Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Antibiotic Treatment of Cellulitis and Erysipelas: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Importance The optimum antibiotic treatment for cellulitis and erysipelas lacks consensus. The available trial data do not demonstrate the superiority of any agent, and data are limited on the most appropriate route of administration or duration of therapy. Objective To assess the efficacy and safety of antibiotic therapy for non-surgically acquired cellulitis. Data Sources The following databases were searched to June 28, 2016: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (2016, issue 5), Medline (from 1946), Embase (from 1974), and Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Information System (LILACS) (from 1982). In addition, 5 trials databases and the reference lists of included studies were searched. Further searches of PubMed and Google Scholar were undertaken from June 28, 2016, to December 31, 2018. Study Selection Randomized clinical trials comparing different antibiotics, routes of administration, and treatment durations were included. Data Extraction and Synthesis For data collection and analysis, the standard methodological procedures of the Cochrane Collaboration were used. For dichotomous outcomes, the risk ratio and its 95% CI were calculated. A summary of findings table was created for the primary end points, adopting the GRADE approach to assess the quality of the evidence. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was the proportion of patients cured, improved, recovered, or symptom-free or symptom-reduced at the end of treatment, as reported by the trial. The secondary outcome was any adverse event. Results A total of 43 studies with a total of 5999 evaluable participants, whose age ranged from 1 month to 96 years, were included. Cellulitis was the primary diagnosis in only 15 studies (35%), and in other studies the median (interquartile range) proportion of patients with cellulitis was 29.7% (22.9%-50.3%). Overall, no evidence was found to support the superiority of any 1 antibiotic over another, and antibiotics with activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus did not add an advantage. Use of intravenous antibiotics over oral antibiotics and treatment duration of longer than 5 days were not supported by evidence. Conclusions and Relevance In this systematic review and meta-analysis, only low-quality evidence was found for the most appropriate agent, route of administration, and duration of treatment for patients with cellulitis; future trials need to use a standardized set of outcomes, including severity scoring, dosing, and duration of therapy.
Τhe Antioxidant Function of HDL in Atherosclerosis

Atherosclerosis is a multistep process that progresses over a long period of time and displays a broad range of severity. In its final form, it manifests as a lesion of the intimal layer of the arterial wall. There is strong evidence supporting that oxidative stress contributes to coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality and antioxidant high-density lipoprotein (HDL) could have a beneficial role in the prevention and prognosis of the disease. Indeed, certain subspecies of HDL may act as natural antioxidants preventing oxidation of lipids on low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and biological membranes. The antioxidant function may be attributed to inhibition of synthesis or neutralization of free radicals and reactive oxygen species by HDL lipids and associated enzymes or transfer of oxidation prone lipids from LDL and biological membranes to HDL for catabolism. A limited number of clinical trials suggest that the increased antioxidant potential of HDL correlates with decreased risk for atherosclerosis. Some nutritional interventions to increase HDL antioxidant activity have been proposed with limited success so far. The limitations in measuring and understanding HDL antioxidant function in vivo are also discussed.
SOME RESULTS ON ROBUST OUTPUT FEEDBACK STABILIZATION OF NONLINEAR SYSTEMS1

This paper aims at extending the results presented in (Teel and Praly, 1995) about the design of output feedback stabilizers for systems in normal form starting from Uniformly Completely Observable (UCO) state feedback control laws in two main directions: first, we show how output feedback asymptotic stabilization can be achieved even without requiring local exponential stability of the state feedback UCO-based loop and without designing an explicit local nonlinear observer. Second, we show how to design the output feedback stabilizer starting from an UCO state feedback control law which is not vanishing on the desired asymptotic attractor which, as a consequence, may be not invariant for the original controlled system. Key tools in achieving this goal are the ones developed in (Marconi et al., 2006) in a context strongly inspired by output regulation problems.
Antihyperglycemic and Antioxidant Activity of Fructus hordei Germinatus Extract on Streptozotocin-induced Diabetic Rats

Purpose: To explore the antihyperglycemic and antioxidant effects of Fructus Hordei Germinatus extract (FHGE) in diabetic rats. Methods: The aqueous extract of FHG was obtained by steeping the dried Fructus Hordei Germinatus in water at 60 o C three times, each for 1 h before first drying in an oven and then freeze-drying the last extract thus obtained. Antihyperglycemic effect was measured by blood glucose and plasma insulin levels. Oxidative stress was evaluated in liver and kidney by antioxidant markers, viz, lipid peroxidation (LPO), superoxide dismutase (SOD), reduced glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and catalase (CAT), while blood serum levels of creatinine and urea were also determined in both diabetic control and treated rats. Results: Compared with diabetic rats, oral administration of FHGE at a concentration of 20, 40 and 80 mg/kg daily for 45 days showed a significant decrease in fasting blood glucose (p < 0.05) and increased insulin (p < 0.05) level,. Furthermore, it significantly reduced biochemical parameters (serum creatinine and serum urea, p < 0.05)). The treatment also resulted in significant increase in GSH, GPx (p < 0.05), SOD and CAT (p < 0.05), as well as decreased LPO (p < 0.05) level in the liver and kidney of diabetic rats. Conclusion: The results suggest that FHGE may effectively normalize the impaired antioxidant status in streptozotocin-induced diabetes in a dose-dependent manner. FHGE has a protective effect against lipid peroxidation by scavenging free radicals and is thus capable of reducing the risk of diabetic complications.
Characterisation and rapid identification of phylogroup G in Escherichia coli, a lineage with high virulence and antibiotic resistance potential.

The phylogeny of the Escherichia coli species, with the identification of seven phylogroups (A, B1, B2, C, D, E and F), is linked to the lifestyle of the strains. With the accumulation of whole genome sequence data, it became clear that some strains belong to a group intermediate between the F and B2 phylogroups, designated as phylogroup G. Here, we studied the complete sequences of 112 strains representative of the G phylogroup diversity and showed that it is composed of one main sequence type complex (STc)117 and four other STcs (STc657, STc454, STc738 and STc174). STc117, which phylogeny is characterised by very short internal branches, exhibits extensive O diversity, but little H-type and fimH allele diversity while the other STcs are characterised by a main O, H and fimH type. STc117 strains possess many traits associated with extra-intestinal virulence, are virulent in a mouse sepsis model and exhibit multi-drug resistance such as CTX-M production. Epidemiologic data on 4524 Australian and French strains suggest that STc117 is a poultry associated lineage that can also establish in humans and cause extra-intestinal diseases. We propose an easy identification method that will help to trace this potentially virulent and resistant phylogroup in epidemiologic studies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
A statistical arteriovenous cerebral atlas

In this paper, we propose a pipeline for building statistical cerebro-vascular atlases from 3D angiographic datasets. This pipeline relies on recent advances in vessel segmentation and filtering, image skeletonization, and image registration. The generated atlases embed information on vesselness probability , vein/artery discrimination, vessel size and relative orientation. It improves on previously proposed approaches. Experiments performed on a dataset of 54 MRA/MRI images allowed us to propose an original vascular atlas of the whole intracranial volume.
Five-year Longitudinal Cohort Study of Reinterventions After Sleeve Gastrectomy and Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass.

OBJECTIVE To compare the long-term risks of reintervention following sleeve gastrectomy (SG) and Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) in a large surgical cohort. BACKGROUND The use of SG has increased dramatically relative to RYGB for the treatment of obesity. However, long-term risks following SG compared with RYGB have not been adequately defined in a large population-based study. METHODS A retrospective longitudinal cohort study of all adult health-plan members undergoing SG or RYGB for obesity in a multistate integrated health care system from January 2005 through September 2015. The risks of nutritional, endoscopic, radiologic, and surgical reintervention as well as the overall risk of any reinterventions at 1, 3, and 5 years were identified using diagnosis and procedure codes from comprehensive electronic medical records. RESULTS The study included 15,319 patients who underwent SG and 19,954 patients who underwent RYGB with a follow-up of 79.2%. The overall risk of any reintervention at 5 years was 21.3% for SG and 28.3% for RYGB (P < 0.0001). After adjustment, SG was associated with fewer reinterventions through 5 years than RYGB (hazard ratio, 0.78; 95% confidence interval, 0.74-0.84). When comparing subcategories, SG also had a lower risk of nutritional, endoscopic, radiologic, and surgical reinterventions when examined versus RYGB. The findings for risks of reinterventions were consistent across clinical subgroups. CONCLUSION SG has significantly lower risk of reintervention in all categories studied when compared with RYGB at 5-year follow-up. The long-term safety profile of LSG compared with RYGB should be an essential part of the discussion in patient-centered decision making when choosing between bariatric procedure options.
RNAi-Mediated Knockdown of Tssk1 and Tektin1 Genes Impair Male Fertility in Bactrocera dorsalis

The genetic-based sterile insect technique (SIT) is an effective and environmentally safe strategy to diminish populations of agricultural and horticultural insect pests. Functional characterization of genes related to male fertility can enhance the genetic-based SIT. Tssk1 has been involved to control male fertility in both mammals and insects. Moreover, Tektin1 has also been revealed to influence male fertility in both human and mammals. These findings suggested that Tssk1 and Tektin1 identified from Bactrocera dorsalis could be required for male fertility in B. dorsalis. In this study, expression profiles of these two genes were studied at different developmental stages and in various tissues of adult males. Remarkably, it was found that Tssk1 and Tektin1 were highly expressed in the testis of mature adult males of B. dorsalis. Furthermore, Tssk1 and Tektin1 genes were downregulated by using the RNA interference (RNAi) method. Fertility assays including egg laying, hatching, and spermatozoa count were also performed to investigate male fertility of B. dorsalis. Results showed that knockdown of Tssk1 and Tektin1 caused male sterility up to 58.99% and 64.49%, respectively. As expected, the total numbers of spermatozoa were also significantly reduced by 65.83% and 73.9%, respectively. These results suggested that male sterility was happened wing to the low number of spermatozoa. In conclusion, we demonstrate that Tssk1 and Tektin1 are the novel agents that could be used to enhance the genetic-based SIT, or their double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can be used as biopesticides to control the population of B. dorsalis.
Challenges and Experiences in Building an Efficient Apache Beam Runner For IBM Streams

This paper describes the challenges and experiences in the development of IBM Streams runner for Apache Beam. Apache Beam is emerging as a common stream programming interface for multiple computing engines. Each participating engine implements a runner to translate Beam applications into engine-specific programs. Hence, applications written with the Beam SDK can be executed on different underlying stream computing engines, with negligible migration penalty. IBM Streams is a widely-used enterprise streaming platform. It has a rich set of connectors and toolkits for easy integration of streaming applications with other enterprise applications. It also supports a broad range of programming language interfaces, including Java, C++, Python, Stream Processing Language (SPL) and Apache Beam. This paper focuses on our solutions to efficiently support the Beam programming abstractions in IBM Streams runner. Beam organizes data into discrete event time windows. This design, on the one hand, supports out-of-order data arrivals, but on the other hand, forces runners to maintain more states, which leads to higher space and computation overhead. IBM Streams runner mitigates this problem by efficiently indexing inter-dependent states, garbage-collecting stale keys, and enforcing bundle sizes. We also share performance concerns in Beam that could potentially impact applications. Evaluations show that IBM Streams runner outperforms Flink runner and Spark runner in most scenarios when running the Beam NEXMark benchmarks. IBM Streams runner is available for download from IBM Cloud Streaming Analytics service console.
TET2 missense variants in human neoplasia. A proposal of structural and functional classification

The human TET2 gene plays a pivotal role in the epigenetic regulation of normal and malignant hematopoiesis. Somatic TET2 mutations have been repeatedly identified in age‐related clonal hematopoiesis and in myeloid neoplasms ranging from acute myeloid leukemia (AML) to myeloproliferative neoplasms. However, there have been no attempts to systematically explore the structural and functional consequences of the hundreds of TET2 missense variants reported to date.
Alex: A Virtual Peer that Identifies Student Dialect

Our work in educational technology supports the deeper understanding of cultural phenomena that affect students in an educational environment. In this demo, we show a Virtual Peer system that supports collaborative science dialogue in two dialects: Mainstream American English and African-American Vernacular English, an often-stigmatized dialect. The most recently developed module in this system allows for the automatic classification of the students’ dialect in order to adjust the VP’s own dialect in response, and provide metalin-guistic support. We are hopeful that this system will provide data to help close pervasive achievement gaps between students of different cultural backgrounds, while also providing important insights about the relationship between culture and learning that will impact educational technology design.
Toxoplasma gondii Detection in Fecal Samples from Domestic Cats (Felis catus) in Hawai‘i1

Abstract: The presence of large numbers of free-ranging feral cats (Felis catus) has raised concern in terms of both native species predation and potential disease transmission in Hawai‘i. A disease of particular concern is toxoplasmosis, caused by Toxoplasma gondii, a zoonotic protozoan parasite. We tested soil samples and cat fecal samples from cat colonies from an urban university campus and a natural, coastal ecosystem for T. gondii oocysts using standard molecular procedures. Soil and fecal samples were collected from cat colony sites at the University of Hawai‘i at Mnoa (UHM), and additional fecal samples were collected from cats trapped within Ka‘ena Point Natural Area Reserve (KPNAR). Toxoplasma gondii DNA was detected in 5% (3 of 60) of fecal samples from UHM, but no T. gondii DNA was detected from soil samples. At KPNAR, 22.2% (2 of 9) of fecal samples were positive for T. gondii DNA. Presence of T. gondii at the university study sites suggests that cat colonies may be a potential health hazard for landscaping personnel, students, staff, and visitors. Likewise, presence of T. gondii at KPNAR, and potentially other coastal habitat(s) for ground-nesting seabirds or marine mammals, also suggests a disease risk and should be considered when managing those areas. Toxoplasmosis is a growing concern to both people and wildlife, and further work is needed to determine pathways of transmission both within and between terrestrial and marine ecosystems of Hawai‘i.
Exploiting Coroutines to Attack the "Killer Nanoseconds"

Database systems use many pointer-based data structures, including hash tables and B+-trees, which require extensive "pointer-chasing. " Each pointer dereference, e.g., during a hash probe or a B+-tree traversal, can result in a CPU cache miss, stalling the CPU. Recent work has shown that CPU stalls due to main memory accesses are a significant source of overhead, even for cache-conscious data structures, and has proposed techniques to reduce this overhead, by hiding memory-stall latency. In this work, we compare and contrast the state-of-the-art approaches to reduce CPU stalls due to cache misses for pointer-intensive data structures. We present an in-depth experimental evaluation and a detailed analysis using four popular data structures: hash table, binary search, Masstree, and Bw-tree. Our focus is on understanding the practicality of using coroutines to improve throughput of such data structures. The implementation, experiments, and analysis presented in this paper promote a deeper understanding of how to exploit coroutines-based approaches to build highly efficient systems.
Classification of Twitter Disaster Data Using a Hybrid Feature-Instance Adaptation Approach

Huge amounts of data that are generated on social media during emergency situations are regarded as troves of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a disaster is challenged by the lack of labeled data for that particular disaster. Furthermore, supervised models trained on labeled data from a prior disaster may not produce accurate results, given the inherent variation between the current and the prior disasters. To address the challenges posed by the lack of labeled data for a target disaster, we propose to use a hybrid feature-instance adaptation approach based on matrix factorization and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, respectively. The proposed hybrid adaptation approach is used to select a subset of the source disaster data that is representative for the target disaster. The selected subset is subsequently used to learn accurate Naïve Bayes classifiers for the target disaster.
Psychometric Properties and Construct Validity of the Short Version of the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale in a Southern European Sample

Abstract The Self-Report Psychopathy Scale–Short Form (SRP–SF) is a brief measure of psychopathy, developed via model-based test theory. The SRP–SF has a 4-factor structure with items reflecting affective, interpersonal, lifestyle, and antisocial domains, in line with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R), which can be aggregated to form the traditional F1 and F2 dimensions of psychopathy. Previous research indicates the SRP is a viable tool for examining the prevalence of psychopathic propensities and their correlates in nonoffender populations. Currently, a substantial amount of nonoffender research on psychopathy is conducted in North America. Here, we inspect the psychometric properties of the SRP–SF and probe its association with general personality and empathy in a large southern European (Portuguese) community sample. Consistent with previous studies, results indicated good fit for the 4-factor model, including for separate female and male subsamples, good internal consistency across its scales and subscales, and the predicted pattern of associations with the correlates of psychopathy. The results of this cross-cultural study provide further evidence of the validity of the SRP–SF in the assessment of psychopathy in community samples, and help to extend the nomological net on the larger construct to a southern European sample.
A Comparative Study on Fault Tolerance Methods in IP Networks versus Software Defined Networks

Today, to create and maintain a secure communication in a network and implementation of sophisticated management policies on network devices, operators have to deal with low-level and exclusive configuration of vendors devices. Current IP networks by combining control and data surfaces, have kept flexibility of management rules at a very low level. It is both difficult to configure the network according to predefined policies, and to reconfigure it to respond to faults, load, and changes. However, a new style of computer networks, i.e. Software Defined Networks (SDNs) has introduced modern facilities to manage and configure the networks by separating the control level from the data level and this results in smarter, more flexible and controllable management and introduce new abstractions in networking, simplifying network management and facilitating network evolution. However, SDN is unable to survive when facing failure, in particular in large scale data-center networks. Due to the programmability of SDN, mechanism could be designed to achieve fault tolerance. Fault tolerance in a computer system can be obtained through redundancy in software, data or calculations. Such redundancy can be implemented in a static, dynamic or combined configuration. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on SDN. We start by introducing the motivation for SDN, explain its main concepts and how it differs from traditional networking, its roots, and the standardization activities regarding this novel paradigm. Next, we present the key building blocks of an SDN infrastructure using a bottom-up, layered approach. We also look at cross-layer problems such as debugging and troubleshooting. In particular, We study on fault tolerant techniques and methods in current IP networks and SDN. Finally an analysis of all current methods is discussed.
Effect of 24-Epibrassinolide on Growth of in Vitro Shoot Tips of Different Yam (Dioscorea Spp.) Species

In this work we compared the effect of the growth regulator content of the culture medium on the growth of in vitro shoot tips of five yam accessions belonging to four yam species (one Dioscorea alata, one D. rotundata, one D. cayenensis and two D. trifida). Medium S contained 0.6 µM benzyl adenine, 1.07 µM naphthalene acetic acid and 0.23 µM gibberellic acid while medium EBR contained 0.23 µM gibberellic acid and 0.1 µM 24-epibrassinolide. After 2 months of culture, oxidation level was significantly reduced on medium EBR compared to medium S for four of the five accessions tested. By contrast, medium EBR did not have any positive effect on shoot length since length of shoots produced after 2 months of culture on medium S and EBR were similar, except with accession 3-45T, for which shoot length was shorter on medium S compared to medium EBR. These results underline the potential of 24-epibrassinolide to reduce oxidation phenomena during in vitro culture and call for its utilization for regeneration of cryopreserved yam shoot tips, which is often impeded by oxidation phenomena.