Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensitivity Comparison of 68Ga-OPS202 and 68Ga-DOTATOC PET/CT in Patients with Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors: A Prospective Phase II Imaging Study

Radiolabeled somatostatin (sst) receptor agonists are integral to the diagnosis of gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), but detection rates, especially of liver metastases, remain limited even with PET/CT. 68Ga-OPS202 (68Ga-NODAGA-JR11; NODAGA = 1,4,7-triazacyclononane,1-glutaric acid-4,7-acetic acid and JR11 = Cpa-c(dCys-Aph(Hor)-dAph(Cbm)-Lys-Thr-Cys)-dTyr-NH2)), a novel radiolabeled sst receptor antagonist with a high affinity for the sst2 receptor, has the potential to perform better than sst receptor agonists. Here, we present the results of the phase II component of a phase I/II study that evaluated the sensitivity of 68Ga-OPS202, compared with the reference compound, 68Ga-DOTATOC (an sst receptor agonist), in PET imaging. Methods: Patients received a single 150-MBq intravenous injection of 68Ga-DOTATOC (15 μg of peptide) and 2 single 150-MBq intravenous injections of 68Ga-OPS202 (15 μg of peptide at visit 1 and 50 μg at visit 2). Whole-body PET/CT acquisitions were performed 1 h after injection on the same calibrated PET/CT scanner. Diagnostic efficacy measures were compared against contrast medium–enhanced CT or MRI as the gold standard. Two independent masked experts read the scans, and both outcomes were combined for analysis. Results: Twelve consecutive patients with low- or intermediate-grade gastroenteropancreatic NETs took part in this prospective study. Image contrast for matched malignant liver lesions was significantly higher for the 68Ga-OPS202 scans than for the 68Ga-DOTATOC scan: the median of the mean tumor-to-background SUVmax ratios were significantly higher for 15 and 50 μg of 68Ga-OPS202 (5.3 and 4.3, with interquartile ranges of 2.9–5.7 and 3.4–6.3 and P values of 0.004 and 0.008) than for 68Ga-DOTATOC (1.9, with an interquartile range of 1.4–2.9). The higher tumor-to-background ratio of 68Ga-OPS202 resulted not only in a higher detection rate of liver metastases but also in a significantly higher lesion-based overall sensitivity with the antagonist than with 68Ga-DOTATOC: 94% and 88% for 50 and 15 μg of 68Ga-OPS202, respectively, and 59% for 15 μg of 68Ga-DOTATOC (P < 0.001). Positive predictive values for 68Ga-OPS202 PET/CT and 68Ga-DOTATOC PET/CT were similar (∼98%). There were no significant differences in image contrast, sensitivity, or positive predictive values between the 2 68Ga-OPS202 peptide doses, indicating a high reproducibility. Conclusion: Preliminary diagnostic efficacy data from this phase II study indicate that 68Ga-OPS202 has high sensitivity for the detection of gastroenteropancreatic NETs. Further studies in larger patient populations are warranted.
Handwritten Signature Verification Based on Surf Features Using Hmm

Handwritten signature broadly used biometric which include elevated intrapersonal variance . Signature are generally used as the personal identification apparatus for human that the necessitate for verification system. Two types verification is performed generally online (dynamic) and offline signature verification (static). The static is offline technology that is used for documents authentication, the dynamic is online technology for signal processing and pattern recognition. The main motive of handwritten signature verification is to reduce fraud in financial transactions, security in crossing the international borders and boarding an aircraft. In this paper present the signature verification on Punjabi database of 50 persons. The features are extracted using the Gabor filter and matching is performed using SURF features and critical point matching. The classification is based on HMM classifier and the experimental results shows the verification accuracy rate of 97%. General terms: Biometrics, Signature verification, signature matching.
Measuring Implementation Fidelity in a Community-Based Parenting Intervention

Background: Establishing the feasibility and validity of implementation fidelity monitoring strategies is an important methodological step in implementing evidence-based interventions on a large scale. Objectives: The objective of the study was to examine the reliability and validity of the Fidelity Checklist, a measure designed to assess group leader adherence and competence delivering a parent training intervention (the Chicago Parent Program) in child care centers serving low-income families. Method: The sample included 9 parent groups (12 group sessions each), 12 group leaders, and 103 parents. Independent raters reviewed 106 audiotaped parent group sessions and coded group leaders' fidelity on the Adherence and Competence Scales of the Fidelity Checklist. Group leaders completed self-report adherence checklists and a measure of parent engagement in the intervention. Parents completed measures of consumer satisfaction and child behavior. Results: High interrater agreement (Adherence Scale = 94%, Competence Scale = 85%) and adequate intraclass correlation coefficients (Adherence Scale = .69, Competence Scale = .91) were achieved for the Fidelity Checklist. Group leader adherence changed over time, but competence remained stable. Agreement between group leader self-report and independent ratings on the Adherence Scale was 85%; disagreements were more frequently due to positive bias in group leader self-report. Positive correlations were found between group leader adherence and parent attendance and engagement in the intervention and between group leader competence and parent satisfaction. Although child behavior problems improved, improvements were not related to fidelity. Discussion: The results suggest that the Fidelity Checklist is a feasible, reliable, and valid measure of group leader implementation fidelity in a group-based parenting intervention. Future research will be focused on testing the Fidelity Checklist with diverse and larger samples and generalizing to other group-based interventions using a similar intervention model.
Self-perceptions of health: a prospective analysis of mortality, control, and health.

A growing number of studies show that self-perceptions of health are an important predictor of mortality. The present study was designed to extend this research by examining the relation between health perceptions and a range of other outcome measures besides mortality, including control beliefs and morbidity. The results show that older adults who rated their health as "bad/poor" and "fair" were more than twice as likely to die within three to three-and-a-half years following the initial survey than those who perceived their health as "excellent. " However, although health perceptions assessed in 1991/92 were related to health perceptions four years later, they did not predict morbidity. Health perceptions also predicted perceived control and use of control-enhancing strategies in dealing with age-related challenges, as assessed in 1995. These findings contribute to our understanding of the benefits of positive health perceptions by showing that they are connected to an adaptive psychological profile including perceptions of control and use of control-enhancing strategies that are linked to health and well-being.
The two opposing activities of adenylyl transferase reside in distinct homologous domains, with intramolecular signal transduction

Adenylyl transferase (ATase) is the bifunctional effector enzyme in the nitrogen assimilation cascade that controls the activity of glutamine synthetase (GS) in Escherichia coli. This study addresses the question of whether the two antagonistic activities of ATase (adenylylation and deadenylylation) occur at the same or at different active sites. The 945 amino acid residue ATase has been truncated in two ways, so as to produce two homologous polypeptides corresponding to amino acids 1–423 (AT‐N) and 425–945 (AT‐C). We demonstrate that ATase has two active sites; AT‐N carries a deadenylylation activity and AT‐C carries an adenylylation activity. Glutamine activates the adenylylation reaction of the AT‐C domain, whereas α‐ketoglutarate activates the deadenylylation reaction catalysed by the AT‐N domain. With respect to the regulation by the nitrogen status monitor PII, however, the adenylylation domain appears to be dependent on the deadenylylation domain: the deadenylylation activity of AT‐N depends on PII‐UMP and is inhibited by PII. The adenylylation activity of AT‐C is independent of PII (or PII‐UMP), whereas in the intact enzyme PII is required for this activity. The implications of this intramolecular signal transduction for the prevention of futile cycling are discussed.
Competencies of front-line managers in supported accommodation: Issues for practice and future research

Abstract Background Front-line managers of supported accommodation for people with intellectual disability are assumed to have a key role in the realisation of outcomes for service users. Yet, their job has been little researched. A job analysis from Minnesota that identified 142 competencies required of effective front-line managers was used to examine what was expected of the equivalent position in Victoria, Australia. Methods These competencies formed the basis of semistructured interviews with an extreme sample of 16 high-performing house supervisors and 5 more senior managers. Results Ninety-two percent of the original competences were retained, with changes in language and terminology to reflect the local context. Emergent findings highlighted the importance of house supervisors’ “orientations. ” Conclusions The findings support the proposition that the front-line manager's job is underpinned by core competencies and that the role merits further study. Issues of wider significance for human service organisations and researchers are discussed.
Linguistically Inspired Language Model Augmentation for MT

The present article reports on efforts to improve the translation accuracy of a corpus―based Machine Translation (MT) system. In order to achieve that, an error analysis performed on past translation outputs has indicated the likelihood of improving the translation accuracy by augmenting the coverage of the Target-Language (TL) side language model. The method adopted for improving the language model is initially presented, based on the concatenation of consecutive phrases. The algorithmic steps are then described that form the process for augmenting the language model. The key idea is to only augment the language model to cover the most frequent cases of phrase sequences, as counted over a TL-side corpus, in order to maximize the cases covered by the new language model entries. Experiments presented in the article show that substantial improvements in translation accuracy are achieved via the proposed method, when integrating the grown language model to the corpus-based MT system.
The effect of oxygen therapy on brain damage and cerebral pO2 in transient focal cerebral ischemia in the rat

We examined the effect of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) and normobaric oxygen (NBO) on neurologic damage and brain oxygenation before and after focal cerebral ischemia in rats. A middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO)/reperfusion rat model was used. The rats were sacrificed 22 h after reperfusion, and the infarct volume was evaluated. In study A, HBO (2.0 ATA), NBO (100% oxygen) and normobaric air (NBA) were each administered for 60 min in five different rat groups. The sizes of the infarcts after HBO and NBO applied during ischemia were 8.8 ± 2.8% and 22.8 ± 3.7% respectively of the ipsilateral non-occluded hemisphere. The infarct size after HBO applied during ischemia was statistically smaller than for NBO and NBA exposure (p < 0.01). In study B, cerebral pO2 was measured before and after MCAO and HBO exposure (2.0 ATA for 60 min) in six rats using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) oximetry. The pO2 in the ischemic hemisphere fell markedly following ischemia, while the pO2 in the contralateral hemisphere remained within the normal range. Measurements of the pO2 performed minutes after HBO exposure did not show an increase in the ischemic or normal hemispheres. The mean relative infarct size was consistent with the changes observed in study A. These data confirm the neuroprotective effects of HBO in cerebral ischemia and indicate that in vivo EPR oximetry can be an effective method to monitor the cerebral oxygenation after oxygen therapy for ischemic stroke. The ability to measure the pO2 in several sites provides important information that should help to optimize the design of hyperoxic therapies for stroke.
Age Group and Health Status Effects on Health Behavior Change

The authors explored health behavior change during 5 years, considering age/cohort, health status, and gender effects. The authors divided the sample (n = 1,064) into 4 age/cohort groups: young adults (n = 139; 19-42 years), middle-aged adults (n = 386; 43-62 years), young-old adults (n = 296; 63-72 years), and old-old adults (n = 243; 73 + years) and health status: cardiovascular disease and physical disability. Smoking and seat belt behaviors remained stable, whereas alcohol, food consumption, food preparation, physical activity, dental, and medical behaviors showed change. Change in health behaviors differed by age/cohort group and health status for food consump-tion, food preparation, and medical care, primarily showing negative change for old-old adults and positive change for individuals with cardiovascular dis-ease. Health behavior interventions need to focus on the old-old, individuals with physical disability, and on smoking and seat belt use. These specific populations and behaviors need to be targeted to promote positive health behavior change, to limit future onsets of disability and morbidity, and to prevent the occurrence of premature death.
Red cell, plasma and blood volume in healthy men measured by radiochromium (Cr51) cell tagging and hematocrit: influence of age, somatotype and habits of physical activity on the variance after regression of volumes to height and weight combined.

Methods employing radioactively tagged red cells have been widely adopted for measurement of blood volume. However, in comparison with the work which has been done with the dye (1-5) and carbon monoxide (6) methods, little attention has been given to the establishment of mean values for men and women or to study of the variance encountered among healthy subjects. Most clinical investigators have collected their own control data, based often on study of relatively few or not entirely healthy subjects (7-13). A rather large scatter of data around mean prediction values has been found by all workers, regardless of methods employed, when values for whole blood volume (Vwb), red cell volume (Vrbc) and plasma volume (Vpl) are related to body weight, height, or combinations of these measures (1-5, 13, 14). Some of this variation presumably results from differences in body composition, since blood volume correlates both with body density (5, 15) and with lean body mass (16, 17). However, it has not been shown that predictions based on total body mass are less accurate than those based on lean body mass, which requires a separate measurement (15, 16). Consideration of fat thickness and girth measurement, in addition to height and weight, was found by
A Smart Image-Based Cloud Detection System for Intrahour Solar Irradiance Forecasts

AbstractThis study proposes an automatic smart adaptive cloud identification (SACI) system for sky imagery and solar irradiance forecast. The system is deployed using off-the-shelf fish-eye cameras that offer substantial advantages in terms of cost when compared to industry-standard sky imagers. SACI uses a smart image categorization (SIC) algorithm that combines the sky images and solar irradiance measurements to classify sky conditions into three categories: clear, overcast, and partly cloudy. A cloud detection scheme, optimized for each image category, is used to quantify cloud cover from the sky images. SACI is optimized and validated against manually annotated images. Results show that SACI achieves overall classification accuracy higher than 90% and outperforms reference cloud detection methods. Cloud cover retrieved by SACI is used as an input for an artificial neural network (ANN) model that predicts 1-min average global horizontal irradiance (GHI), 5-, 10-, and 15-min ahead of time. The performan.
A nonproteolytic proteasome activity controls organelle fission in yeast

To understand the processes underlying organelle function, dynamics and inheritance, it is necessary to identify and characterize the regulatory components involved. Recently in yeast and mammals, proteins of the membrane fission machinery (Dnm1-Mdv1-Caf4-Fis1 in yeast and DLP1-FIS1 in human) have been shown to have a dual localization on mitochondria and peroxisomes, where they control mitochondrial fission and peroxisome division. Here, we show that whereas vacuole fusion is regulated by the proteasome degradation function, mitochondrial fission and peroxisomal division are not controlled by the proteasome activity but rather depend on a new function of the proteasomal lid subunit Rpn11. Rpn11 was found to regulate the Fis1-dependent fission machinery of both organelles. These findings indicate a unique role of the Rpn11 protein in mitochondrial fission and peroxisomal proliferation that is independent of its role in proteasome-associated deubiquitylation.
Wavelet features for similarity-based retrieval of logo images

This paper presents a novel signature feature representation for retrieving degraded binary document images based on graphical content that is rotation, resolution and translation insensitive. We use logos as an example of graphical regions in document images. Logos are arbitrarily complex in geometry and tend to be highly degraded. The first stage of signature extraction normalizes the logo with respect to geometrical variations using principal component analysis. The second stage extracts the wavelet projection signature representation which consists of the low-pass wavelet transform coefficients of the projections of the normalized image. Images are retrieved based on L1 distance in the wavelet projection signature space from the query. We present an exhaustive performance evaluation of retrieval performance on a database of over 2000 real-world degraded logo images. The retrieval performance as quantified by the percentage of queries where the target is in the top 16 logos retrieved from the database (in terms of distance from the query) ranges between 88 and 95%. We also synthetically degrade the logo images to study retrieval performance as a function of rotation, resolution and pixel noise introduced using the Baird document defect model and present the results of these evaluations in the paper.
Inflammatory cytokines induce apoptosis of corneal endothelium through nitric oxide.

PURPOSE Proinflammatory cytokines are integral components of the allogeneic response to a corneal transplant and contribute to the pathogenesis of graft failure that results from irreversible damage to donor corneal endothelium. As yet, the mechanism and effectors of tissue damage during graft rejection remain unidentified. In the current study, the synergistic apoptotic effect of sustained proinflammatory cytokine insult was investigated in excised cornea and in transformed and primary corneal endothelial cells. METHODS Apoptosis was assessed by tissue- and flow cytometry-based TUNEL staining. Downstream signaling events of cytokine stimulation and subsequent activation status of endothelium were studied by RT-PCR and Western blot analysis. Cellular production of NO was examined by the Griess reaction. RESULTS Prolonged exposure (48 hours) of corneal endothelium to IL-1, IFNgamma, and TNF (100 ng/mL each) resulted in induction of apoptosis. Synergy in induction of apoptosis was found after exposure to cytokine combinations. Cytokine-mediated cytotoxicity was correlated with high and sustained (up to 36 hours) endothelial activation (specifically through NF-kappaB, p38, and STAT-1), upregulation of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), and elevated de novo production of NO. Pharmacologic inhibition of iNOS elicited complete cytoprotection from inflammatory cytokine insult. CONCLUSIONS The specific release of proinflammatory cytokines from alloreactive infiltrating cells, in combination with the inflamed environment of a corneal allograft, results in apoptosis in the corneal endothelium. This effect is mediated by the de novo generation of NO and sustained activation of NF-kappaB, p38, and STAT-1. Inflammatory cytokine-induced apoptosis presents a new target for the development of interventions to prevent or attenuate endothelial injury in graft rejection.
Opportunities and Challenges: Stem Cell‐Based Therapy for the Treatment of Ischemic Stroke

Stem cell‐based therapy for ischemic stroke has been widely explored in animal models and provides strong evidence of benefits. In this review, we summarize the types of stem cells, various delivery routes, and tracking tools for stem cell therapy of ischemic stroke. MSCs, EPCs, and NSCs are the most explored cell types for ischemic stroke treatment. Although the mechanisms of stem cell‐based therapies are not fully understood, the most possible functions of the transplanted cells are releasing growth factors and regulating microenvironment through paracrine mechanism. Clinical application of stem cell‐based therapy is still in its infancy. The next decade of stem cell research in stroke field needs to focus on combining different stem cells and different imaging modalities to fully explore the potential of this therapeutic avenue: from bench to bedside and vice versa.
Automated determination of uric acid, with use of a uricase-peroxidase system.

An automated colorimetric procedure is described for the determination of serum and urine uric acid with improved specificity. Hydrogen peroxide, formed when uric acid is oxidized by uricase, oxidatively couples with 3-methyl-2-benzothiazolinone hydrazone and N,N-dimethylaniline, in the presence of peroxidase, to produce a stable, sensitive indamine dye. The method is reproducible, and the results correlate well with those obtained by a manual spectrophotometric uricase procedure. Also, the automated procedure is resistant to many added reducing substances that cause positive interferences in alkaline phosphotungstate methods.
Emodin Regulates Apoptotic Pathway in Human Liver Cancer Cells

Emodin, a natural anthraquinone, has been reported to possess antiproliferative effects in many cancer cell lines. However, anticancer mechanism against human liver cancer remains unclear. In this study, we observed that emodin induced apoptosis in HepG2 cells and caused a significant accumulation of cells in the G1 phase. Western blot data showed that emodin treatment caused the increasing of release of cytochrome c into cytosol from mitochondria and the activation of caspase‐8 and caspase‐9, which suggest that the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways could be involved. Emodin treatment also resulted in a dose‐dependent accumulation of intracellular reactive oxygen species. Furthermore, emodin increased the protein level of p53 and decreased the protein level of NF‐κB/p65 in HepG2 cells, which indicated these two regulators might play a role in emodin‐induced apoptosis. Computational modeling showed that emodin could directly bind to the BH3 domain of Bcl‐2 through forming one hydrogen bond with Ala146 residue in Bcl‐2. From these examinations, emodin not only significantly downregulated expression of Bcl‐2 but also inhibited the heterodimerization of Bcl‐2 with Bax because of strong interaction between emodin and Bcl‐2. These suggest that emodin induces apoptosis in liver cancer cell line through a multifaceted complex cascade of events. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.