Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship Between Liver Fibrosis Noninvasively Measured by Fibro Scan and Blood Test

Recently, Fibro scan was developed as a non-invasive device for measuring liver fibrosis. Progression of liver fibrosis has been reported to increase the measurement value (elasticity). We have performed the Fibro scan for liver diseases. [ ;normal liver (n=33), hepatitis C (n=156), hepatitis B(n=36), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (n=24), auto immune hepatitis (n=9), primary biliary cirrhosis (n=10), alcoholic liver disease (n=7), acute hepatitis (n=3), other liver disease (n=14), recipient of living donor liver transplantation (n=11)] Elasticity, blood test, and indirect fibrosis diagnostic score were comparatively investigated. In the hepatitis C group, the mean value for elasticity was 14.7±12.0 kPa. Elasticity was found to be significantly correlated with the hepatobiliary enzymes, fibrosis markers and indirect fibrosis diagnostic score. When elasticity was divided into ≧14.6kPa(liver cirrhosis) and<14.6kPa(non liver cirrhosis) groups for the investigation, liver inflammation and fibrosis markers were correlated in the progress of fibrosis in non liver cirrhosis, and it could be speculated that if liver cirrhosis is reached, progression of fibrosis reflects decreased liver function.
How do Project Post-Mortems Contribute to Organizational Learning?

Project post-mortems have been identified as a key strategy for organizations to learn from their past failures and improve system development project performance. Although several guidelines for conducting post-mortems have been proposed those conducted result often in little novel insight and understanding. This study seeks to understand how the information captured and used as part of project post-mortems is or is not leveraged to facilitate organizational learning and what factors thwart such efforts. Twenty-five project and program managers are interviewed for how they collect, interpret, and use project data to learn and build local theories of project performance. Our findings suggest that postmortem practices can facilitate organizational learning, however, we found the lack of incentives to use the data, opportunities and weak mechanisms for sharing post-mortem knowledge are key barriers for using generated project information for improved learning during post mortems.
Improving Local Governments’ Financial Sustainability by Using Open Government Data: An Application of High-Granularity Estimates of Personal Income Levels in Romania

The availability of open government data has expanded considerably in recent years. This expansion is expected to generate significant benefits not just for increasing government transparency, but also for the economy. The aim of this study is to illustrate the use of open government data in estimating personal income levels for all 3181 municipalities, towns, and communes in Romania. The novelty of our work comes from the high granularity of the estimates obtained. We use tax revenues collected by local governments in Romania on vehicles and buildings owned by natural persons, as well as data on energy subsidies. The classification is conducted using the k-means clustering algorithm. We find three distinct clusters of communities, which we map. The results can benefit both businesses and policymakers. The former can use the income level estimates for market intelligence purposes, while for the latter, these may aid in determining the financial sustainability of local governments and a better allocation of central government resources at the subnational level.
Mitigation of drought stress effect on growth and productivity of mung bean by foliar application of sorghum water extract

Field trial was conducted in Research Field equipped with rainfall transparent shade, Biology Department, College of Science, Baghdad University during the growing season of 2012 to test the potential of sorghum water extract in improving yield and yield components of local cultivar of mung bean crop grown under different moisture deficit stresses. The water stresses were applied by irrigated the plots to field capacity and withheld the next irrigation until the soil water deficit reaches 80, 50 and 30% of field capacity for control, mild water stress and higher water stress, respectively. Foliar application of sorghum water extract at 0 ( control), 2.5 and 5% (W/V) was made at preflowering, flowering and fruiting stages. The experiment was conducted in split plot design with four replications for each treatment. The sorghum water extract rates were kept in the sub plot while moisture deficits were assigned as main plot. Results showed that drought stress significantly reduced the averages seed yield , dry matter accumulation, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per pod and plant height. Foliar applications of sorghum extracts significantly increased seeds yield, dry weight biomass, number of seeds per pod and plant height. The interaction of drought stress and sorghum water extract treatment significantly affected seed yield , dry matter accumulation, number of pods per plant, total chlorophyll content and plant height. Application of sorghum water extract under severe moisture deficit stress (i.e., 70% field capacity) increased seed yield, dry weight biomass and plant height , number of pods per plant, number of seeds per pod by 37.8%, 48.9%,64.3%,8.7% and 5.1%, of control, respectively compared the reduction achieved by the sever moisture deficit applied alone which was 58.50% , 56.06% , 57.17% , 48.05% and 14.78 % of control for the aforementioned parameters respectively. Chlorophyll content was found to be increased by effected by application of sorghum extracts at control moisture treatment. Proline content of leaves was significantly increased by high drought stress when water extract applied alone. However, such differences disappeared when sorghum extract was applied, suggesting another mechanisms could be responsible for the stimulatory effect of sorghum extract under drought stress.
A 6-Bit Ku Band Digital Step Attenuator with Low Phase Variation in 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS

A 6-bit Ku band digital step attenuator with low phase variation is presented in this paper. The attenuator is designed with 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS process technology using triple well isolation N-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (TWNMOS) and through-silicon-via (TSV). TWNMOS is mainly used to improve the performance of switches and reduce the insertion loss (IL). TSV is utilized to provide approximately ideal global current ground plane with low impedance for the attenuator. In addition, substrate floating technique and new capacitance compensation technique are adopted in the attenuator to improve the linearity and decrease the phase variation. The measured results show that the attenuator IL is 6.99–9.33 dB; the maximum relative attenuation is 31.87–30.31 dB with 0.5-dB step (64 states), the root mean square (RMS) for the amplitude error is 0.58–0.36 dB and the phase error RMS is 2.06–3.46° in the 12–17 GHz frequency range. The total chip area is 1 × 0.9 mm2.
Timely identification of atypical acute aortic dissection in the emergency department:a study from a tertiary hospital

Background/aim Acute aortic dissection (AAD) is a rare but fatal disease if left untreated. Symptoms are often similar to common conditions; therefore, the diagnostic strategy is important. We aimed to identify the atypical symptoms in a timely manner without putting patients at greater risk for undetected AAD. Materials and methods We conducted a retrospective observational study of 59 AAD patients with both atypical and typical symptoms from January 2012 to December 2016. Patients with atypical symptoms continuing more than 30 min underwent a D-dimer test and computed tomography (CT) or computed tomographic angiography (CTA). Results Of the 59 AAD patients, 22 were atypical. In the atypical group, the median delay time in our hospital was 3.1 h; average delay time after July 2015 was shorter than average delay time before June 2015 (16.59 ± 24.70 vs. 1.90 ± 0.57 h, P = 0.076). Conclusions For patients in the emergency department who are suspected of having AAD, incorporating atypical symptoms with high levels of D-dimer into a triage strategy could improve the efficiency of clinical decision making. Furthermore, essential education directed towards the recognition of the atypical symptoms of AAD for front-line physicians may aid in a timely diagnosis, as compared with the usual assessments in the emergency department.
Engagement and Adoption of Person-Centered Care: Participant Experiences in the Kansas PEAK 2.0 Program.

The Promoting Excellent Alternatives in Kansas (PEAK) 2.0 program provides training, evaluation, and support in person-centered care (PCC) for nursing homes across Kansas. To represent the participant voice, nursing home employees (N = 141) provided feedback on their experiences and their home's level of engagement in PEAK 2.0 as well as achievement of PCC adoption. Analyses were conducted to capture the positive/negative valence and specificity of their comments and examine how engagement in PEAK 2.0 relates to the process and outcome of PEAK 2.0. Qualitatively, staff participants demonstrated that PEAK 2.0 is viewed positively overall, with approximately twice as many participants with more positive (e.g., community support, satisfaction with resources) than negative (e.g., over-regulation, too structured) comments. Employees reporting moderate engagement in PCC provided the majority of specific suggestions for improvement. In addition, higher levels of engagement were significantly associated with higher levels of PCC achievement. Based on these results, suggestions are offered to enhance nursing staff experiences and engagement that will help support PCC adoption. [Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 45(11), 5-10. ].
Metagenomes from Late Pleistocene Ice Complex Sediments of the Siberian Arctic

The late Pleistocene Ice Complex (also known as Yedoma) encompasses ice-rich permafrost formed when alluvial and/or aeolian sediments accumulated under cold climatic conditions. Three metagenomes obtained from Yedoma deposits continually frozen for periods up to 60,000 years are reported here. ABSTRACT The late Pleistocene Ice Complex (also known as Yedoma) encompasses ice-rich permafrost formed when alluvial and/or aeolian sediments accumulated under cold climatic conditions. Three metagenomes obtained from Yedoma deposits continually frozen for periods up to 60,000 years are reported here.
Myocardial fibrosis: why image, how to image and clinical implications

### Learning objectives The current era has seen major advances in myocardial imaging. We are now able to assess cardiac anatomy, function, tissue composition and disease activity across a wide range of disease states. Recently, there has been major interest in imaging myocardial fibrosis, predominantly with cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). Fibrosis represents a common response to injury in most cardiomyopathies, but the distribution and pattern of fibrosis differ between pathologies, underscoring its potential role as a diagnostic marker. Furthermore, fibrosis is closely associated with impaired left ventricular function, as well as cardiac arrhythmias; as such, fibrosis imaging also provides powerful prognostic information. In this review, we discuss the pathophysiology of myocardial fibrosis, review the applications of CMR in the non-invasive detection of myocardial fibrosis and provide an overview of common pathologies in which fibrosis imaging may be of clinical utility. Our understanding of myocardial function and disease is largely focused on cardiomyocytes. However, the majority of cardiac cells in the adult mammalian heart are non-myocytes. Cardiac fibroblasts are one such cell type that play a crucial role in myocardial disease and healing. These cells are responsible for the production and deposition of extracellular matrix proteins—type 1 collagen being the prototype—which serve as a scaffold for other cellular components and are integral to the structural integrity and function of the myocardium. Fibroblasts respond to cytokines and neurohormal factors, differentiating into activated fibroblasts and smooth muscle-like myofibroblasts that are critical in the healing response of diseased or injured myocardium. These cells exert their effects on the extracellular matrix via regulation of matrix metalloproteinases and fibronectin. Although the primary response to myocardial injury—wound healing, reparative scar formation and …
Component importance in multistate directed network flow systems

There seem to be two main reasons for coming up with a measure of importance of system components. Firstly, it permits the analyst to determine which components merit the most additional research and development to improve overall system reliability at minimum cost or effort. Secondly, it may suggest the most efficient way to diagnose system failure by generating a repair checklist for an operator to follow. It should be noted that no measure of importance can be expected to be universally best irrespective of usage purpose. In this project we will present a new and general approach to importance measures related to multistate systems. Particular focus is put on a class of repairable directed network flow systems. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my very great appreciation to my supervisor Arne Bang Huseby. Thank you for introducing me to a new and interesting field, and for providing me with an exciting topic. You have been a great support and motivated me during this period. I appreciate your feedback, contributions and valuable comments during the writing process. I would also like to thank my family and colleagues for their support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my significant other Aksel, for keeping me motivated throughout this short but intense period. Oslo, December 2018 Martyna Kalinowska
Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System

The problems of medical care confront us daily: a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. "Medical care is in crisis," we are repeatedly told, and so it is. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well. Enter David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's health care task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues in Your Money or Your Life that health care has in fact improved exponentially over the last fifty years, and that the successes of our system suggest ways in which we might improve care, make the system easier to deal with, and extend coverage to all Americans. Cutler applies an economic analysis to show that our spending on medicine is well worth it-and that we could do even better by spending more. Further, millions of people with easily manageable diseases, from hypertension to depression to diabetes, receive either too much or too little care because of inefficiencies in the way we reimburse care, resulting in poor health and in some cases premature death. The key to improving the system, Cutler argues, is to change the way we organize health care. Everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and payments should be based on the quality of services provided not just on the amount of cutting and poking performed. Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming health care-one that promises to break through the stalemate of failed reform.
Family Support Network for Adolescent Cannabis Users

This is volume 3 of a series of 5 treatment guides of interventions for adolescents with cannabis use problems devised in the US (see related publication links below). This guide describes a twelve session intervention for families for adolescent cannabis users. It is designed to be used alongside the interventions described in Vols 1 & 2 which are focused on the adolescent. The twelve sessions combine home visits and group sessions for family members. The aim is to support the family network to help maintain changes to the young person’s cannabis use. The guide contains many useful handouts and resources in addition to the manual for the individual family and group sessions. This intervention can be carried out by drug workers with additional competences and appropriate supervision.
Cardiovascular responses to lumbar core muscle stability exercise in young adults having postural low back pain

Background: Postural low back pain is a significant public health problem worldwide, due to the changing lifestyle. Many interventions are used in the treatment of postural low back pain, among them core stability exercise is one of the treatment plans. After exercise, cardiovascular system produces significant changes in parameters such as blood pressure (BP), heart rate, and respiratory rate. Aims and Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate cardiovascular response to lumbar core muscle stability exercise in healthy young adults having postural low back pain. Materials and Method: In the study, 40 patients with postural low back pain were considered. First, baseline parameters such as BP, heart rate, and respiratory rate were measured and recorded as L1, then all the patients were taught to perform lumbar core stability exercise (drawing in maneuver) and asked to hold for 10 s and 10 repetitions were performed. A pressure biofeedback was used at 40 mm Hg pressure and placed at the lower lumbar region; then patient was asked to perform exercise. After the exercise parameter were again recorded as L2. Results: Paired t-test was used to compare L1 and L2 parameters, and GraphPad software was used for the analysis. For systolic BP, t-value and p-value were 7.89 and
Comparison of Exercise Echocardiography in Patients with 18mm ATS-AP Aortic Prosthesis

Title Comparison of Exercise Echocardiography in Patients with 18mm ATS-AP Aortic Prosthesis Author(s) Odate, Tomohiro; Hashizume, Koji; Ariyoshi, Tsuneo; Taniguchi, Shinichiro; Hashimoto, Wataru; Matsukuma, Seiji; Hisatomi, Kazuki; Eishi, Kiyoyuki Citation Acta medica Nagasakiensia, 54(1), pp.15-20 ; 2009 Issue Date 2009-07 URL http://hdl.handle. net/10069/22061 Right NAOSITE: Nagasaki University's Academic Output SITE
The Problem of Hipparcos Distances To Open Clusters. II. Constraints From Nearby Field Stars

This paper examines the discrepancy between distances to nearby open clusters as determined by parallaxes from Hipparcos compared to traditional main-sequence fitting. The biggest difference is seen for the Pleiades, and our hypothesis is that if the Hipparcos distance to the Pleiades is correct, then similar subluminous zero-age main-sequence (ZAMS) stars should exist elsewhere, including in the immediate solar neighborhood. We examine a color-magnitude diagram of very young and nearby solar-type stars and show that none of them lie below the traditional ZAMS, despite the fact that the Hipparcos Pleiades parallax would place its members 0.3 mag below that ZAMS. We also present analyses and observations of solar-type stars that do lie below the ZAMS, and we show that they are subluminous because of low metallicity and that they have the kinematics of old stars.
Radiation from perfect mirrors starting from rest and the black body spectrum

We address the question of radiation emission from a perfect mirror that starts from rest and follows the trajectory z = − ln(cosh t ) till t → ∞ . We show that a correct derivation of the black body spectrum via the calculation of the Bogolubov amplitudes requires consideration of the whole trajectory and not just of its asymptotic part.
The role of bias in observational studies on oral contraceptives [letter]

The authors defend their focus on women 25-44 years old to the exclusion of younger women in their study of oral contraceptive (OC) use. This age group was selected for two reasons. First older women are more likely to have been exposed to all OCs on the market. Second a stable healthy user group from which high-risk users have already been removed is necessary to obtain a population group with sufficient exposure durations. At the time of interview 30% of women 25-44 years of age had used levonorgestrel for over 6 years compared with only 8% of 16-24 year olds. Clinical studies of OC use require a population of users in which risk groups have had a chance to experience an adverse event and to drop out of the user group. Each new OC introduction creates a new cohort of users whose risk relative to a cohort of users of another drug can be evaluated only when a certain amount of stability has developed within each successive new user group. This stability is achieved after the high-risk individuals have dropped out of both user groups in the comparison.
Parenteral nutrition in small animals

The provision of nutrition to animals via the parenteral route is an important therapeutic modality for hospitalized animals that cannot tolerate enteral nutrition (EN). Although parenteral nutrition (PN) can be an effective means of providing animals with calories, protein and other nutrients, there are a number of possible complications associated with its use that requires careful patient selection, appropriate formulation, safe and effective administration practices, and close patient monitoring. In most cases hospitalized patients that do not consume adequate quantities of food voluntarily should be supported with EN as it is the safest, most convenient, most physiologically sound and least expensive method of nutritional support (see Chapter 3). While EN support is the preferred method of nutritional support in hospitalized patients, PN is the established method of providing nutritional support to patients whose gastrointestinal tracts cannot tolerate enteral feedings (Barton, 1994; Braunschweig et al., 2001; Biffl et al., 2002). While the use of PN support has certainly increased in recent years, there is a perception that this technique is technically difficult, associated with many complications and limited to university hospitals and major referral centers. In reality, PN support can be adopted in many practices and complications can be significantly reduced with proper and meticulous care. The goals of this chapter are to outline the proper identification of patients most likely to benefit from PN, to review the process of formulating, implementing, and monitoring parenteral nutritional support, and discuss how PN can be incorporated into many practices.
Improved Z -> gamma gamma decay in the renormalizable gauge sector of the noncommutative standard model

In this work we propose the Z -> gamma gamma decay as a process strictly forbidden in the standard model, suitable for the search of noncommutativity of coordinates at very short distances. We computed the Z -> gamma gamma partial width in the framework of the recently proposed one-loop renormalizable gauge sector of the noncommutative standard model. New experimental possibilities at LHC are analyzed and a firm bound to the scale of noncommutativity parameter is set around 1 TeV.
The GS string action on AdS(3) x S(3) with Ramond-Ramond charge

We derive the classical kappa-symmetric Type IIB string action on AdS(3) x S(3) by employing the SU(1,1|2)^2 algebra. We then gauge fix kappa-symmetry in the background adapted Killing spinor gauge and present the action in a very simple form.