantly, the clinical safety of vitamin E remains controversial and warrants further investigation.
Variable Classification-based Co-estimation of Distribution Algorithm Assisted by a Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimizer

Since estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) were proposed, many methods have been made to improve EDAs’ performance. In this paper, a variable classification-based cooperative estimation of distribution algorithm (VC-CEDA) is proposed to balance the global and local searching ability of estimation of distribution algorithms. This study proposes a variable classification method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of probability model development. And a cooperative particle swarm optimizer that can improve the local searching ability is proposed. The VC-CEDA combines the advantages of traditional algorithm and cooperative operations. VC-CEDA shows significantly better performance on 10 test functions. In this study, the experimental results show that the VC-CEDA performs better than traditional EDAs.