Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ventriculectomia parcial esquerda: ponte para transplante?

OBJECTIVE: To assess the suitability of Partial Left Ventriculectomy (PLV) as a bridge to transplantation. BACKGROUND: Cohort study, prospective. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Fifty-three patients were submitted to PLV in a time frame of 5 years. Seven out of 53 patients, ages ranging from 37 to 64 years old, 5 males and 2 females, all with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, were transplanted afterwards. Ejection fraction, NYHA functional classes, maximum oxygen consumption, left ventricular end-diastolic diameter and Quality of Life Scores were analysed preoperatively and then at three and six months and immediately before transplantation. RESULTS: The numerical values mentioned below are referred to the data obtained pre-ventriculectomy, at 3 and 6 postoperative months and immediately before transplantation. NYHA functional classes: 3.71 ± 0.49, 2.57 ± 1.13 (p=0.011), 3.0 ± 1.29 and 3.86 ± 0.38. Ejection fraction: 25.17 ± 6.15, 35.5 ± 8.41 (p=0.013), 32.33 ± 7.12 and 26.17 ± 3.76. Left ventricular end-diastolic diameter: 79.16 ± 10.85, 67.66 ± 9.2, 65.83 ± 9.57 e 64.25±8.99. Maximum VO2 was 8.12 ± 3.47 pre-VPE and increased to 13.2 ± 7.75 at six months (p=0.068). Quality of life scores: 4.29 ± 1.25, 3.0 ± 1.41 (p=0.050), 3.29 ± 1.8 e 4.57 ± 1.13. 7/53 patients (13.20%) were subsequently transplanted. Survival time, from PLV up to TX ranged from 7 to 33 months (18.71±11.78). Follow-up was 100%. CONCLUSION: Improvement in quality of life, NYHA functional classes and maximum VO2 consumption, as well as increase in ejection fraction and sustained decrease in left ventricular end-diastolic diameter, in short-term, can benefit patients previously excluded from TX and bring them back to the awaiting list. However, high immediate mortality rates in overall casuistry can limit its routine indication as a biological bridge to transplantation.
Galactose half‐life is a useful tool in assessing prognosis of chronic liver disease in children

In children, optimal timing of liver transplantation (LT) is crucial, but reliable prognostic tools for chronic liver diseases are scarce. We assessed the predictive value of galactose half‐life (Gal½) for LT or death. A retrospective search of hospital database 2003–2010 revealed 92 consecutive children with chronic liver disease (36 biliary atresia) whose liver function was assessed with Gal½ measurement. Gal½, follow‐up data, and liver biochemistry were recorded and pediatric/model for end‐stage liver disease (P/MELD) scores calculated. Patients listed for LT or those who died within 1 year of the Gal½ measurement (Group 1) were compared to those surviving without listing (Group 2). Predictive value of Gal½ and P/MELD for listing for LT was assessed with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) analysis. Group 1 had markedly increased median Gal½ [17.0 (interquartile range 12.5–28.5) min] and higher P/MELD [13 (−1–23)] compared with group 2, [10.5 (9.5–12.5) min and −1 (−8–8); P < 0.001 for both]. Both Gal½ and P/MELD (P < 0.001) predicted listing or death with respective AUROCs of 0.808 (95% CI 0.704–0.913) and 0.780 (0.676–0.890), and 85% sensitivity and 69% specificity for Gal½≥12.0 min. Gal½ is a useful tool when evaluating 1‐year prognosis in children with chronic liver disease.
A Reliability Generalization Study of Coefficient Alpha for the UCLA Loneliness Scale

Loneliness is a psychological construct that has been reported in a variety of populations and associated with a number of other negative psychological problems. This study was an examination of coefficient alpha of a prominent measure of loneliness: the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale (Russell, Peplau, & Cutrona, 1980; Russell, 1996). We utilized reliability generalization to provide an aggregate estimate of the reliability of the scale over time and in a variety of populations as well as to assess and identify sampling and demographic characteristics associated with variability in coefficient alpha. Of the 213 studies examined, 80 had reported alpha estimates, and we used them in this analysis. We discuss conditions associated with variability in coefficient alpha along with pertinent implications for practice and future research.
Analysis of fatty acids in human plasma

Nesse fasciculo da revista, o estudo de Morais et al. (2010) avaliou quatro metodologias classicas de extracao de lipideos (metodos de Folch, Bligh-Dyer, Rose-Gottlieb e Gerber) e uma tecnica alternativa, com o objetivo de avaliar a eficiencia da extracao e a composicao em acidos graxos de plasma humano. O metodo alternativo proposto pelos autores usou o forno de micro-ondas como ferramenta e foi considerado muito rapido na extracao lipidica e adequado na identificacao de acidos graxos, mas nao em sua quantificacao. O metodo de extracao mais indicado para quantificacao de acidos graxos em plasma humano foi o metodo de Folch.
Convergent Validity of the Defense Mechanisms Manual and the Defensive Functioning Scale

We examined the convergent validity of Cramer’s Defense Mechanisms Manual (DMM; Cramer, 1991b) by comparing it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) Defensive Functioning Scale (DFS). A total of 60 low income urban women from a primary care medical facility responded to four Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943) cards and an interview of early memories and descriptions of significant others. We scored the TAT narratives with the DMM, and we coded the interview narratives with the DFS. DMM Denial and Projection scales were negatively correlated with the DFS Overall Defensive Functioning scale (r= –.28, p< .01 and r= –.22, p< .10, respectively) and were positively correlated with a DFS pathological composite score (r= .36, p< .01 and r= .32, p< .05, respectively). These findings support the convergent validity of the DMM Denial and Projection scales.
Use of the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System in an Assessment of an Adolescent in Foster Care

Child maltreatment has been associated with a host of negative outcomes including impaired social relationships (Rogosch, Cicchetti, & Aber, 1995), depression (Toth, Manly, & Cicchetti, 1992), poor self-concept and motivation (Vondra, Barnett, & Cicchetti, 1990), and delinquency and conduct problems (Cook et al., 2005; Grotevant et al., 2006; McCabe, Lucchini, Hough, Yeh, & Hazen, 2005; Ryan & Testa, 2005). An assessment of the mental representation of attachment relationships could offer additional relevant and useful information to the evaluation of youth in foster care, and could inform treatment and placement considerations. The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) is a relatively new measure of internal representations of attachment based on the analysis of a set of stimuli designed to systematically activate the attachment system (George, West, & Pettem, 1997). This article considers the use of the AAP with a maltreated adolescent in a clinical setting and uses a case study to illustrate the components of the AAP that are particularly relevant to case conceptualization and interventions.
The Decanal Divide: Women in Decanal Roles at U.S. Medical Schools

Purpose To test the hypotheses that women in medical school dean-level (decanal) positions occupy lower-rank and more image- and education-focused positions than men, and that state and woman-led schools have more women in decanal positions. Method Data were collected on September 10–18, 2016, from Web sites of 136 allopathic, U.S. medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and represented on the roster of accredited MD programs in the United States with full accreditation as of June 22, 2016. Statistical significance of differences between comparison groups was assessed using Student t test with P < . 05 indicating significance. Correlation between parameters was determined by Spearman rank correlation test with P < . 05 indicating significant correlation. Results Findings demonstrate that only 15% (22/149) of deans and interim deans are women, and the prevalence of women in decanal positions decreases with ascending professional rank (R2 = 0.93; P < .05). Women are most prevalent in decanal positions focusing on education and mentoring or institutional public image and least prevalent in those focusing on corporate strategy and policy, finance, or government relations. Schools with a woman as dean or interim dean have a higher percentage of decanal positions occupied by women than those with a man as dean or interim dean (P < .05). State and private medical schools do not differ from one another in this regard. Conclusions Gender stereotypes and models appear to continue to drive the number and roles of women in decanal positions.
Patient Education for Individuals with Communication and Sensory Impairment

This article will focus upon communicatively disordered individuals and the effects of their impairments upon their ability to participate in self-directed medical care and/or self-administration of pharmacological agents. Individuals with communication disorders may experience deficits in the area(s) of auditory comprehension, verbal expression and speech intelligibility. The modalities of reading and written expression may also be disturbed and compounded by sensory deficits such as visual acuity and perceptual disturbances as well as hearing disturbances. The evolution of our communication abilities is unique to our species. Damage or disruption of communicative processes has a deleterious impact upon on all aspects of our lives and can result in isolation and severely compromised quality of life. Although more severely involved communicatively disordered individuals may receive special medical services at home or in the contexts of subacute and nursing home settings, some may be capable of meeting some of their own medical care needs with minimal supervision. If living at home, some may benefit from the contracted services of visiting nurses who may administer oral medications and injections as in the case of communicatively involved individuals with insulin dependent diabetes millitus (IDDM). Visiting nurses need to be especially sensitive to the communication impairments of their patients as it may be necessary for them to reiterate instructions involving special diets, positioning and mobility issues. For those individuals who may be capable of self-administering medica-
Predicting audience gender in online content-sharing social networks

Understanding the behavior and characteristics of web users is valuable when improving information dissemination, designing recommendation systems, and so on. In this work, we explore various methods of predicting the ratio of male viewers to female viewers on YouTube. First, we propose and examine two hypotheses relating to audience consistency and topic consistency. The former means that videos made by the same authors tend to have similar male‐to‐female audience ratios, whereas the latter means that videos with similar topics tend to have similar audience gender ratios. To predict the audience gender ratio before video publication, two features based on these two hypotheses and other features are used in multiple linear regression (MLR) and support vector regression (SVR). We find that these two features are the key indicators of audience gender, whereas other features, such as gender of the user and duration of the video, have limited relationships. Second, another method is explored to predict the audience gender ratio. Specifically, we use the early comments collected after video publication to predict the ratio via simple linear regression (SLR). The experiments indicate that this model can achieve better performance by using a few early comments. We also observe that the correlation between the number of early comments (cost) and the predictive accuracy (gain) follows the law of diminishing marginal utility. We build the functions of these elements via curve fitting to find the appropriate number of early comments (approximately 250) that can achieve maximum gain at minimum cost.
Improving polarity classification of bilingual parallel corpora combining machine learning and semantic orientation approaches

Polarity classification is one of the main tasks related to the opinion mining and sentiment analysis fields. The aim of this task is to classify opinions as positive or negative. There are two main approaches to carrying out polarity classification: machine learning and semantic orientation based on the integration of knowledge resources. In this study, we propose to combine both approaches using a voting system based on the majority rule. In this way, we attempt to improve the polarity classification of two parallel corpora such as the opinion corpus for Arabic (OCA) and the English version of the OCA (EVOCA). Several experiments have been performed to check the feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that the experiment that took into account both approaches in the voting system obtained the best performance. Moreover, it is also shown that the proposed method slightly improves the best results obtained using machine learning approaches solely over the OCA and the EVOCA separately. Therefore, we can conclude that the approach proposed here might be considered a good strategy for polarity detection when we work with bilingual parallel corpora.
Is There Hardening of the Heart During Medical School?

Purpose To determine whether vicarious empathy (i.e., to have a visceral empathic response, versus role-playing empathy) decreases, and whether students choosing specialties with greater patient contact maintain vicarious empathy better than do students choosing specialties with less patient contact. Method The Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale was administered at the beginning of each academic year at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences for four classes, 2001–2004. Students also reported their gender and specialty choice. Specialty choice was classified as core (internal medicine, family medicine, obstetrics–gynecology, pediatrics, and psychiatry) or noncore (all other specialties). Results Vicarious empathy significantly decreased during medical education (P < .001), especially after the first and third years. Students choosing core careers had higher empathy than did those choosing noncore careers. Men choosing core careers initially had empathy exceeding population norms, but their empathy fell to be comparable with that of norms by the end of their third year. The empathy of men choosing noncore careers was comparable with that of norms. Women choosing core careers had empathy scores comparable with those of norms, but the scores of women choosing noncore careers fell below those of the norms by their second year. Conclusions The findings suggest that undergraduate medical education may be a major determinant differentially affecting the vicarious empathy of students on the basis of gender and/or specialty choice. The greatest impact occurred in men who chose noncore specialties. The significant decrease in vicarious empathy is of concern, because empathy is crucial for a successful physician–patient relationship.
Measures for impact, consistency, and the h‐ and g‐indices

An altogether different view on the properties of a good performance measure than that given in Egghe (2012) is offered. Egghe argued that a good impact measure should reward nonconsistency; that is, the more citations over papers are unequally distributed, the higher the impact should be. Here, a quantitative proxy for consistency is offered, and it is shown that as consistency increases, the ideal performance measure, which is sensitive to changes in consistency, should increase, reflecting this virtue.
Thesaurus and ontology structure: Formal and pragmatic differences and similarities

Thesauri and other types of controlled vocabularies are increasingly re‐engineered into ontologies described using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), particularly in the life sciences. This has led to the perception by some that thesauri are ontologies once they are described by using the syntax of OWL while others have emphasized the need to re‐engineer a vocabulary to use it as ontology. This confusion is rooted in different perceptions of what ontologies are and how they differ from other types of vocabularies. In this article, we rigorously examine the structural differences and similarities between thesauri and meaning‐defining ontologies described in OWL. Specifically, we conduct (a) a conceptual comparison of thesauri and ontologies, and (b) a comparison of a specific thesaurus and a specific ontology in the same subject field. Our results show that thesauri and ontologies need to be treated as 2 orthogonal kinds of models with superficially similar structures. An ontology is not a good thesaurus, nor is a thesaurus a good ontology. A thesaurus requires significant structural and other content changes to become an ontology, and vice versa.
Tweet‐biased summarization

We examined whether the microblog comments given by people after reading a web document could be exploited to improve the accuracy of a web document summarization system. We examined the effect of social information (i.e., tweets) on the accuracy of the generated summaries by comparing the user preference for TBS (tweet‐biased summary) with GS (generic summary). The result of crowdsourcing‐based evaluation shows that the user preference for TBS was significantly higher than GS. We also took random samples of the documents to see the performance of summaries in a traditional evaluation using ROUGE, which, in general, TBS was also shown to be better than GS. We further analyzed the influence of the number of tweets pointed to a web document on summarization accuracy, finding a positive moderate correlation between the number of tweets pointed to a web document and the performance of generated TBS as measured by user preference. The results show that incorporating social information into the summary generation process can improve the accuracy of summary. The reason for people choosing one summary over another in a crowdsourcing‐based evaluation is also presented in this article.
Gaps Between Immigrant Spouses in Host Country Language Proficiency: Longitudinal Effects on Marital Satisfaction

ABSTRACT Research on immigration underscores the importance of language acculturation in successful adjustment to life in a new country. However, the profound impact of different levels of language proficiency between immigrant spouses on their married life is an understudied topic. The current study explores whether differences between immigrant spouses in host language proficiency predict marital satisfaction in their first four years in the host country. Using a three-wave longitudinal study, with intervals of one to two years, we collected data from 316 married couples who immigrated from the Former Soviet Union to Germany and Israel. Language proficiency and marital satisfaction were measured via self-report questionnaires. We conducted an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model analysis to control for dyadic and time data dependencies. The results indicate that differences between spouses in their host language proficiency predict marital dissatisfaction, and that this effect is exacerbated over time. These associations held across gender and host country. The findings are discussed in light of the gap-distress model.
Rehabilitation Needs and Disability in Community Living Stroke Survivors Two Years after Stroke

Abstract Sixty-eight patients have been evaluated 2 years after stroke concerning their rehabilitation needs, level of disability, health-related quality of life, and satisfaction in various life situations. Assessments of the rehabilitation needs corresponded in general to the results from the different assessments. The neurological deficits and the dependence in personal ADL were rather low, but the majority of patients were dependent in instrumental activities and not fully satisfied with their lives as a whole. The dominant need for rehabilitation interventions was in social-related activities. The present study throws light on the need for systematic follow-up and interventions in stroke patients in the sub-acute and chronic phases.
Author publication preferences and journal competition

The processes that authors use to publish their papers in journals can be analyzed in terms of field‐specific practices. How they select targeted publications can influence competitive relationships among journals. In this paper, the author quantifies the publishing choices of a set of scholars to confirm this ecological perspective. The results indicate a strong focus on a small number of journals. A measure of author publishing choices was used to define four ecological characteristics: coverage, coreness, exclusivity, and journal overlap. Several types of journals indexed in the Information Science and Library Science section of the Journal Citation Reports are compared in terms of their ecological characteristics. The data show that some journals cover large numbers of authors, but compete with other journals in subcommunities. Some journals with author profiles similar to those of high‐ranking journals lost potential submissions. Others with low coverage, high coreness, and high exclusivity were found to have groups of “fans” who used them for all of their submissions, but still exhibited a strong need to sustain their exclusivity. It is hoped that the method and results presented in this paper will provide useful information for editorial boards interested in managing their submissions according to author profiles.
Nonlinear Associations Between Co-Rumination and Both Social Support and Depression Symptoms

ABSTRACT Co-ruminating about one's problems appears to involve both beneficial self-disclosure and harmful rumination, suggesting that moderate levels may be the most adaptive. This study used nonlinear regression to determine whether moderate levels of self-reported co-rumination in relationships with a sibling, parent, friend, and romantic partner are linked to the highest levels of self-perceived social support and lowest levels of self-reported depression symptoms in 175 emerging adults (77% female; M = 19.66 years). As expected, moderate co-rumination was associated with high social support across all four relationship types, but, somewhat unexpectedly, high levels of co-rumination were also associated with high social support. As predicted, moderate levels of co-rumination with friends and siblings were associated with low levels of depression. Contrary to hypotheses, high levels of co-rumination were associated with high depression within romantic relationships. Co-rumination with a parent did not have a linear or quadratic association with depression. These findings suggest that high co-ruminating in supportive relationships and to a lesser extent low co-ruminating in unsupportive relationships are maladaptive interpersonal processes but that co-rumination's relation to depression depends on the co-ruminating partner. Psychotherapies for depression may target these maladaptive processes by supporting clients' development of balanced self-focused negative talk.