Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expression of Serum Amyloid A, in Normal, Dysplastic, and Neoplastic Human Colonic Mucosa: Implication for a Role in Colonic Tumorigenesis

Serum amyloid A (SAA) is an acute phase reactant, whose level in the blood is elevated in response to trauma, infection, inflammation, and neoplasia. Elevated levels of SAA in the serum of cancer patients were suggested to be of liver origin rather than a tumor cell product. The role of SAA in human malignancies has not been elucidated. We investigated the expression of SAA at various stages of human colon carcinoma progression. Nonradioactive in situ hybridization applied on paraffin tissue sections from 26 colon cancer patients revealed barely detected SAA mRNA expression in normal looking colonic epithelium. Expression was increased gradually as epithelial cells progressed through dysplasia to neoplasia. Deeply invading colon carcinoma cells showed the highest levels of SAA. Expression was also found in colon carcinoma metastases. Cells of lymphoid follicles of the intestinal wall, inflammatory cells, ganglion cells, and endothelial cells, also expressed SAA mRNA. Immunohistochemical staining revealed SAA protein expression that colocalized with SAA mRNA expression. RT-PCR analysis confirmed the expression of the SAA1 and SAA4 genes in colon carcinomas, expression that was barely detectable in normal colon tissues. These findings indicate local and differential expression of SAA in human colon cancer tissues and suggest its role in colonic tumorigenesis.
Artificial Metalloproteins with a Ruthenium Tris(bipyridyl) Complex as the Core

Creating artificial proteins such as artificial enzymes, artificial receptors, and artificial antibodies is one of the dreams of modern chemists. Until now, biomimetic chemistry, in which the amino acid residues around active sites in target proteins (enzymes) are extracted, has helped in understanding enzymatic reactions and/or designing new functional molecules. However, this approach excludes the protein backbones around the active sites, and therefore, it effectively reduces protein science to organic chemistry. On the other hand, research towards creating functional peptides, which possess similar backbones to proteins, has actively been carried out. As peptides, being smaller (MW ~10) than proteins, are generally flexible, it is important for designing functional peptides to precisely control their three-dimensional structures. As examples, the template-assisted synthetic proteins (TASP) have actively been researched; the template molecules associate with secondary structures such as a-helices and b-sheets to successfully produce functional peptides. The introduction of rigid, unnatural amino acids to control the peptides’ conformation is also effective. Ishida and co-workers have reported the molecular design of cyclic peptides with alternative natural amino acid and 3-aminobenzoic acid sequences that act as efficient phosphoester binders and as artificial ion channels. Bipyridyl groups, which can coordinate with a variety of metal ions, have sometimes been utilized to control peptide conformations and/or design functional peptides. a-Helical or collagenous peptides have been assembled by using bipyridyl moieties through coordination with a metal ion. A peptide with a bipyridyl group has also been found to produce the b-sheet conformation upon treatment with a metal ion. Many amino acids with a bipyridyl group as a side chain or a backbone have been synthesized. We propose the molecular design of artificial proteins utilizing 5’-amino-2,2’-bipyridine-5-carboxylic acid (5Bpy) as an unnatural amino acid (Scheme 1). In the design, the peptides containing three 5Bpy residues fold by coordination with a metal ion. The designed proteins are considered to have an artificial motif, not naturally occurring protein motifs. Furthermore, by using the ruthenium(II) ion, the central metal com-
Diagnosis of pregnancy and experimental extension of gestation in the pipistrelle bat, Pipistrellus pipistrellus.

The reliability of palpation, weighing, radiography and the state of the nipples is discussed in relation to the determination of pregnancy in the pipistrelle. In two series of pregnant pipistrelles, the mean length of gestation has been extended by the induction of torpor at different stages during pregnancy and this extension is in good agreement with the period of torpor. Pregnancy is thought to be extended in response to adverse conditions in the natural environment, and the present concept of a standard gestation period for these heterothermic animals is therefore questioned.
An In-Air Signature Verification System Using Wi-Fi Signals

This paper presents a Wi-Fi based system for in-air signature verification. The proposed system is able to authenticate in-air signatures which are captured through Wi-Fi signals. The system consists of four main stages namely, data acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction and matching. The proposed system shows an average equal error rate of 4.31% on an in-house dataset which consists of 1040 samples collected from 13 subjects. This experiment shows that the Wi-Fi signals can be applied to in-air signature verification effectively.
Knowledge acquisition in incomplete fuzzy information systems via the rough set approach

Abstract: Machine learning can extract desired knowledge from training examples and ease the development bottleneck in building expert systems. Most learning approaches derive rules from complete and incomplete data sets. If attribute values are known as possibility distributions on the domain of the attributes, the system is called an incomplete fuzzy information system. Learning from incomplete fuzzy data sets is usually more difficult than learning from complete data sets and incomplete data sets. In this paper, we deal with the problem of producing a set of certain and possible rules from incomplete fuzzy data sets based on rough sets. The notions of lower and upper generalized fuzzy rough approximations are introduced. By using the fuzzy rough upper approximation operator, we transform each fuzzy subset of the domain of every attribute in an incomplete fuzzy information system into a fuzzy subset of the universe, from which fuzzy similarity neighbourhoods of objects in the system are derived. The fuzzy lower and upper approximations for any subset of the universe are then calculated and the knowledge hidden in the information system is unravelled and expressed in the form of decision rules.
A New Receiver Architecture for MIMO Beam-Forming Applications

Owing to its reduction in hardware complexity and power consumption, hybrid beam-forming has become one of the most promising substitutes for fully digital beam-forming (FDB) in large antenna array systems. In conventional hybrid beam-forming (CHB) architecture, phase shifters are designed to operate at RF band and inaccuracies of the RF phase shifts are unavoidable in practice. Furthermore, these RF phase shifters still consume considerable power if implemented as active devices or a large space/area on dice (form factor) if implemented as passive devices. This issue becomes more critical for massive MIMO systems where lower power consumption and smaller form factor are much desired due to the large number of antenna elements. Aiming at reducing power consumption and form factor of the receiver, we investigate a new method to insert phase shifts via adjusting sampling-offset on sample and hold (S&H) circuit. Based on this method, a new receiver architecture with RF under-sampling technique and adjustable S&H circuit is proposed. We also develop a method to find out the required phase shifts for the beam-forming in the proposed receiver architecture. Performance evaluation at 28 GHz band shows that the proposed technology gives practically the same bit error rate (BER) performance as the CHB architecture but yields advantages in terms of power consumption, chip area, and beam-forming phase errors, which makes it appealing for massive MIMO systems.
An Overview of Methods for Calculating the Burden of Disease Due to Specific Risk Factors

There are a number of measures that quantify the public health burden due to specific risk factors for specific diseases. Although these measures are of importance for policymakers, epidemiologists do not often calculate them or may be unfamiliar with some of the issues involved when they do. The primary measure of interest is the attributable fraction (AF), representing the fraction of cases or deaths from a specific disease that would not have occurred in the absence of exposure to a specific risk factor either in the exposed population or the population as a whole. AFs can be multiplied by the total number of cases of a given disease to obtain a “body count”—the absolute number of preventable cases due to a specific risk factor. Two other measures of public health burden, used in conjunction with AFs, are attributable years-of-life-lost and attributable disability-adjusted life-years. We provide an overview of the AF and related measures and discuss some of the specific issues involved in calculating AFs. These issues include calculating the variance of AFs (such as Monte Carlo sensitivity methods), biases arising from some formulas for the AF, sources of data for calculating AFs, dependence of AFs on basic decisions about what exposure–disease associations are causal, and extrapolation from the source population to the target population.
Side pumping of double-clad photonic crystal fibers

Side-pumping of double clad photonic crystal fibers is experimentally demonstrated. Optical access to the multimode cladding is obtained by collapsing the airholes over a short length of fiber while leaving the inner single mode core undisturbed. Coupling efficiencies above 90% are obtained. A side-pumped Yb fiber laser with a slope efficiency of 81% is demonstrated using this method.
Human intestinal mononuclear cells. I. Investigation of antibody-dependent, lectin-induced, and spontaneous cell-mediated cytotoxic capabilities.

Abstract Cytotoxic mononuclear cells may mediate inflammatory bowel disease but have not been demonstrated in human intestinal mucosa. Therefore, we have examined human intestinal specimens for the presence of cytotoxic mononuclear cells and lymphocytes. Using a sequential dithiothreitol-EDTAcollagenase technique, we examined mononuclear cells obtained from mucosa of 37 intestinal specimens consisting of inflammatory bowel disease or normal control tissue adjacent to tumor or diverticular disease, all obtained at surgery. Surface characteristics revealed a mean of 7% ± 1% Fc receptor bearing cells for control colon and 6% ± 2% for inflammatory bowel disease intestine. Lectin-induced cellular cytotoxicity with human red blood cells as targets was seen with unseparated mononuclear cells and macrophage depleted lymphocytes from peripheral blood (64% and 46%, respectively), control colons (22%, 19%) ulcerative colitis colons (29%, 18%), and Crohn's intestinal specimens (43%, 29%). Antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity with chicken red blood cells as targets was also seen with unsepa rated mononuclear cells and macrophage-depleted lymphocytes from peripheral blood (44% and 45%, respectively) control colons (15%, 24%), ulcerative colitis colons (24%, 20%), and Crohn's intestinal specimens (17%, 13%). In contrast, using Chang cell lines as targets, antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity was observed with peripheral blood mononuclear cells but not with control or inflammatory bowel disease intestinal cells. Spontaneous cell-mediated cytotoxicity against Chang or K562 cell lines was also not observed with intestinal cells. These experiments demonstrate that Fc-receptor bearing mononuclear cells are present in control and IBD human intestinal mucosa. Furthermore, lamina propria lymphocytes from control and inflammatory bowel disease intestine mediate lectin-induced cellular cytotoxicity against human red blood cells and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity against chicken red blood cells, but do not mediate cytotoxicity against cell line cells.
Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data

Measurements of the galaxy stellar mass function are crucial to understand the formation of galaxies in the Universe. In a hierarchical clustering paradigm, it is plausible that there is a connection between the properties of galaxies and their environments. Evidence for environmental trends has been established in the local Universe. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) provides large photometric data sets that enable further investigation of the assembly of mass. In this study, we use similar to 3.2 million galaxies from the (South Pole Telescope) SPTEast field in the DES science verification (SV) data set. From grizY photometry, we derive galaxy stellar masses and absolute magnitudes, and determine the errors on these properties using Monte Carlo simulations using the full photometric redshift probability distributions. We compute galaxy environments using a fixed conical aperture for a range of scales. We construct galaxy environment probability distribution functions and investigate the dependence of the environment errors on the aperture parameters. We compute the environment components of the galaxy stellar mass function for the redshift range 0.15 < z < 1.05. For z < 0.75, we find that the fraction of massive galaxies is larger in high-density environment than in lowdensity environments. We show that the low-density and high-density components converge with increasing redshift up to z similar to 1.0 where the shapes of the mass function components are indistinguishable. Our study shows how high-density structures build up around massive galaxies through cosmic time.
cDNA Cloning and Characterization of Murine Transcriptional Enhancer Factor-1-related Protein 1, a Transcription Factor That Binds to the M-CAT Motif (*)

The M-CAT motif is a cis-regulatory DNA sequence that is essential for muscle-specific transcription of several genes. Previously, we had shown that both muscle-specific (A1) and ubiquitous (A2) factors bind to an essential M-CAT motif in the myosin heavy chain β gene and that the ubiquitous factor is transcriptional enhancer factor (TEF)-1. Here we report the isolation of mouse cDNAs encoding two forms (a and b) of a TEF-1-related protein, TEFR1. The TEFR1a cDNA encodes a 427-amino acid protein. The coding region of TEFR1b is identical to 1a in both nucleotide and predicted amino acid sequence except for the absence of 43 amino acids downstream of the TEA DNA-binding domain. Three TEFR1 transcripts (7, 3.5, and 2 kilobase pairs) are enriched in differentiated skeletal muscle (myotubes) relative to undifferentiated skeletal muscle (myoblasts) and non-muscle cells in culture. In situ hybridization analysis indicated that TEFR1 transcripts are enriched in the skeletal muscle lineage during mouse embryogenesis. Transient expression of fusion proteins of TEFR1 and the yeast GAL4 DNA-binding domain in cell lines activated the expression of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter constructs containing GAL4 binding sites, indicating that TEFR1 contains an activation domain. An anti-TEFR1 polyclonal antibody supershifted the muscle-specific M-CAT•A1 factor complex in gel mobility shift assays, suggesting that TEFR1 is a major component of this complex. Our results suggest that TEFR1 might play a role in the embryonic development of skeletal muscle in the mouse.
Clinical predictors of mechanical ventilation in guillain-barré syndrome (gbs)

Introduction: Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome is the most common cause of acute flaccid paralysis worldwide. One of the most serious complications is respiratory failure warranting mechanical ventilation which is required in about 30% of the patients. Various studies have been carried out to identify clinical factors which could help identify patients with impending respiratory failure and facilitate elective mechanical ventilation in these patients to reduce the associated mortality. Material and methods: 92 patients diagnosed with GBS were enrolled from February 6, 2013 to August 5, 2013 in department of Neurology, PIMS, Islamabad. Each patient was then be managed accordingly and monitored for therequirement of ventilatory support. Based on the need of Mechanical ventilation patients were divided in to 2 groups: ventilated (Group 1) and non-ventilated (Group 2) and presence of various clinical factors were assessed in both groups. Results: The mean age of patients was 33.83 ± 16.91 years with a male preponderance (68.48%). 31 (33.7%) patients of GBS needed mechanical ventilation.Patients requiring mechanical ventilation tended to have more severe disease evidenced by the presence of bulbar dysfunction (P=.000), autonomic dysfunction (P = .000), and upper limb paralysis (P = .010). The presence of a preceding gastrointestinal illness did not prove to be an independent predictor of mechanical ventilation on multivariate analysis. Conclusion: The course of patients with severe GBS leading to mechanical ventilation can, to some extent, be predicted on the basis of clinical factors. This study identifies bulbar dysfunction and dysautonomia as significant independent predictors of mechanical ventilation.
A 58 . 6 mW Real-Time Programmable Object Detector with Multi-Scale Multi-Object Support Using Deformable Parts Model on 1920 x 1080 Video at 30 fps

This paper presents a programmable, energy-efficient and realtime object detection accelerator using deformable parts models (DPM), with 2x higher accuracy than traditional rigid body models. With 8 deformable parts detection, three methods are used to address the high computational complexity: classification pruning for 33x fewer parts classification, vector quantization for 15x memory size reduction, and feature basis projection for 2x reduction of the cost of each classification. The chip is implemented in 65nm CMOS technology, and can process HD (1920x1080) images at 30fps without any off-chip storage while consuming only 58.6mW (0.94nJ/pixel, 1168 GOPS/W). The chip has two classification engines to simultaneously detect two different classes of objects. With a tested high throughput of 60fps, the classification engines can be time multiplexed to detect even more than two object classes. It is energy scalable by changing the pruning factor or disabling the parts classification.
Variable Selection for Logistic Regression Using a Prediction‐Focused Information Criterion

Summary In biostatistical practice, it is common to use information criteria as a guide for model selection. We propose new versions of the focused information criterion (FIC) for variable selection in logistic regression. The FIC gives, depending on the quantity to be estimated, possibly different sets of selected variables. The standard version of the FIC measures the mean squared error of the estimator of the quantity of interest in the selected model. In this article, we propose more general versions of the FIC, allowing other risk measures such as the one based on Lp error. When prediction of an event is important, as is often the case in medical applications, we construct an FIC using the error rate as a natural risk measure. The advantages of using an information criterion which depends on both the quantity of interest and the selected risk measure are illustrated by means of a simulation study and application to a study on diabetic retinopathy.
Identification of Mouse MD-2 Residues Important for Forming the Cell Surface TLR4-MD-2 Complex Recognized by Anti-TLR4-MD-2 Antibodies, and for Conferring LPS and Taxol Responsiveness on Mouse TLR4 by Alanine-Scanning Mutagenesis1

The expression of MD-2, which associates with Toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 on the cell surface, confers LPS and LPS-mimetic Taxol responsiveness on TLR4. Alanine-scanning mutagenesis was performed to identify the mouse MD-2 residues important for conferring LPS and Taxol responsiveness on mouse TLR4, and for forming the cell surface TLR4-MD-2 complex recognized by anti-TLR4-MD-2 Ab MTS510. Single alanine mutations were introduced into mouse MD-2 (residues 17–160), and the mutants were expressed in a human cell line expressing mouse TLR4. Mouse MD-2 mutants, in which a single alanine mutation was introduced at Cys37, Leu71, Leu78, Cys95, Tyr102, Cys105, Glu111, Val113, Ile117, Pro118, Phe119, Glu136, Ile138, Leu146, Cys148, or Thr152, showed dramatically reduced ability to form the cell surface mouse TLR4-mouse MD-2 complex recognized by MTS510, and the mutants also showed reduced ability to confer LPS and Taxol responsiveness. In contrast, mouse MD-2 mutants, in which a single alanine mutation was introduced at Tyr34, Tyr36, Gly59, Val82, Ile85, Phe126, Pro127, Gly129, Ile153, Ile154, and His155 showed normal ability to form the cell surface mouse TLR4-mouse MD-2 complex recognized by MTS510, but their ability to confer LPS and Taxol responsiveness was apparently reduced. These results suggest that the ability of MD-2 to form the cell surface mouse TLR4-mouse MD-2 complex recognized by MTS510 is essential for conferring LPS and Taxol responsiveness on TLR4, but not sufficient. In addition, the required residues at codon numbers 34, 85, 101, 122, and 153 for the ability of mouse MD-2 to confer LPS responsiveness are partly different from those for Taxol responsiveness.
Communication skills, cultural challenges and individual support: challenges of international medical graduates in a Canadian healthcare environment

Physicians require good communication skills to develop effective patient–physician relationships. Externally funded international medical graduates (IMGs) move directly from their home countries to complete residency training at the University of Ottawa, Canada. They must learn quickly how to work with patients, families and colleagues. A detailed needs assessment was designed to assess IMGs’ communication skill needs through focus groups, interviews and surveys with IMGs, program directors, allied healthcare professionals and experts in communication skills. There was a high degree of consensus amongst all participants concerning specific educational needs for communication skills and training issues related to the healthcare system for externally funded IMGs. Specific recommendations include (1) English-language skills; (2) how to get things done in the hospital/healthcare system; (3) opportunities to practise specific skills, e.g. negotiating treatment, (4) adequate support system for IMGs; (5) faculty and staff education on the cultural challenges faced by IMGs.