Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A CROSS SECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF MISSED PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS IN THE GENERAL MEDICAL INPATIENT WARDS

: Introduction: Tuberculosis is a major health problem in Brazil. It is estimated that only 75% of all cases are detected, and that 76% of them are cured. Objectives: The main objective of the study is to analyse the missed pulmonary tuberculosis in the general medical inpatient wards. Material and methods: This cross sectional study was conducted in Rawalpindi Medical University Rawalpindi during June 2019 to March 2020. Using a standard chart, we recorded the patient identification, place of origin, lasting of symptoms, reason for admission, previous pulmonary Tb records, HIV serum testing, location of Tb and way of diagnosing, side effects presented to the antituberculosis therapy during hospitalization, need to be transferred to the ICU or the respiratory isolation ward, hospitalization time. Results: The data was collected from 120 patients of pulmonary TB. The mean duration of symptoms upon admission was 2.9 months. Previous Tb was reported by 32 patients (23%), 37.5% of which had been discharged, 34.4% had abandoned Tb treatment, 15.6% were under treatment upon admission, and 12.5% were admitted due to multi-resistant Tb (MRTB). Serum testing for HIV was positive in 42% of the studied patients. HIV-positive patients presented a higher occurrence of extrapulmonary Tb. Conclusion: It is concluded that TB cases are being “missed” in the general medical inpatient wards in hospitals in Pakistan.
6G BRAINS Deliverable D3.1 3D Laser measurement of one factory at Bosch with 3D cloud scanner and 3D hand scanner

The present report introduces the results of an extensive 3D laser measurement campaign with the objective of obtaining a precise raytracing model from point cloud data in an industrial environment. The measurements were conducted in a Bosch factory in Germany. The resulting model is tested with different raytracing tools and contrasted with multiband radio frequency measurements, simultaneously conducted in the same scenario. This raytracing model allows simulations with spatial consistency over the different bands of interest in 6G BRAINS, providing an accurate geometrical representation of the environment from the propagation properties for precise localization applications.
New Service Robot Controlled by Human Eye Which Allows Patients in Hospitals Self-Services Remotely

New service robot controlled by human eye which allows patients in hospitals self-service and speaks remotely. Patients’ sight can be estimated with camera images which are mounted on their glass. Also, patients may control the service robot by using the estimated sight for choosing some functions in the menu (moving to anywhere they want, talking to the other persons, etc.). Three types of command (move forward, turn left, and turn right) are available for robot control. These commands can be selected by looking to the center, right and left directions. Patients can create sentences by choosing desired keys from the keyboard which is shown in their head mount display. By using text to speech function, they can talk with some other persons. On the other hand, the service robot has another camera at the tip of the robot for capturing the scenery. Between robot and user, they are separated by distance. The robot streams the scenery video and receives command sending by the patients as clients. The patients could control the robot remotely even in the long distance because user could see the scenery in the front of robot. The performance of the robot is evaluated for the routes including obstacles which are designated in the hospital. All the functions are confirmed together with moving performance.
RMHP_A_247633 443..451

1Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospital St. Anna, Ferrara, Italy; 2Department of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Prevention, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy; 3Department of Nursing, Maimonides Biomedical Research Institute of Cordoba (IMIBIC)/University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain Purpose: Burden of comorbidities appears to be related to clinical outcomes in hospitalized patients. Clinical stratification of admitted patients could be obtained calculating a comorbidity score, which represents the simplest way to identify the severity of patients’ clinical conditions and a practical approach to assess prevalent comorbidities. Our aim was to validate a modified Elixhauser score for predicting in-hospital mortality (IHM) in internal medicine admissions and to compare it with a different one derived from clinical data previously used in a similar setting, having a good prognostic accuracy. Patients and Methods: A single-center retrospective study enrolled all patients admitted to internal medicine department between January and June 2016. A modified Elixhauser score was calculated from chart review and administrative data; moreover, a second prognostic index was calculated from chart review only. Comorbidity scores were compared using c-statistic. Results: We analyzed 1614 individuals without selecting the reason for admission, 224 (13.9%) died during hospital stay. Deceased subjects were older (83.3±9.1 vs 78.4±13.5 years; p<0.001) and had higher burden of comorbidities. The modified Elixhauser score calculated by administrative data and by chart review and the comparator one was 18.13 ±9.36 vs 24.43±11.27 vs 7.63±3.3, respectively, and the c-statistic was 0.758 (95% CI 0.727–0.790), 0.811 (95% CI 0.782–0.840) and 0.740 (95% CI 0.709–0.771), respectively. Conclusion: The new modified Elixhauser score showed a similar performance to a previous clinical prognostic index when it was calculated using administrative data; however, its performance improved if calculation was based on chart review.
IndividualsImmunodeficiency Virus Type 1-Infected Ligand Production in Human Contributes to Decreased Soluble CD40 Antiplatelet Activity of Valproic Acid

CD40L is a type II membrane glycoprotein of the TNF family that is found on activated T cells, B cells, and platelets. We previously reported that the soluble form of this inﬂammatory mediator (sCD40L) is elevated in the plasma and cerebrospinal ﬂuid of HIV-1–infected, cognitively impaired individuals. In this study, we demonstrate that the mood-stabilizing drug valproic acid (VPA) reduces sCD40L levels in plasma samples of HIV-1–infected patients ( n = 23) and in washed human platelets, which are the main source of circulating sCD40L. VPA also inhibited HIV-1 transactivator of transcription-induced release of sCD40L and platelet factor 4 in C57BL/6 mice. The mechanism by which VPA was able to do so was investigated, and we demonstrate that VPA, a known glycogen synthase kinase 3 b inhibitor, blocks platelet activating factor-induced activation of glycogen synthase kinase 3 b in platelets in a manner that alters sCD40L release from platelets. These data reveal that VPA has antiplatelet activity, and they convey important implications for the potential of VPA as an adjunct therapy not only for cognitively impaired patients with HIV-1 infection, but also numerous inﬂammatory diseases for which such antiplatelet therapies are currently lacking. The Journal of Immunology , 2011, 186: 000–000.
Work in Progress: Veterinary Medicine as a Context for Student Reasoning in a Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Course

Kristen Wendell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Adjunct Associate Professor of Education at Tufts University. Her research efforts at at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach focus on supporting discourse and design practices during K-12, teacher education, and collegelevel engineering learning experiences, and increasing access to engineering in the elementary school experience, especially in under-resourced schools. In 2016 she was a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). https://engineering.tufts. edu/me/people/faculty/kristenbethke-wendell
John David Barrow. 29 November 1952—26 September 2020

John Barrow wrote dozens of books and hundreds of papers, including more than 10 papers and one book during his final illness, addressing a grand problem: why is the universe the way it is? What is the fundamental nature of physics, and what are its cosmological outcomes? His most famous book was on the Anthropic Principle with Frank Tipler, and his most significant physics research was on the possibility of a variation of the fundamental constants of physics—which, if true, requires a rejigging of our foundational physics theories. He was an outstanding communicator of science to the public, being asked to lecturer at as varied places as Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. His most important public service was as director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, for which he was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Educational Achievement by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. He was awarded many other prizes, including the Templeton Prize, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, both the Kelvin Medal and the Dirac Gold Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Faraday Medal of the Royal Society.
Lifespan extending properties of Kalanchoe daigremontiana plant extracts in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract. Kalanchoe daigremontiana, commonly known as mother of thousands and the alligator plant, is a traditional remedy that has been used in various countries to treat inflammation and related disorders. The long-standing use of this plant makes it a promising candidate for the discovery of new anti-inflammatory and anti-aging compounds. Varying concentrations of K. daigremontiana extract (water (H2O), hexane (Hex), methanol (MeOH), chloroform (CHCl3) and ethyl acetate (EtOAc)) were tested on Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the yeast were tolerant of all extract concentrations examined. The extracts were then tested for lifespan altering effects in yeast utilizing the growth-based lifespan measuring DeaD (Death of Daughters) assay. It was found that each extract under multiple concentrations increased replicative lifespan. Furthermore, extracts from the EtOAc extract were able to overcome the powerful lifespan shortening effects of the sirtuin inhibitor nicotinamide. The increase in yeast lifespan with the addition of these extracts, indicates the value of K. daigremontiana in the study of lifespan and the potential for the development of drugs to combat age-related disease, inflammation and to extend healthspan/ lifespan.
Preservation of Lyapunov-Theoretic Proofs: From Real to Floating-Point Numbers

In [3] Feron presents how Lyapunov-theoretic proofs of stability can be migrated toward computer- readable and veriﬁable certiﬁcates of control software behavior by relying of Floyd’s and Hoare’s proof system. However, Feron’s proofs are addressed towards exact, real arithmetic and do not accurately represent the behavior of realistic programs run with machine arithmetic. We address the issue of errors resulting from the use of ﬂoating-point arithmetic: we present an approach to translate Feron’s proof invariants on real arithmetic to similar invariants on ﬂoating-point numbers and show how our methodology applies to prove stability, thus allowing to verify whether the stability invariant still holds when the controller is implemented. We study in details the open-loop system of Feron’s paper. We also use the same approach for Feron’s closed-loop system, but the constraints are too tights to show stability in this second case: more leeway should be introduced in the proof on real numbers, otherwise the resulting system might be unstable.
Parallel space-time likelihood optimization for air pollution prediction on large-scale systems

Gaussian geostatistical space-time modeling is an effective tool for performing statistical inference of field data evolving in space and time, generalizing spatial modeling alone at the cost of the greater complexity of operations and storage, and pushing geostatistical modeling even further into the arms of high-performance computing. It makes inferences for missing data by leveraging space-time measurements of one or more fields. We propose a high-performance implementation of a widely applied space-time model for large-scale systems using a two-level parallelization technique. At the inner level, we rely on state-of-the-art dense linear algebra libraries and parallel runtime systems to perform complex matrix operations required to evaluate the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). At the outer level, we parallelize the optimization process using a distributed implementation of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. At this level, parallelization is accomplished using MPI sub-communicators, such that the nodes in each sub-communicator perform a single MLE iteration at a time. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we assess the accuracy of the newly implemented space-time model on a set of large-scale synthetic space-time datasets. Moreover, we use the proposed implementation to model two air pollution datasets from the Middle East and US regions with 550 spatial locations X730 time slots and 945 spatial locations X500 time slots, respectively. The evaluation shows that the proposed approach satisfies high prediction accuracy on both synthetic datasets and real particulate matter (PM) datasets in the context of the air pollution problem. We achieve up to 757.16 TFLOPS/s using 1024 nodes (75% of the peak performance) using 490K geospatial locations on Shaheen-II Cray XC40 system.
Distributed-memory simulations of turbulent flows on modern GPU systems using an adaptive pencil decomposition library

This paper presents a performance analysis of pencil domain decomposition methodologies for three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes for turbulence simulations, on several large GPU-accelerated clusters. The performance was assessed for the numerical solution of the Navier-Stokes equations in two codes which require the calculation of Fast-Fourier Transforms (FFT): a tri-periodic pseudo-spectral solver for isotropic turbulence, and a finite-difference solver for canonical turbulent flows, where the FFTs are used in its Poisson solver. Both codes use a newly developed transpose library that automatically determines the optimal domain decomposition and communication backend on each system. We compared the performance across systems with very different node topologies and available network bandwidth, to show how these characteristics impact decomposition selection for best performance. Additionally, we assessed the performance of several communication libraries available on these systems, such as Open-MPI, IBM Spectrum MPI, Cray MPI, the NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL), and NVSHMEM. Our results show that the optimal combination of communication backend and domain decomposition is highly system-dependent, and that the adaptive decomposition library is key in ensuring efficient resource usage with minimal user effort.
ECT in patient with treatment resistant schizophrenia: A case study

I signal transduction pathways are considered to contribute to the etiology of schizophrenia. However, components of trophic factor signaling have not been considered even though neurotrophins such as BDNF are crucially involved in neurodevelopment and synaptic connectivity. Here we describe new de novo mis-sense mutations in ARMS/Kidins220 and TRIO genes in exome sequencing a cohort of unrelated and ethnically diverse schizophrenia-affected subjects. The two genes gave the highest genetic burden among the neurotrophin pathway genes and are highly expressed in cortex and hippocampus. These two genes are of particular interest since they are downstream of BDNF and are involved in spine formation, synaptic plasticity and dendrite formation and growth cone collapse. The ARMS/Kidins220 protein is tyrosine phosphorylated by Trk and ephrin receptors and not by other growth factor receptors. TRIO is a scaffold protein, which associates with ARMS/Kidins220 and forms a ternary complex with SorCS2 and p75, which leads to growth cone collapse. Hence, this exome analysis suggested that the two scaffold proteins, ARMS/Kidins220 and TRIO, act in the neurotrophin pathway to regulate morphological changes.
Analysis of Fall Detection Systems: A Review

Since falls are a major public health problem among older people, the number of systems aimed at detecting them has increased dramatically over recent years. This work presents an extensive literature review of fall detection systems, including comparisons among various kinds of studies. It aims to serve as a reference for both clinicians and biomedical engineers planning or conducting field investigations. Challenges, issues and trends in fall detection have been identified after the reviewing work. The number of studies using context-aware techniques is still increasing but there is a new trend towards the integration of fall detection into smart phones as well as the use of machine learning methods in the detection algorithm. We have also identified challenges regarding performance under real-life conditions, usability, and user acceptance as well as issues related to power consumption, real-time operations, sensing limitations, privacy and record of real-life falls.
Walk Environment Analysis Using MY VISION: Toward a Navigation System Providing Visual Assistance

This paper proposes a method of analyzing a human walk environment using MY VISION. MY VISION is an ego-camera and a computer system which analyzes a video obtained from the ego-camera to acquire certain visual information useful for human daily activities. The system is expected to be a virtual eye of a visually impaired person or the third eye of a pedestrian absorbed in a mobile phone. The proposed method keeps in a database the background images of key points along a sidewalk and judges if a MY VISION user is walking along the sidewalk or if he/she has come to a crosswalk by referring to the backgrounds. If the former, the method ﬁnds a safe road region on the sidewalk, whereas, if the latter, it searches for the crosswalk for ﬁnding an appropriate walk direction and a traﬃc light to know the proper timing to cross it. Experimental results show eﬀectiveness of the proposed method.
Substrate dependent Abcg2/Bcrp1-mediated interactions: consideration of multiple binding sites in in vitro assay design

In vitro assays are frequently used for the screening of substrates and inhibitors of transporter-mediated efflux. Examining directional flux across MDCKII cell monolayers that over express a transporter protein is particularly useful in identifying whether or not a candidate compound is an inhibitor or substrate for that transport system. Studies that use a single substrate or inhibitor in competition assays can be challenging to interpret due to the possible multiple mechanisms involved in substrate/inhibitor-protein interactions. During our previous studies of substrate-inhibitor-transporter interactions, we observed differences in BCRP inhibition depending on the substrate and the inhibitor. Therefore, we investigated BCRP-mediated interactions with a 4x4 matrix of substrates and inhibitors using monolayers formed from MDCKII cells transfected with murine BCRP (Bcrp1/Abcg2). The selective BCRP inhibitor Ko143 effectively inhibited the Bcrp1-mediated transport of all substrates examined. However, GF120918, nelfinavir and Pluronic P85 exhibited differences in inhibition depending on the substrate examined. Our findings support recent reports that suggest the interactions of substrate molecules with BCRP involve multiple binding regions in the protein. The nucleoside substrates zidovudine and abacavir appear to bind to a region on BCRP that may have little or no overlap with the binding regions of either prazosin or imatinib. In conclusion, the choice of substrate or inhibitor molecules for an in vitro assay system can be crucial for the optimal design of experiments to evaluate transporter-mediated drug-drug interactions.
Integrated microprism and micro-electrode array for chronic in vivo two-photon imaging and electrophysiology across all cortical layers

Implantable microelectrode arrays (MEAs) have been widely used for multisite neural recording and stimulation in basic neurophysiological research and brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. However, exactly how neural electrodes interact with brain cells remains poorly understood. Two-photon microscopy (TPM) is a valuable tool to observe cellular activities in vivo, but the imaging depth is usually limited to the superficial brain regions. In this work, we build a multi-functional device by integrating a microprism with a custom designed transparent MEA, allowing long-term sub cellular imaging, electrophysiological recording, and microstimulation in the same region across all cortical layers. The accessible depth is about six times deeper than the conventional method (~1000 µm vs. ~150 µm). By implanting this device in Thy1-GCaMP6s mice, we obtained stable TPM images of neuronal calcium activities across multiple cortical layers near the MEA, as well as single-unit recordings for 16 weeks. For the first time, we visualized the neuronal network activation pattern of all cortical layer in response to electrical stimulation with TPM, demonstrating the influence of stimulation location, amplitude, and frequency on neuronal activity. This novel MEA-on-microprism design provides a powerful multimodal method to investigate electrophysiology and cellular activities throughout all cortical layers in living animals.
Does the size of termite mounds affect chances of fire survival? A study of two southern African mound-building termite (Termitidae) species

The effect of fire on insects is an under-researched area of ecology, especially in southern Africa. This study focusing on two termite species, Trinervitermes trinervoides and Amitermes sp. , aims to determine whether fire survival in termites is related to mound size. 207 termite mounds were sampled across four sites on the periphery of a semi-urban area in Makhanda, South Africa. Each sampling site consisted of a pair of plots, either recently burnt (< 1 year or ~2 years since fire) or unburnt (> 2 years since fire). Mound type, dimensions, the presence of termites and termite species were recorded. Live mounds were significantly larger than dead mounds at both burnt and unburnt plots. For at least one termite species, there was a strong relationship between survivorship and size class of mounds at burnt plots but not at unburnt plots, suggesting that mound size plays a role in fire survival.
Grapevine leaf size influences vine canopy temperature

Premise Grapevine leaves have diverse shapes and sizes. Their shape and size is known to be influenced by many factors including genetics, vine phytosanitary status, environment, leaf and vine age, and node position on the shoot. In order to determine the importance of grapevine leaf shape and size to canopy temperature, we examined the relationship in five seedling populations grown in a vineyard in California, USA. Methods All of the populations had one parent with compound leaves of the Vitis piasezkii type and each population had a different second parent with non-compound leaves. In previous work, we measured leaf shape and size using 21 homologous landmarks. Here, we paired these morphology data with measurements taken using an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the canopy. By recording time of sampling and canopy temperature, we were able to determine which vines were cooler or hotter than expected, using a linear model. Results We established a relationship between leaf size and canopy temperature: vines with larger leaves were cooler than expected. In contrast, leaf shape was not strongly correlated with variation in temperature. Conclusions Ultimately, these findings indicate that vines with larger leaves may contribute to the reduction of overall vine canopy temperature, but further work is needed to determine if this is due to variation in leaf size, differences in the openness of the canopy, or other related traits.