Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Translation of an Action Learning Collaborative Model Into a Community-Based Intervention to Promote Physical Activity and Healthy Eating

Action Learning Collaboratives (ALCs), whereby teams apply quality improvement (QI) tools and methods, have successfully improved patient care delivery and outcomes. We adapted and tested the ALC model as a community-based obesity prevention intervention focused on physical activity and healthy eating. Method. The intervention used QI tools (e.g., progress monitoring) and team-based activities and was implemented in three communities through nine monthly meetings. To assess process and outcomes, we used a longitudinal repeated-measures and mixed-methods triangulation approach with a quasi-experimental design including objective measures at three time points. Results. Most of the 97 participants were female (85.4%), White (93.8%), and non-Hispanic/Latino (95.9%). Average age was 52 years; 28.0% had annual household income of $20,000 or less; and mean body mass index was 35. Through mixed-effects models, we found some physical activity outcomes improved. Other outcomes did not significantly change. Although participants favorably viewed the QI tools, components of the QI process such as sharing goals and data on progress in teams and during meetings were limited. Participants’ requests for more education or activities around physical activity and healthy eating, rather than progress monitoring and data sharing required for QI activities, challenged ALC model implementation. Conclusions. An ALC model for community-based obesity prevention may be more effective when applied to preexisting teams in community-based organizations.
Dialysis Disequilibrium Syndrome: A Swell Diagnosis?

Dialysis disequilibrium syndrome (DDS) is a known complication of dialysis with a wide spectrum of clinical presentations including self-limiting nausea, to the extreme version of it resulting in coma and death. The differing clinical presentations are the result of the varying severity of increased intracranial pressure. Preventative measures have made its occurrence much less frequent, but its diagnosis should be considered when neurological symptoms are temporally related to dialysis even when preventative measures have been implemented. We report the case of a patient with acute kidney injury (AKI) in the setting of chronic kidney disease (CKD) who developed DDS following initial dialysis despite precautionary measures. J Med Cases. 2014;5(8):437-440 doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.14740/jmc1847w
Morphological Decomposition for Arabic Broadcast News Transcription

In this paper, we present a novel approach for morphological decomposition in large vocabulary Arabic speech recognition. It achieved low out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate as well as high recognition accuracy in a state-of-the-art Arabic broadcast news transcription system. In this approach, the compound words are decomposed into stems and affixes in both language training and acoustic training data. The decomposed words in the recognition output are re-joined before scoring. Four algorithms are experimented and compared in this work. The best system achieved 1.9% absolute reduction (9.8% relative) in word error rate (WER) when compared to the 64K-word baseline. The recognition performance of this system is also comparable to a 300K-word recognition system trained on the normal words. In the meantime, the decomposed system is much faster in terms of speed and also needs less memory than the systems with larger than 64K vocabularies
Query by humming of midi and audio using locality sensitive hashing

This paper proposes a query by humming method based on locality sensitive hashing (LSH). The method constructs an index of melodic fragments by extracting pitch vectors from a database of melodies. In retrieval, the method automatically transcribes a sung query into notes and then extracts pitch vectors similarly to the index construction. For each query pitch vector, the method searches for similar melodic fragments in the database to obtain a list of candidate melodies. This is performed efficiently by using LSH. The candidate melodies are ranked by their distance to the entire query and returned to the user. In our experiments, the method achieved mean reciprocal rank of 0.885 for 2797 queries when searching from a database of 6030 MIDI melodies. To retrieve audio signals, we apply an automatic melody transcription method to construct the melody database directly from music recordings and report the corresponding retrieval results.
Mailing lists for pharmacists and other interested health care professionals

Abstract Electronic mailing lists are an excellent way for pharmacists and other health care professionals to keep abreast of the newest technologies and share information with other colleagues with the same interests. There are now over 85,000 mailing lists available on a wide variety of topics. This article focuses on mailing lists that would be of interest to pharmacists and other interested health care professionals.
A DNA-Based Candidate HIV Vaccine Delivered via In Vivo Electroporation Induces CD4 Responses toward the α4β7-Binding V2 Loop of HIV gp120 in Healthy Volunteers

ABSTRACT Administration of a clade C/B′ candidate HIV-1 DNA vaccine, ADVAX, by in vivo electroporation (EP) was safe and more immunogenic than intramuscular administration without EP. The breadth and specificity of T-cell responses to full-length Env were mapped. Responses to multiple Env regions were induced, with most focusing on V3/C4 and V2 regions, including the α4β7 integrin-binding domain. The breadth of responses induced by this DNA vaccine regimen was comparable to that of viral-vectored vaccine regimens.
Phenotypic Definition of Effector and Memory T-Lymphocyte Subsets in Mice Chronically Infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis

ABSTRACT The bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis remains one of the world's most successful pathogens, a situation that is aggravated by the fact that the existing vaccine, Mycobacterium bovis BCG, is not effective in adults. As with any vaccine, the purpose of giving BCG vaccination is to establish a long-lived state of memory immunity, but whether this is successfully completely established is still unclear. It is generally accepted that memory T cells can be divided into central and effector memory populations by function and by phenotype; however, the majority of data supporting this division have been generated using transgenic mouse models or mice that have recovered from acute viral infections. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, represents a persistent, chronic state of immunity in which the presence of memory T cells is far less well defined. We show here that mice vaccinated with BCG or chronically infected with M. tuberculosis establish antigen-specific populations of cells within the lungs that predominantly express a cellular phenotype consistent with their being effector or effector memory cells. In contrast, cells with a central memory phenotype exist in much lower numbers in the lungs but can be found in significantly larger numbers in the spleen, where they may represent a potential reservoir. These data suggest that the effector-to-central-memory T-cell transition may well be minimal in these persisting mycobacterial infections, and they support a novel hypothesis that this may explain the fundamental basis of the failure of the BCG vaccine in humans.
Epidemiological Data from 2270 PPV Patients

Paroxysmal positional vertigo (PPV) is the most common vestibular disorder observed in a dizziness unit. In 1921, Barany documented the first case. Since then many authors have defined its characteristics and pathogenetic mechanisms and suggested diagnostic and therapeutic manoeuvres. Here we outline the history of PPV and investigate its epidemiology. Two thousand two hundred and seventy PPV patients were examined over the period 1991 to 2000, at the ENT Department of Siena University. The data obtained were used to assess the incidence, prevalence, features and clinical course of the disorder.
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A Survey of Current Trends in Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we propose a survey of the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) field when considering the recent evolution of autonomous driving. The growing interest regarding self-driving cars has given new directions to localization and mapping techniques. In this survey, we give an overview of the different branches of SLAM before going into the details of specific trends that are of interest when considered with autonomous applications in mind. We first present the limits of classical approaches for autonomous driving and discuss the criteria that are essential for this kind of application. We then review the methods where the identified challenges are tackled. We mostly focus on approaches building and reusing long-term maps in various conditions (weather, season, etc.). We also go through the emerging domain of multivehicle SLAM and its link with self-driving cars. We survey the different paradigms of that field (centralized and distributed) and the existing solutions. Finally, we conclude by giving an overview of the various large-scale experiments that have been carried out until now and discuss the remaining challenges and future orientations.
A Dose-Response Study of Glimepiride in Patients With NIDDM Who Have Previously Received Sulfonylurea Agents

OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy, safety, and dose-response relationship of glimepiride in patients with NIDDM. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS After a 21-day placebo washout period, 304 patients were randomized to receive either placebo or glimepiride, 1, 4, or 8 mg once daily. Fasting plasma glucose (FPG), 2-h postprandial glucose (PPG), and HbA1c were measured at predetermined intervals during the washout period and the 14-week study. Adverse events were tabulated. RESULTS At each patient visit, reduction from baseline FPG was greater in each glimepiride group than in the placebo group (P < 0.001). Changes from baseline to endpoint after 1, 4, and 8 mg glimepiride exceeded those after placebo (P < 0.001) by 2.4, 3.9, and 4.1 mmol/l, respectively, for FPG; by 1.2, 1.8, and 1.9 percentage points, respectively, for HbA1c; and by 3.5, 5.1, and 5.2 mmol/l, respectively, for 2-h PPG. Greater reductions in these parameters were observed with 8 and 4 mg than with 1 mg (P < 0.05), indicating a dose-response relationship. When patients with baseline HbA1c levels ≥ 8% were assessed, more patients who received 8 mg glimepiride had HbA1c values < 8% at endpoint compared with patients receiving 4 mg. Glimepiride had a favorable safety profile. CONCLUSIONS Glimepiride in 1-, 4-, or 8-mg doses was effective and well tolerated. Although the 4- and 8-mg once-daily doses were significantly more potent than the 1-mg dose, all three doses yielded clinical improvement. Because the 8-mg dose controlled HbA1c values in a greater number of patients with high baseline HbA1c levels than did the 4-mg dose, this higher dose might be beneficial for patients who are difficult to treat.
Cytomegalovirus infection in patients with AIDS.

Advances in the field of antiviral therapy are now occurring with increasing frequency and rapidity and often generate varying degrees of confusion among those of us whose practices are focused primarily on therapy with antibacterial agents. How to treat cytomegalovirus infections in patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus constitutes one of the best examples of the quandaries engendered by these advances, and the topic is reviewed in this first AIDS Commentary update. Given the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's recent approval of foscarnet, this discussion is very timely; it is particularly relevant for clinicians to be made aware of current lines of thought regarding induction versus maintenance therapy, the benefits of efficacy versus adverse effects of drug-related toxicity, and the interactions between antiretroviral drugs and ganciclovir or foscarnet. Dr. W. Lawrence Drew's career in this area has been long-standing and productive, and he is one of the leading experts in the field. In this update he addresses these perplexing issues.
WFST-based structural classification integrating dnn acoustic features and RNN language features for speech recognition

This paper proposes a method to train Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST) based structural classifiers using deep neural network (DNN) acoustic features and recurrent neural network (RNN) language features for speech recognition. Structural classification is an effective approach to achieve highly accurate recognition of structured data in which the classifier is optimized to maximize the discriminative performance using different kinds of features. A WFST-based classifier, which can integrate acoustic, pronunciation, and language features embedded in a composed WFST, was recently extended to incorporate DNN bottleneck (DNNBN) features. In this paper, we further investigate the integration of a RNN language model (RNNLM) with the WFST classifier. To this end, we introduce a lattice rescoring method using a RNNLM for efficient classifier training. In a lecture transcription task, we reduced the word error rate from 19.2% to 18.6% by optimizing the WFST parameters for the DNNBN acoustic and RNNLM language features.
Training Tomorrow’ Military Surgeons: Lessons from the Past and Challenges for the Future

The nature of conflict is evolving, with current warfare being associated with an initial “shock and awe” phase followed by protracted periods of counter-insurgency and peace support missions. As conflict has changed, so have the munitions deployed and the resulting patterns of injury. Improvised Explosive Devices have become the preferred weapon of the insurgent and the resultant explosive and fragmentation injuries are the hallmark of modern military wounding. These injuries pose a significant challenge to deployed medical forces, requiring a well-defined, seamless approach from injury to rehabilitation. Traditionally, military medical services demonstrate a poor ‘institutional memory’ in the maintenance of combat surgical skills. Numerous publications detail the re-learning of key tenets of war surgery by generations of surgeons deploying onto the field of battle. While the maintenance of military surgical capability in trained surgeons may be addressed through combat surgical courses, concern exists as to the generic competency of those currently in training and their ability to deal with the burden of injury associated with modern conflict. The training of junior doctors in the United Kingdom and further afield is in a state of flux. New curriculum development, streamlined and run-through training programmes have combined with the legal requirements of the European Working Time Directive to produce a training landscape almost unrecognisable with that of previous years. This article investigates the development of current military wounding patterns and modern surgical training programmes. It describes processes already in place to address the unique training needs of military surgeons and proposes a framework for enabling appropriate training opportunities in the future.
Cytokine Protein Expression Levels in Tracheobronchial Lymph Node Homogenates of Pigs Infected with Pseudorabies Virus

ABSTRACT Pseudorabies virus (PRV) is a neurotropic alphaherpesvirus that produces fatal encephalitis in newborn pigs, respiratory disorders in fattening pigs, and reproductive failure in sows. Following primary infection of the respiratory tract, PRV can develop into a systemic infection with dispersion of the virus via the lymphatic system that involves mononuclear cells in tracheobronchial lymph nodes (TBLNs). The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the pathogenesis and to determine the early immune cytokine profiles in TBLNs following experimental infection with a feral swine PRV isolate at 1, 3, 6, and 14 days postinfection (dpi). Forty healthy pigs were purchased from a PRV-negative herd. Twenty pigs received the Florida strain isolate (FS268) of feral swine PRV intranasally, and 20 uninfected controls received a sham inoculum. Compared to the levels in the controls, the levels of alpha interferon (IFN-α), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-12, and IFN-γ were increased in TBLN homogenates from PRV-infected pigs at 1 dpi, whereas the IL-18 levels were decreased from 3 to 6 dpi. The protein levels of IL-4 and IL-10 did not differ between the controls and the PRV-infected pigs at any time point. Flow cytometric analysis of TBLN homogenates of PRV-infected pigs and the controls revealed increases in the percentages of B cells at 6 dpi, CD4+ cells at 14 dpi, and CD25 expression in TBLN homogenates (in the total mononuclear fraction and on B cells) in the PRV-infected pigs. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that a feral PRV in commercial swine can modulate the host's early immune response to allow the virus to establish an infection.
Quality Monitoring of HIV-1-Infected and Uninfected Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cell Samples in a Resource-Limited Setting

ABSTRACT Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) vaccine and natural history studies are critically dependent on the ability to isolate, cryopreserve, and thaw peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) samples with a high level of quality and reproducibility. Here we characterize the yield, viability, phenotype, and function of PBMC from HIV-1-infected and uninfected Ugandans and describe measures to ascertain reproducibility and sample quality at the sites that perform cryopreservation. We have developed a comprehensive internal quality control program to monitor processing, including components of method validation. Quality indicators for real-time performance assessment included the time from venipuncture to cryopreservation, time for PBMC processing, yield of PBMC from whole blood, and viability of the PBMC before cryopreservation. Immune phenotype analysis indicated lowered B-cell frequencies following processing and cryopreservation for both HIV-1-infected and uninfected subjects (P < 0.007), but all other major lymphocyte subsets were unchanged. Long-term cryopreservation did not impact function, as unstimulated specimens exhibited low background and all specimens responded to staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) by gamma interferon and interleukin-2 production, as measured by intracellular cytokine staining. Samples stored for more than 3 years did not decay with regard to yield or viability, regardless of HIV-1 infection status. These results demonstrate that it is possible to achieve the high level of quality necessary for vaccine trials and natural history studies in a resource-limited setting and provide strategies for laboratories to monitor PBMC processing performance.
Robust MVDR beamforming using time-frequency masks for online/offline ASR in noise

This paper considers acoustic beamforming for noise robust automatic speech recognition (ASR). A beamformer attenuates background noise by enhancing sound components coming from a direction specified by a steering vector. Hence, accurate steering vector estimation is paramount for successful noise reduction. Recently, a beamforming approach was proposed that employs time-frequency masks. In the speech recognition system we submitted to the CHiME-3 Challenge, we employed a new form of this approach that uses a speech spectral model based on a complex Gaussian mixture model (CGMM) to estimate the time-frequency masks and the steering vector without providing technical details. This paper elaborates on this technique and examines its effectiveness for ASR. Experimental results show that the CGMM-based approach outperforms a recently proposed mask estimator based on a Watson mixture model. In addition, the CGMM-based approach is extended to an online speech enhancement scenario, which allows this technique to be used in an online recognition setup. This online version reduces the CHiME-3 evaluation error rate from 15.60% to 8.47%, which is a comparable improvement to that obtained by batch processing.
Insomnia and Relationship With Immunosuppressant Therapy After Lung Transplantation

Background: Lung transplant recipients are at high risk of developing sleep disorders such as insomnia, but the prevalence and features are currently poorly characterized within this population. Since these disorders are associated with increased morbidity and mortality, it is important to identify them to optimize the care of lung transplant recipients. We sought to evaluate the prevalence of insomnia within our university-based lung transplant clinic and determine whether a relationship exists between insomnia and exposure to immunosuppressant medications following transplantation. Methods: Participants were recruited through the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Lung Transplant Clinic (N = 125). Participants (n = 92) completed the adult sleep history questionnaire, which included the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) to assess for insomnia (defined as ISI score >10). Cumulative tacrolimus exposure was determined in 73 patients by performing an area under the curve calculation to assess for a potential relationship between tacrolimus exposure and insomnia. Results: The prevalence of insomnia was 40% within this population. Although no difference in time since transplant was found, cumulative mean ± standard error of the mean tacrolimus exposure was significantly higher in patients with insomnia versus those without insomnia (17 190 ± 1673 ng·d/mL vs 12 130 ± 1630 ng·d/mL, respectively; P = .04). Estimated tacrolimus exposure was not greater with increasing frequency of insomnia complaints (analysis of variance P = .54). Conclusion: In our population, insomnia is common after lung transplantation, with prevalence greater than the general population. Higher cumulative exposure to tacrolimus may contribute to insomnia in this group. Future research should investigate the relationship between immunosuppressant therapy and development of sleep disorders.
Similarity Join Processing on Uncertain Data Streams

Similarity join processing in the streaming environment has many practical applications such as sensor networks, object tracking and monitoring, and so on. Previous works usually assume that stream processing is conducted over precise data. In this paper, we study an important problem of similarity join processing on stream data that inherently contain uncertainty (or called uncertain data streams), where the incoming data at each time stamp are uncertain and imprecise. Specifically, we formalize this problem as join on uncertain data streams (USJ), which can guarantee the accuracy of USJ answers over uncertain data. To tackle the challenges with respect to efficiency and effectiveness such as limited memory and small response time, we propose effective pruning methods on both object and sample levels to filter out false alarms. We integrate the proposed pruning methods into an efficient query procedure that can incrementally maintain the USJ answers. Most importantly, we further design a novel strategy, namely, adaptive superset prejoin (ASP), to maintain a superset of USJ candidate pairs. ASP is in light of our proposed formal cost model such that the average USJ processing cost is minimized. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approaches.