Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gaps in the implementation of antenatal syphilis detection and treatment in health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa

Background Syphilis in pregnancy is an under-recognized public health problem, especially in sub-Saharan Africa which accounts for over 60% of the global burden of syphilis. If left untreated, more than half of maternal syphilis cases will result in adverse pregnancy outcomes including stillbirth and fetal loss, neonatal death, prematurity or low birth weight, and neonatal infections. Achieving universal coverage of antenatal syphilis screening and treatment has been the focus of the global campaign for the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of syphilis. However, little is known about the availability of antenatal syphilis screening and treatment across sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of this study was to estimate the ‘likelihood of appropriate care’ for antenatal syphilis screening and treatment by analyzing health facility surveys and household surveys conducted from 2010 to 2015 in 12 sub-Saharan African countries. Methods In this secondary data analysis, we linked indicators of health facility readiness to provide antenatal syphilis detection and treatment from Service Provision Assessments (SPAs) and Service Availability and Readiness Assessments (SARAs) to indicators of ANC use from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to compute estimates of the ‘likelihood of appropriate care’. Results Based on data from 5,593 health facilities that reported offering antenatal care (ANC) services, the availability of syphilis detection and treatment in ANC facilities ranged from 2% to 83%. The availability of syphilis detection and treatment was substantially lower in ANC facilities in West Africa compared to the other sub-regions. Levels of ANC attendance were high (median 94.9%), but only 27% of ANC attendees initiated care at less than 4 months gestation. We estimated that about one in twelve pregnant women received ANC early (<4 months) at a facility ready to provide syphilis detection and treatment (median 8%, range 7–32%). The largest implementation bottleneck identified was low health facility readiness, followed by timeliness of the first ANC visit. Conclusions While access was fairly high, the low levels of likelihood of antenatal syphilis detection and treatment identified reinforce the need to improve the availability of syphilis rapid diagnostic tests and treatment and the timeliness of antenatal care-seeking across sub-Saharan Africa.
Switching from originator to biosimilar infliximab – real world data of a prospective 18 months follow-up of a single-centre IBD population

Abstract Background and aims: Long-term data regarding switching from originator infliximab to biosimilar CT-P13 are sparse. Concerns about increased immunogenicity after switching have been raised. We aimed to study the effectiveness, safety and immunogenicity after switching from originator infliximab to CT-P13 in a real-world IBD population with 18 months prospective follow-up. Methods: All adult IBD patients treated with originator infliximab at the Department of Gastroenterology, Oslo University Hospital, were switched to CT-P13 and followed prospectively for 18 months. The primary endpoints were (i) the proportion of patients remaining on CT-P13 18 months after switching and (ii) immunogenicity during 18 months after switching. The secondary endpoints included (i) adverse events, (ii) changes in disease activity, C-reactive protein, anaemia, faecal calprotectin, infliximab dose and interval and p-infliximab. Results: In total, 143 IBD patients were switched, 99 with Crohn’s disease and 44 with ulcerative colitis. Altogether, 130 (91%) remained on CT-P13 throughout 18 months. Two patients developed ADAs at moderate level and discontinued CT-P13. Another 10 patients discontinued CT-P13 (two due to loss of response without ADAs, four due to adverse events, and four in remission and a personal wish to stop). There was no overall change in disease activity scores or in the other studied variables except for p-infliximab, which increased significantly. Conclusions: The present study provides valuable evidence for the safety and effectiveness of switching from originator to biosimilar infliximab over a prolonged period of 18 months and demonstrates that switching was well tolerated and did not affect the long term clinical outcome.
Comparison of the toxicity of dimethoate and cypermethrin in the laboratory and the field when applying the same bioassay

The present paper studies the relationship between laboratory‐ and field—based survival data of beetle larvae sprayed with either dimethoate or cypermethrin. The comparison for dimethoate was based on an earlier constructed pesticide—effect model derived from greenhouse data. To predict field effects, the model was supplied with field data for temperatures, the insecticide concentrations on the plants, and the control mortality rate of the beetles. The same model structure was unable to predict greenhouse mortality from cypermethrin treatment, for which reason the differences between laboratory and field for this compound are discussed on the basis of direct observations. For best comparison, the same bioassay method was used in both the greenhouse and the field in the present study. Tests were based on Gastrophysa polygoni larvae dwelling on the undersides of leaves of Fallopia convolvulus plants. Dietary uptake was regarded as the main source of exposure. The simulation results for dimethoate underestimated the field mortality even after accounting for the higher control mortality in the field in the model. It was shown that an additional increase of the toxicant—induced death rate by more than a factor of five was required for the model to fit the field data. This indicated a relatively severe impact of dimethoate under field conditions. For cypermethrin, the effects in the field increased with time, pointing at increasing exposure of and/or effects on the larvae. Contributions of the present results toward the bridging of the gap between laboratory and field are discussed.
Tuning the Mechanical Properties of a DNA Hydrogel in Three Phases Based on ATP Aptamer

By integrating ATP aptamer into the linker DNA, a novel DNA hydrogel was designed, with mechanical properties that could be tuned into three phases. Based on the unique interaction between ATP and its aptamer, the mechanical strength of the hydrogel increased from 204 Pa to 380 Pa after adding ATP. Furthermore, with the addition of the complementary sequence to the ATP aptamer, the mechanical strength could be increased to 570 Pa.
Position Paper for the Treatment of Nightmare Disorder in Adults: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine Position Paper.

INTRODUCTION Nightmare disorder affects approximately 4% of adults, occurring in isolation or as part of other disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and can significantly impair quality of life. This paper provides the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) position regarding various treatments of nightmare disorder in adults. METHODS A literature search was performed based upon the keywords and MeSH terms from the Best Practice Guide for the Treatment of Nightmare Disorder in Adults that was published in 2010 by the AASM. The search used the date range March 2009 to August of 2017, and sought to find available evidence pertaining to the use of behavioral, psychological, and pharmacologic therapies for the treatment of nightmares. A task force developed position statements based on a thorough review of these studies and their clinical expertise. The AASM Board of Directors approved the final position statements. DETERMINATION OF POSITION Positions of "recommended" and "not recommended" indicate that a treatment option is determined to be clearly useful or ineffective/harmful for most patients, respectively, based on a qualitative assessment of the available evidence and clinical judgement of the task force. Positions of "may be used" indicate that the evidence or expert consensus is less clear, either in favor or against the use of a treatment option. The interventions listed below are in alphabetical order within the position statements rather than clinical preference: this is not meant to be instructive of the order in which interventions should be used. POSITION STATEMENTS The following therapy is recommended for the treatment of PTSD-associated nightmares and nightmare disorder: image rehearsal therapy. The following therapies may be used for the treatment of PTSD-associated nightmares: cognitive behavioral therapy; cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia; eye movement desensitization and reprocessing; exposure, relaxation, and rescripting therapy; the atypical antipsychotics olanzapine, risperidone and aripiprazole; clonidine; cyproheptadine; fluvoxamine; gabapentin; nabilone; phenelzine; prazosin; topiramate; trazodone; and tricyclic antidepressants. The following therapies may be used for the treatment of nightmare disorder: cognitive behavioral therapy; exposure, relaxation, and rescripting therapy; hypnosis; lucid dreaming therapy; progressive deep muscle relaxation; sleep dynamic therapy; self-exposure therapy; systematic desensitization; testimony method; nitrazepam; prazosin; and triazolam. The following are not recommended for the treatment of nightmare disorder: clonazepam and venlafaxine. The ultimate judgment regarding propriety of any specific care must be made by the clinician, in light of the individual circumstances presented by the patient, accessible treatment options, and resources.
Usability Testing of a mHealth App to Support Self-Management of HIV-Associated Non-AIDS Related Symptoms

Mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) are uniquely poised to offer the information that persons living with HIV (PLWH) need to manage the symptoms associated with their chronic condition. The purpose of this study was to assess the usability of a mHealth app designed to help PL WH self-manage the symptoms associated with their HIV and HIV-associated non-AIDS (HANA) conditions. We conducted a heuristic evaluation with five experts in informatics and end-user testing with 20 PLWH. End-users completed the PSSUQ and Health-ITUES validated measures of system usability. Mean severity scores for the 10-item heuristic checklist completed by experts ranged from 0.4–2.4. End-users gave the system high scores on the PSSUQ and Health-ITUES usability measures (mean 2.23±0.83 and 4.24±0.62 respectively). Results indicated the system is usable and will be ready for future efficacy testing after incorporation of recommended feedback.
Smart eye-tracking system

This project is a smart eye tracking system which is designed for people with disabilities and elderly people. The concept of this research is to apply eye movement to control appliances, wheelchair and communicate with caretaker. This system comprises four components, imaging processing module, wheelchair-controlled module, appliances-controlled module and SMS manager module. The image processing module consists of webcam and C++ customized image processing, the eye movement image is captured and transmitted to Raspberry Pi microcontroller for processing with OpenCV to derive the coordinate of eye ball. The coordinate of eye ball is utilized for cursor control on the Raspberry Pi screen to control the system. Besides the eye movement, the eye blink is applied in this system for entering a command as when you press Enter button on keyboard. The wheelchair-controlled module is a cradle with two servos that can be moved to two dimensions and also adaptable to other wheelchair joysticks. This system also remotely controls some appliances and communicate with caretaker via send message to smartphone.
Towards pulse rate parametrization during free-living activities using smart wristband

Objective: The growing interest to integrate consumer smart wristbands in eHealth applications spawns the need for novel approaches of data parametrization which account for the technology-specific constraints. The present study aims to investigate the feasibility of a consumer smart wristband to be used for computing pulse rate parameters during free-living activities. Approach: The feasibility of computing pulse rate variability (PRV) as well as pulse rate and physical activity-related parameters using the smart wristband was investigated, having an electrocardiogram as a reference. The parameters were studied on the pulse rate and step data from 54 participants, diagnosed with various cardiovascular diseases. The data were acquired during free-living activities with no user lifestyle intervention. Main results: The comparison results show that the smart wristband is well-suited for computing the mean interbeat interval and the standard deviation of the averaged interbeat intervals. However, it is less reliable when estimating frequency domain and nonlinear parameters. Heart recovery time, estimated by fitting an exponential model to the events, satisfying the conditions of the 3 min step test, showed satisfactory agreement (relative error <20%) with the reference ECG in one-third of all cases. On the other hand, the heart’s adaptation to physical workload, expressed as the slope of the linear regression curve, was underestimated in most cases. Significance: The present study demonstrates that pulse rate parametrization using a consumer smart wristband is in principle feasible. The results show that the smart wristband is well suited for computing basic PRV parameters which have been reported to be associated with poorer health outcomes. In addition, the study introduces a methodology for the estimation of post-exercise heart recovery time and the heart’s adaptation to physical workload during free-living activities.
Deep belief network based detection and categorization of malicious URLs

ABSTRACT The Internet, web consumers and computing systems have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Malicious uniform resource locator (URL) is a prominent cyber-attack broadly used with the intention of data, money or personal information stealing. Malicious URLs comprise phishing URLs, spamming URLs, and malware URLs. Detection of malicious URL and identification of their attack type are important to thwart such attacks and to adopt required countermeasures. The proposed methodology for detection and categorization of malicious URLs uses stacked restricted Boltzmann machine for feature selection with deep neural network for binary classification. For multiple classes, IBK-kNN, Binary Relevance, and Label Powerset with SVM are used for classification. The approach is tested with 27700 URL samples and the results demonstrate that the deep learning-based feature selection and classification techniques are able to quickly train the network and detect with reduced false positives.
Location Regularization-Based POI Recommendation in Location-Based Social Networks

POI (point-of-interest) recommendation as one of the efficient information filtering techniques has been widely utilized in helping people find places they are likely to visit, and many related methods have been proposed. Although the methods that exploit geographical information for POI recommendation have been studied, few of these studies have addressed the implicit feedback problem. In fact, in most location-based social networks, the user’s negative preferences are not explicitly observable. Consequently, it is inappropriate to treat POI recommendation as traditional recommendation problem. Moreover, previous studies mainly explore the geographical information from a user perspective and the methods that model them from a location perspective are not well explored. Hence, this work concentrates on exploiting the geographical characteristics from a location perspective for implicit feedback, where a neighborhood aware Bayesian personalized ranking method (NBPR) is proposed. To be specific, the weighted Bayesian framework that was proposed for personalized ranking is first introduced as our basic POI recommendation method. To exploit the geographical characteristics from a location perspective, we then constrain the ranking loss by using a regularization term derived from locations, and assume nearest neighboring POIs are more inclined to be visited by similar users. Finally, several experiments are conducted on two real-world social networks to evaluate the NBPR method, where we can find that our NBPR method has better performance than other related recommendation algorithms. This result also demonstrates the effectiveness of our method with neighborhood information and the importance of the geographical characteristics.
Comparative toxicity of ammonium and nitrate compounds to pacific treefrog and african clawed frog tadpoles

The effects of ammonium nitrate, ammonium chloride, ammonium sulfate, and sodium nitrate on survival and growth of Pacific treefrog (Pseudacris regilla [Baird and Girard]) and African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis [Daudin]) tadpoles were determined in static—renewal tests. The 10‐d ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate LC50s for P. regilla were 55.2 and 89.7 mg/L NH4‐N, respectively. The 10‐d LC50s for X. laevis for the three ammonium compounds ranged from 45 to 64 μg/L NH4‐ N. The 10‐d sodium nitrate LC50s were 266.2 mg/L NO3‐N for P. regilla and 1,236.2 mg/L NO3‐N for X. laevis. The lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) of ammonium compound based on reduced length or weight was 24.6 mg/L NH4‐N for P. regilla and 99.5 mg/L NH4‐N for X. laevis. The lowest sodium nitrate LOAELs based on reduced length or weight were <30.1 mg/L NO3‐N for P. regilla and 126.3 mg/L NO3‐N for X. laevis. Calculated un—ionized NH3 comprised 0.3 to 1.0% of measured NH4‐N concentrations. Potential harm to amphibians could occur if sensitive life stages were impacted by NH4‐N and NO3‐N in agricultural runoff or drainage for a sufficiently long period.
Reinsurance Network and the Performance of U.S. Property-Liability Insurers Abstract Reinsurance plays a fundamental role in the insurance market to connect insurers and diversify risks. Prior studies have examined the impact of reinsurance counterparty relationships, such as reinsurance exposure, c

Reinsurance plays a fundamental role in the insurance market to connect insurers and diversify risks. Prior studies have examined the impact of reinsurance counterparty relationships, such as reinsurance exposure, concentration, and tenure, on firm performance. However, no extant research investigates the relationship between an insurer’s network position in a reinsurance network and its performance. In this paper, we utilize network analysis to construct the reinsurance networks from 2000 to 2011 and then evaluate an insurer’s market position using various centrality measures. We find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between an insurer’s underwriting performance (measured by combined ratio) and its network position, whereas there is a U-shaped relationship between its profitability (measured by risk adjusted ROA or risk adjusted ROE) and its network position. We also investigate the impact of an insurer’s network position on its operational efficiency, including cost efficiency, revenue efficiency and profit efficiency.
Achromobacter xylosoxidans bacteremia: clinical and microbiological features in a 10-year case series

ABSTRACT Objective The treatment of Achromobacter xylosoxidans bacteremia is challenged by antimicrobial resistance and the paucity of data. We aimed at offering a contemporary description of this uncommon entity. Patients and methods Retrospective case series of 13 episodes of A. xylosoxidans bacteremia diagnosed over a 10-year period (November 2007 to May 2017) in our tertiary care center. Results Solid organ cancer and heart failure were the most common comorbidities (4/13 [30.7%]). All but one episodes were hospital-acquired. Most patients had received previous antibiotic therapy (7/13 [53.8%]) and had a central venous catheter in place (6/13 [46.1%]). Primary and intravascular catheter were the most common sources (4/13 [30.7%] each). Meropenem was the agent with best in vitro activity (92.3% [12/13] of susceptible isolates). All-cause 30-day mortality (overall 23.1%) was higher in patients with primary bacteremia (50.0% vs. 11.1%; P-value=0.203) and prior chemotherapy (66.7% vs. 10.0%; P-value=0.108). Conclusions Bacteremia due to A. xylosoxidans constitutes a serious infection among immunocompromised hosts. Carbapenem-based therapy may be appropriate in most cases.
ОПРЕДЕЛЕНИЕ ФЕНОЛОВ В ВОДНЫХ РАСТВОРАХ В ВИДЕ ИЗОПРОПИЛОКСИКАРБОНИЛЬНЫХ ПРОИЗВОДНЫХ МЕТОДОМ ХРОМАТО-МАСС-СПЕКТРОМЕТРИИ

Оптимизированы условия получения и экстракции эфирных производных некоторых фенолов с изопропилхлороформиатом для их последующего определения методом, сочетающим газовую хроматографию и масс-спектрометрию. Для фенола, 3-метилфенола, 3,4-диметилфенола, 3-метилфенола, 4-хлорфенола, 2,4-дихлорфенола, 2,4,6-трихлорфенола, 3,4-дифторфенола, 3-хлор-4-фторфенола, 4-иодфенола, -нафтола, -нафтола, пентахлорфенола степень превращения в соответствующие производные составляет 90100%. Пределы обнаружения составляют от 200 нг/л (4-хлорфенол, 2,4-дихлорфенол, 2,4,6-трихлорфенол) до 1.5 мкг/л (пентахлорфенол).
An Enhanced Hidden Markov Map Matching Model for Floating Car Data

The map matching (MM) model plays an important role in revising the locations of floating car data (FCD) on a digital map. However, most existing MM models have multiple shortcomings, such as a low matching accuracy for complex roads, long running times, an inability to take full advantage of historical FCD information, and challenges in maintaining the topological adjacency and obeying traffic rules. To address these issues, an enhanced hidden Markov map matching (EHMM) model is proposed by adopting explicit topological expressions, using historical FCD information and introducing traffic rules. The EHMM model was validated against areal ground dataset at various sampling intervals and compared with the spatial and temporal matching model and the ordinary hidden Markov matching model. The empirical results reveal that the matching accuracy of the EHMM model is significantly higher than that of the reference models regarding real FCD trajectories at medium and high sampling rates. The running time of the EHMM model was notably shorter than those of the reference models. The matching results of the EHMM model retained topological adjacency and complied with traffic regulations better than the reference models.