Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cholecystectomy before, simultaneously, or after ERCP in patients with acute cholecystitis: A protocol for systematic review and/or meta analysis

Introduction: Cholecystectomy is the intervention of choice for treating acute cholecystitis; when conservative management does not work, it operates on the patient outside the critical condition. It can be performed together with or after endoscopic papillotomy through endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) when it is concurrent with a situation of cholechodocolithiasis or when there is compression and consequent increase in pressure in the bile duct caused by a calculus jammed in the vesicular infundibulum (Mirizzi’s syndrome), with or without jaundice, fever, and pain in the right hypochondrium (Charcot’s Triad), which can progress to sepsis of biliary origin. This review aims to assess whether the timing of cholecystectomy (before or after ERCP) interferes with the postoperative period and clinical outcome in patients with acute cholecystitis. Methods and Analysis: By searching the MEDLINE/PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, ClinicalTrials.gov, CINAHAL, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences, Scopus and Cochrane Central databases, Controlled Trials Registry Randomized clinical trials will be searched to analyze whether ERCP performed before or after open or laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) in patients with acute cholecystitis is beneficial or not, through the analysis of postoperative complications. No language or publication period restrictions will be imposed. The primary outcome will be postoperative complications (postoperative morbidity and mortality). Four independent reviewers will select the studies and extract data from the original publications, with a fifth reviewer in case of disagreement regarding the inclusion or not of particular research in the present review. The risk of bias will be assessed using The Risk of Bias 2 (RoB 2.0) tool, and the certainty of evidence will be evaluated using the grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation. Data synthesis will be performed using the Review Manager software (RevMan V.5.2.3). To assess heterogeneity, we will calculate the I2 statistics. Additionally, a quantitative synthesis will be performed if the included studies are sufficiently homogeneous. Ethics and Disclosure: Since the present study will review secondary data, previously published and scientifically validated, it will not be necessary to obtain ethical approval. The results of this systematic review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Prospero registration number: International Prospective Registry of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) CRD42021290726.
Tregs in visceral adipose tissue up-regulate circadian-clock expression to promote fitness and enforce a diurnal rhythm of lipolysis

Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in nonlymphoid organs provide critical brakes on inflammation and regulate tissue homeostasis. Although so-called “tissue Tregs” are phenotypically and functionally diverse, serving to optimize their performance and survival, up-regulation of pathways related to circadian rhythms is a feature they share. Yet the diurnal regulation of Tregs and its consequences are controversial and poorly understood. Here, we profiled diurnal variations in visceral adipose tissue (VAT) and splenic Tregs in the presence and absence of core-clock genes. VAT, but not splenic, Tregs up-regulated their cell-intrinsic circadian program and exhibited diurnal variations in their activation and metabolic state. BMAL1 deficiency specifically in Tregs led to constitutive activation and poor oxidative metabolism in VAT, but not splenic, Tregs. Disruption of core-clock components resulted in loss of fitness: BMAL1-deficient VAT Tregs were preferentially lost during competitive transfers and in heterozygous TregBmal1Δ females. After 16 weeks of high-fat diet feeding, VAT inflammation was increased in mice harboring BMAL1-deficient Tregs, and the remaining cells lost the transcriptomic signature of bona fide VAT Tregs. Unexpectedly, VAT Tregs suppressed adipocyte lipolysis, and BMAL1 deficiency specifically in Tregs abrogated the characteristic diurnal variation in adipose tissue lipolysis, resulting in enhanced suppression of lipolysis throughout the day. These findings argue for the importance of the cell-intrinsic clock program in optimizing VAT Treg function and fitness. Description Visceral adipose tissue Tregs turn up cell-intrinsic circadian rhythms to promote cellular fitness and regulate diurnal lipolysis. Bedtime for Tregs Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in visceral adipose tissue (VAT) are key to regulating local and systemic metabolism. Circadian rhythm pathways are up-regulated in tissue-Tregs, yet it is unclear how they affect VAT Tregs. Here, Xiao et al. determined the transcriptomic and metabolic profiles of VAT Tregs at various circadian time points in mice that expressed or were deficient in expression of core-clock genes (genes that control circadian rhythms). VAT Tregs had altered phenotypes at various times during the circadian cycle and ablation of Bmal1, a core clock gene, which led to VAT Treg constitutive activation and altered metabolism, fitness loss, and the greater suppression of adipocyte lipolysis. Thus, diurnal rhythm plays a key role in the function and regulation of VAT Tregs.
Disease resistance in coral is mediated by distinct adaptive and plastic gene expression profiles

Infectious diseases are an increasing threat to coral reefs, resulting in altered community structure and hindering the functional contributions of disease-susceptible species. We exposed seven reef-building coral species from the Caribbean to white plague disease and determined processes involved in (i) lesion progression, (ii) within-species gene expression plasticity, and (iii) expression-level adaptation among species that lead to differences in disease risk. Gene expression networks enriched in immune genes and cytoskeletal arrangement processes were correlated to lesion progression rates. Whether or not a coral developed a lesion was mediated by plasticity in genes involved in extracellular matrix maintenance, autophagy, and apoptosis, while resistant coral species had constitutively higher expression of intracellular protein trafficking. This study offers insight into the process involved in lesion progression and within- and between-species dynamics that lead to differences in disease risk that is evident on current Caribbean reefs.
CARE AND FEEDING OF FROGS

“Propellers” are features in Saturn's A ring associated with moonlets that open partial gaps. They exhibit non-Keplerian motion (Tiscareno et al.); the longitude residuals of the best-observed propeller, “Blériot,” appear consistent with a sinusoid of period ∼4 years. Pan & Chiang proposed that propeller moonlets librate in “frog resonances” with co-orbiting ring material. By analogy with the restricted three-body problem, they treated the co-orbital material as stationary in the rotating frame and neglected non-co-orbital material. Here we use simple numerical experiments to extend the frog model, including feedback due to the gap's motion, and drag associated with the Lindblad disk torques that cause Type I migration. Because the moonlet creates the gap, we expect the gap centroid to track the moonlet, but only after a time delay tdelay, the time for a ring particle to travel from conjunction with the moonlet to the end of the gap. We find that frog librations can persist only if tdelay exceeds the frog libration period Plib, and if damping from Lindblad torques balances driving from co-orbital torques. If tdelay ≪ Plib, then the libration amplitude damps to zero. In the case of Blériot, the frog resonance model can reproduce the observed libration period Plib ≃ 4 yr. However, our simple feedback prescription suggests that Blériot's tdelay ∼ 0.01Plib, which is inconsistent with the observed libration amplitude of 260 km. We urge more accurate treatments of feedback to test the assumptions of our toy models.
Investigating Narrative Performance in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

PURPOSE Narrative assessment is one potentially underutilized and inconsistent method speech-language pathologists may use when considering a diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD). However, narration research encompasses many varied methodologies. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to (a) investigate how various narrative assessment types (e.g., macrostructure, microstructure, and internal state language) differentiate children with typical development (TD) from children with DLD, (b) identify specific narrative assessment measures that result in greater group differences, and (c) evaluate participant and sample characteristics that may influence performance differences. METHOD Electronic databases (PsycINFO, ERIC, and PubMed) and ASHAWire were searched on July 30, 2019, to locate studies that reported oral narrative language measures for both DLD and TD groups between ages 4 and 12 years; studies focusing on written narration or other developmental disorders only were excluded. We extracted data related to sample participants, narrative task(s) and assessment measures, and research design. Group differences were quantified using standardized mean differences. Analyses used mixed-effects meta-regression with robust variance estimation to account for effect size dependencies. RESULTS Searches identified 37 eligible studies published between 1987 and 2019, including 382 effect sizes. Overall meta-analysis showed that children with DLD had decreased narrative performance relative to TD peers, with an overall average effect of -0.82 SD, 95% confidence interval [-0.99, -0.66]. Effect sizes showed significant heterogeneity both between and within studies, even after accounting for effect size-, sample-, and study-level predictors. Across model specifications, grammatical accuracy (microstructure) and story grammar (macrostructure) yielded the most consistent evidence of TD-DLD group differences. CONCLUSIONS Present findings suggest some narrative assessment measures yield significantly different performance between children with and without DLD. However, researchers need to improve consistency of inclusionary criteria, descriptions of sample characteristics, and reporting of correlations between measures to determine which assessment measures reliably distinguish between groups. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21200380.
A lightweight U-net for ECG denoising using knowledge distillation

Objective. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are easily polluted by various noises which are likely to have adverse effects on subsequent interpretations. Research on model lightweighting can promote the practical application of deep learning-based ECG denoising methods in real-time processing. Approach. Firstly, grouped convolution and conventional convolution are combined to replace the continuous conventional convolution in the model, and the depthwise convolution with stride is used to compress the feature map in the encoder modules. Secondly, additional identity connections and a local maximum and minimum enhancement module are designed, which can retain the detailed information and characteristic waveform in the ECG waveform while effectively denoising. Finally, we develop knowledge distillation in the experiments, which further improves the ECG denoising performance without increasing the model complexity. The ground-truth ECG is from The China Physiological Signal Challenge (CPSC) 2018, and the noise signal is from the MIT-BIH Noise Stress Test Database (NSTDB). We evaluate denoising performance using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the root mean square error (RMSE) and the Pearson correlation coefficient (P). We use the floating point of operations (FLOPs) and parameters to calculate computational complexity. Main Results. Different data generation processes are used to conduct experiments: group 1, group 2 and group 3. The results show that the proposed model (U Lde -net) can improve SNRs by 10.30 dB, 12.16 dB and 12.61 dB; reduce RMSEs by 9.88 × 10−2, 20.63 × 10−2 and 15.25 × 10−2; and increase Ps by 14.77 × 10−2, 27.74 × 10−2 and 21.32 × 10−2. Moreover, the denoising performance after knowledge distillation is further improved. The U Lde -net has parameters of 6.9 K and FLOPs of 6.6 M, which are much smaller than the compared models. Significance. We designed a lightweight model, but also retain adequate ECG denoising performance. We believe that this method can be successfully applied to practical applications under time or memory limits.
Probing the first galaxies with the SKA

Observations of anisotropies in the brightness temperature of the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen from the period before reionization would shed light on the dawn of the first stars and galaxies. In this paper, we use large-scale semi-numerical simulations to analyse the imprint on the 21 cm signal of spatial fluctuations in the Lyman-alpha flux arising from the clustering of the first galaxies. We show that an experiment such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) can probe this signal at the onset of reionization, giving us important information about the UV emission spectra of the first stars and characterizing their host galaxies. SKA-pathfinders with ~ 10% of the full collecting area should be capable of making a statistical detection of the 21 cm power spectrum at redshifts z 67 MHz). We then show that the SKA should be able to measure the three dimensional power spectrum as a function of the angle with the line of sight and discuss the use of the redshift space distortions as a way to separate out the different components of the 21 cm power spectrum. We demonstrate that, at least on large scales where the Lyman-alpha fluctuations are linear, they can be used as a model independent way to extract the power spectra due to these Lyman-alpha fluctuations.
Reevaluation of Makuuchi’s criteria for resecting hepatocellular carcinoma: A Japanese nationwide survey

Although Makuuchi’s criteria are widely used to determine the cut‐off for safe liver resection, there have been few reports of concrete data supporting their validity. Here, we verified the utility of Makuuchi’s criteria by comparing the operative mortality rates associated with liver resection between hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients meeting or exceeding the criteria.
Finite-Time Event-Triggered Stabilization for Discrete-Time Fuzzy Markov Jump Singularly Perturbed Systems

The finite-time event-triggered stabilization is studied for a class of discrete-time nonlinear Markov jump singularly perturbed models with partially unknown transition probabilities (TPs). T–S fuzzy strategy is adopted to characterize the related nonlinear Markov jump singularly perturbed models. The control objective is to make sure that the system states remain within a bounded domain during a fixed-time interval. First, a mode-dependent event-triggered scheme is constructed to reduce the communication burden and save the network bandwidth. On that basis, by using a new Lyapunov function, a developed finite-time stability criterion is derived for the corresponding system to avoid an ill-conditioned issue due to a small singular perturbation parameter. Moreover, the mode-dependent fuzzy controller gain and the event-triggered parameter are co-designed under the framework of partially unknown TPs. Finally, the feasibility of the main results is provided to verify the finite-time event-triggered control strategy.
Dust properties of protoplanetary disks in the Taurus-Auriga star forming region from millimeter wavelengths

We present the most sensitive 3 mm-survey to date of protoplanetary disks carried out in the Taurus-Auriga star forming region (average rms of about 0.3 mJy), using the IRAM PdBI. With our high detection rate of 17/19 we provide the first detections at wavelengths longer than about 1 mm for 12 sources. This enables us to statistically study the mm SED slopes and dust properties of faint disks and compare them to brighter disks using a uniform analysis method. With these new data and literature measurements at sub-millimeter and millimeter wavelengths, we analyze the dust properties of a sample of 21 isolated disks around T Tauri stars in the Taurus-Auriga star forming region. Together with the information about the disks’ spatial extension from sub/mm-mm interferometric studies, we derive from the observed sub-mm/mm spectral energy distribution constraints on the dust opacity law at these wavelengths, using two-layer flared disk models and a self-consistent dust model that properly takes into account the variation of the dust opacity with grain growth. We find evidence for the presence of dust particles in the disk midplane that have grown to sizes as large as at least 1 millimeter in all the disks of our sample, confirming what was previously observed on smaller brighter objects. This indicates that the dust coagulation from ISM dust to mm-sized grains is a very fast process in protoplanetary disks, which appears to occur before a young stellar object enters the class II evolutionary stage. The amount of these large grains in the disk outer regions is also found to be stationary throughout the whole class II evolutionary stage, which indicates that mechanisms slowing down the dust inward migration play an important role in the Taurus-Auriga protoplanetary disks. Another result is that the spectral index between 1 and 3 mm for the six faintest disks in our sample is on average smaller than for the brighter disks, indicating either that these fainter yet unmapped disks are spatially much less extended than the brighter spatially resolved disks, or that fainter disks have typically larger dust grains in their outer regions. Considering that these fainter disks are more representative of the bulk of the disk population than the brighter ones, this may have important consequences for the theories of planetesimal formation and disk formation and evolution. Finally, we investigate the relations between the derived dust properties, namely dust mass and grain growth, and the properties of the central star, like its mass, age and mass accretion rate.
ULTRAVIOLET EMISSION-LINE CORRELATIONS IN HST/COS SPECTRA OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: SINGLE-EPOCH BLACK HOLE MASSES

Effective methods of measuring supermassive black hole masses in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are of critical importance to studies of galaxy evolution. While there has been much success in obtaining masses through reverberation mapping, the extensive observing time required by this method has limited the practicality of applying it to large samples at a variety of redshifts. This limitation highlights the need to estimate these masses using single-epoch spectroscopy of ultraviolet (UV) emission lines. We use UV spectra of 44 AGNs from HST/COS, the International Ultraviolet Explorer, and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer of the C iv λ1549, O vi λ1035, O iii] λ1664, He ii λ1640, C ii λ1335, and Mg ii λ2800 emission lines and explore their potential as tracers of the broad-line region and supermassive black hole mass. The higher signal-to-noise ratio and better spectral resolution of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) resolve AGN intrinsic absorption and produce more accurate line widths. From these, we test the viability of mass-scaling relationships based on line widths and luminosities and carry out a principal component analysis based on line luminosities, widths, skewness, and kurtosis. At L1450 ⩽ 1045 erg s−1, the UV line luminosities correlate well with Hβ, as does the 1450 Å continuum luminosity. We find that C iv, O vi, and Mg ii can be used as reasonably accurate estimators of AGN black hole masses, while He ii and C ii are uncorrelated.
Clinical Features of Female Carriers and Prodromal Male Patients With Spinal and Bulbar Muscular Atrophy

Background and Objectives To assess the clinical and electrophysiologic features of female carriers and early-stage male patients with spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA) to elucidate the early pathophysiologic changes of the disease. Methods Female carriers, early-stage male patients with SBMA, and age-matched male and female healthy controls were recruited. The results of motor functional scales, motor unit number estimation, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, and peripheral blood tests were compared between female carriers and healthy female controls and between patients with SBMA and healthy male controls. EMG was also investigated in female carriers. Results We enrolled 21 female carriers and 11 early-stage male patients. Seventeen female and 14 male age-matched healthy controls were also enrolled. Female carriers experienced early-stage symptoms such as muscle cramps more frequently than healthy female controls. Decreased motor unit number estimation and EMG abnormalities including high amplitude or polyphasic potentials were observed in female carriers together with mild muscle weakness in neck flexion and a slow walking speed. Changes of muscle-related markers, including serum creatine kinase and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, were clearly detected in early-stage male patients with SBMA, but not in female carriers. Discussion The present study revealed that female carriers of SBMA manifest mild muscular weakness associated with changes in neurogenic biomarkers. Conversely, male patients showed neurogenic and myopathic changes even at the early stage. These results suggest a testosterone-independent neurodegenerative pathophysiology in female SBMA carriers.
Freedom and Constraint in Digital Environments: Implications for the Self

We evaluate how features of the digital environment free or constrain the self. Based on the current empirical literature, we argue that modern technological features, such as predictive algorithms and tracking tools, pose four potential obstacles to the freedom of the self: lack of privacy and anonymity, (dis)embodiment and entrenchment of social hierarchy, changes to memory and cognition, and behavioral reinforcement coupled with reduced randomness. Comparing these constraints on the self to the freedom promised by earlier digital environments suggests that digital reality can be designed in more freeing ways. We describe how people reassert personal agency in the face of the digital environment’s constraints and provide avenues for future research regarding technology’s influence on the self.