Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transitional Cell Carcinoma in Dialysis Patients

Objective: The aim of our study was to determine whether there is an increased incidence of urothelial cancer, especially transitional cell carcinoma (TCC), in uremic patients on dialysis.Methods: Retrospective chart analyses were completed for 1,910 uremic patients undergoing maintenance dialysis between January 1987 and December 1997. The incidence of urinary tract cancer was assessed. Only the patients with cancers diagnosed after start of dialysis were enrolled in the study.Results: Of the 1,910 patients, 70 had concomitant urinary tract cancers. Nineteen patients (0.99%), including 17 patients with TCC and 2 patients with renal cell carcinoma, were diagnosed after the initiation of dialysis. The average duration from dialysis to TCC diagnosis was 38.3 (range 2–144) months. Painless gross hematuria was the cardinal symptom in 16 of the 17 patients with TCC. In the 17 patients with TCC, no distant metastases were found at the time of diagnosis. Fourteen patients (82.3%) were stage 0 or A, and 1 patient was stage B1.Conclusions: The 0.89% incidence of TCC in our dialysis patients was high as compared with that of the general population. The risks of developing urinary TCC in dialysis patients were examined, and we suggest that immunosuppressive stage, dialysis procedure, and chronic bladder irritation (decreased urinary wash effect) may play a part in the development of urinary TCC in dialysis patients. Early detection of hematuria due to regular visits and decreased exposure of urinary tract epithelium to carcinogens from urine may explain why early–stage TCC was seen in most of our patients.
New insights into the evolutionary origins of the recombination‐activating gene proteins and V(D)J recombination

The adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates relies on V(D)J recombination as one of the main processes to generate the diverse array of receptors necessary for the recognition of a wide range of pathogens. The DNA cleavage reaction necessary for the assembly of the antigen receptor genes from an array of potential gene segments is mediated by the recombination‐activating gene proteins RAG1 and RAG2. The RAG proteins have been proposed to originate from a transposable element (TE) as they share mechanistic and structural similarities with several families of transposases and are themselves capable of mediating transposition. A number of RAG‐like proteins and TEs with sequence similarity to RAG1 and RAG2 have been identified, but only recently has their function begun to be characterized, revealing mechanistic links to the vertebrate RAGs. Of particular significance is the discovery of ProtoRAG, a transposon superfamily found in the genome of the basal chordate amphioxus. ProtoRAG has many of the sequence and mechanistic features predicted for the ancestral RAG transposon and is likely to be an evolutionary relative of RAG1 and RAG2. In addition, early observations suggesting that RAG1 is able to mediate V(D)J recombination in the absence of RAG2 have been confirmed, implying independent evolutionary origins for the two RAG genes. Here, recent progress in identifying and characterizing RAG‐like proteins and the TEs that encode them is summarized and a refined model for the evolution of V(D)J recombination and the RAG proteins is presented.
A survey of deep face recognition in the wild

Face recognition is one of the significant topics in the biometric security system. This topic has been progressively developed by deep learning approaches, one of the most favorite techniques in recent years. In this paper, we propose a survey of existing works on face recognition using deep learning algorithms. All of the surveyed methods were compared on the labeled face in the wild (LFW) database.
Stem Cells Engineered During Different Stages of Reprogramming Reveal Varying Therapeutic Efficacies

Stem cells are emerging as promising treatment strategies for several brain disorders and pathologies. In this study, we explored the potential of creating induced pluripotent stem cell‐derived neural stem cells (ipNSC) by using either unmodified or gene‐modified somatic cells and tested their fate and therapeutic efficacies in vitro and in vivo. We show that cells engineered in somatic state lose transgene‐expression during the neural induction process, which is partially restored by histone deacetylase inhibitor treatment whereas cells engineered at the ipNSC state have sustained expression of transgenes. In vivo, bimodal mouse and human ipNSCs engineered to express tumor specific death‐receptor ligand and suicide‐inducing therapeutic proteins have profound anti‐tumor efficacy when encapsulated in synthetic extracellular matrix and transplanted in mouse models of resected‐glioblastoma. This study provides insights into using somatic cells for treating CNS disorders and presents a receptor‐targeted cancer therapeutic approach for brain tumors. Stem Cells 2018;36:932–942
Diagnosis of non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease/non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis: Why liver biopsy is essential

The pattern of non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease is complex with an association of several lesions, each of them related to different pathophysiological mechanisms. Despite the progress in non‐invasive tools, liver biopsy remains the only diagnostic procedure that can reliably assess these various patterns, their related severity and associations. The most important difficulties of liver biopsy can be avoided if this procedure is performed by an experienced hepatologist and read by a liver pathologist. However, for obvious reasons, biopsy should be restricted to selected patients, especially in the context of clinical trials. Indeed, liver biopsy is considered mandatory by regulatory authorities as a surrogate to assess drug efficacy in Phase 3 clinical trials. In addition to the clinical diagnosis, liver biopsy can be used to score the various histological patterns of disease (NASH‐CRN, SAF scores) and accurately assess the extent of fibrosis, both of which are useful when follow‐up biopsies are performed. When treatment becomes available in the near future, liver biopsy could remain useful for choosing the most suitable therapeutic option based on the main predominant histological features (activity, steatosis, fibrosis).
Conceptual notion for opinion mining from upcoming big data

The recent era of data driven cloud computing produce enormous amount of complex data which are needed to be analyzed properly. Data acquired from various social media platforms and resources further processed through different mining tools and techniques for different aspects such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, etc. Owing to the capability of extracting valuable opinions of consumers towards a particular event or product or blogs, this field gained a lot of attention from researchers and opinion computing become an integral part of big data mining. The existing data mining techniques lacks scalability and computational complexity issues, therefore the proposed study subjected to represent a tentative conceptual model planned for news event sentiment and opinion computation. The conceptual model thereby uses words and emoticons to extract and mine opinions from different words. It represents two different types of case study which are expected to be integrated with the futuristic Big Data Mining based applications.
Avoiding the ‘Costs’ of Testosterone: Ecological Bases of Hormone-Behavior Interactions

A combination of laboratory and field investigations of birds has shown that expression of behavior such as territorial aggression can occur throughout the year in many species and in different life history stages. Although it is well known that testosterone regulates territorial aggression in males during the breeding season, the correlation of plasma testosterone and aggression appears to be limited to periods of social instability when a male is challenged for his territory by another male, or when mate-guarding a sexually receptive female. How essentially identical aggression is modulated in non-breeding life history stages is not fully resolved, but despite low circulating levels of testosterone outside the breeding season, expression of territorial aggression does appear to be dependent upon aromatization of testosterone and an estrogen receptor-mediated mechanism. There is accumulating evidence that prolonged high levels of circulating testosterone may incur costs that may potentially reduce lifetime fitness. These include interference with paternal care, exposure to predators, increased risk of injury, loss of fat stores and possibly impaired immune system function and oncogenic effects. We propose six hypotheses to explain how these costs of high testosterone levels in blood may be avoided. These hypotheses are testable and may reveal many mechanisms resulting from selection to avoid the costs of testosterone. It should also be noted that the hypotheses are applicable to vertebrates in general, and may also be relevant for other hormones that have a highly specialized suite of actions in one life history stage (such as breeding), but also have a limited action in other life history stages when the full spectrum of effects would be inappropriate.
Single amino acid loss in the dystrophin protein associated with a mild clinical phenotype

Introduction: The dystrophinopathies include a spectrum of muscle diseases caused by mutations in the dystrophin (DMD) gene. The clinical phenotype ranges from severe Duchenne muscular dystrophy to a mild phenotype with elevated creatine kinase (CK). Methods: Clinical and molecular assessment of 7 patients carrying a single amino acid loss in the dystrophin protein (p.His1690del) caused by a c. 5068_5070delCAC tri‐nucleotide deletion in exon 36 of the DMD gene. Results: All patients were asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic and had elevated CK levels. Febrile illness, but not exercise, induced muscle symptoms in some patients. None had evidence of cardiomyopathy. Analysis of the short tandem repeat (STR)45 locus and sequencing of exon 36 of the DMD gene indicates that c. 5068_5070delCAC is a founder mutation. Conclusions: The c. 5068_5070delCAC locus in the DMD gene is associated with a very mild phenotype. Further study is needed to evaluate disease progression in these patients. Muscle Nerve 55: 46–50, 2017
Talking About Type 2 Diabetes

Purpose The purpose of this study was to describe type 2 diabetes (T2DM) communication and risk reduction recommendations from the perspective of family members at risk for T2DM based on family history. Methods Semistructured qualitative interviews were conducted with 33 individuals with a first-degree relative with T2DM. Participants were recruited from the community and a previous pharmacogenetics study. Deductive and inductive codes were applied to the transcripts. Results Conversations with family members with and without T2DM focused on symptoms and disease management of the family member with T2DM. With at-risk relatives, conversations also focused on prevention. Lack of perceived relevance to family members without T2DM was a barrier to communication. Recommendations to facilitate communication included education of an at-risk family member to increase awareness of risk, followed by sharing of learned information with others. Conclusion Efforts are needed to increase awareness and improve communication about T2DM risk factors, familial risk, and risk reduction behaviors within families with a family history of T2DM. Family members with and without T2DM should be encouraged to communicate with their relatives about T2DM and the risk to family members. Identification of family members who can facilitate communication, education, and modeling of healthy behaviors may increase awareness and motivate at-risk individuals to engage in risk-reducing behaviors.
Condition monitoring using image processing

Vibrations have been traditionally associated with trouble in machines. However vibrations are merely symptoms of good or bad mechanical behaviour. Today these symptoms are used to detect solve many mechanical problems in rotating machines. These machines play the most important role in any industry. Faults results in motor failure causing breakdown and great loss of production due to shutdown of industry. This in turn increases the running cost of machine with reduction in efficiency. Therefore, early detection of fault with diagnosis of its root cause is needed. This project is an approach for fault detection of rotating machine using orbit analysis of shaft and image processing. Several works have been focused on detecting early mechanical and electrical faults before damage appears in the motor. All the techniques are very effective their way. In this project, a new methodology is proposed for identifying if there is a fault in motor. Through image processing based on orbital analysis, different faults will be studied, generating characteristically different patterns that are used for fault detection.
A de novo 1q22q23.1 Interstitial Microdeletion in a Girl with Intellectual Disability and Multiple Congenital Anomalies Including Congenital Heart Defect

Many studies have shown that molecular karyotyping is an effective diagnostic tool in individuals with developmental delay/intellectual disability. We report on a de novo interstitial 1q22q23.1 microdeletion, 1.6 Mb in size, detected in a patient with short stature, microcephaly, hypoplastic corpus callosum, cleft palate, minor facial anomalies, congenital heart defect, camptodactyly of the 4-5th fingers, and intellectual disability. Chromosomal microarray analysis revealed a 1.6-Mb deletion in the 1q22q23.1 region, arr[GRCh37] 1q22q23.1(155630752_157193893)×1. Real-time PCR analysis confirmed its de novo origin. The deleted region encompasses 50 protein-coding genes, including the morbid genes APOA1BP, ARHGEF2, LAMTOR2, LMNA, NTRK1, PRCC, RIT1, SEMA4A, and YY1AP1. Although the unique phenotype observed in our patient can arise from the haploinsufficiency of the dosage-sensitive LMNA gene, the dosage imbalance of other genes implicated in the rearrangement could also contribute to the phenotype. Further studies are required for the delineation of the phenotype associated with this rare chromosomal alteration and elucidation of the critical genes for manifestation of the specific clinical features.
A study on strategy acquisition on imperfect information game by UCT search

In recent years, using Monte Carlo Tree Search and UCT for game decision making is becoming a popular technique. However, the mainstream target of these researches is a perfect information game. There are perfect information game and imperfect information game in the classification of the game, research on incomplete information games is also important. In this study, the UCT search is applied to make a decision for the Hanafuda game as an incomplete information game that is a Japanese traditional card game. Hanafuda game is also one of typical games with imperfect information. We attempt to acquire a strategy of this game by using UCT search. In order to evaluate the performance of UCT, we carry out a simulated competition experiment. Obtained experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of UCT search.
Intradermal Injection of Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1 Induces Emigration and Differentiation of Blood Monocytes in Rat Skin

Background: Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) is a potent chemoattractant for blood monocytes in vitro. Recent studies in MCP-1-transgenic mice revealed that the local production of MCP-1 caused monocyte infiltration. However, the kinetics of monocyte infiltration after the production of MCP-1 or the amount of MCP-1 necessary for monocyte recruitment are not known. Methods: We purified recombinant rat MCP-1 expressed in COS-7 cells, and injected it into rat skin. The infiltrating cells were examined by immunohistochemistry and ultrastructural peroxidase cytochemistry. Results: Rat recombinant MCP-1 had a molecular mass of approximately 30 kD and exhibited the peak monocyte chemotactic activity at 10–9 M. One microgram of MCP-1 caused intra- and extravascular accumulation of mononuclear cells 3 h after injection. The cells were ED1+, indicating they were blood monocytes. The infiltration of mononuclear cells peaked at 12–24 h, and most of them were TRPM-3+ and ED3+, characteristic to exudate macrophages. None of the cells expressed ED2 or Ki-M2R antigens, markers for resident macrophages, until 3 days after injection. There was no uptake of [3H]thymidine by the infiltrating cells. Ultrastructural peroxidase cytochemistry confirmed that the infiltrating cells were monocytes and exudate macrophages. The number of OX8+ lymphocytes also peaked at 12 h, consisting of approximately 9% of the total infiltrating cells. Conclusion: These results indicate that MCP-1 attracts blood monocytes as early as 3 h and the infiltrating monocytes differentiate into exudate macrophages in loco. However, this effect was transient and the infiltration of monocytes did not result in tissue damage.
ConGEMs: Condensed Gene Co-Expression Module Discovery Through Rule-Based Clustering and Its Application to Carcinogenesis

For transcriptomic analysis, there are numerous microarray-based genomic data, especially those generated for cancer research. The typical analysis measures the difference between a cancer sample-group and a matched control group for each transcript or gene. Association rule mining is used to discover interesting item sets through rule-based methodology. Thus, it has advantages to find causal effect relationships between the transcripts. In this work, we introduce two new rule-based similarity measures—weighted rank-based Jaccard and Cosine measures—and then propose a novel computational framework to detect condensed gene co-expression modules (ConGEMs) through the association rule-based learning system and the weighted similarity scores. In practice, the list of evolved condensed markers that consists of both singular and complex markers in nature depends on the corresponding condensed gene sets in either antecedent or consequent of the rules of the resultant modules. In our evaluation, these markers could be supported by literature evidence, KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) pathway and Gene Ontology annotations. Specifically, we preliminarily identified differentially expressed genes using an empirical Bayes test. A recently developed algorithm—RANWAR—was then utilized to determine the association rules from these genes. Based on that, we computed the integrated similarity scores of these rule-based similarity measures between each rule-pair, and the resultant scores were used for clustering to identify the co-expressed rule-modules. We applied our method to a gene expression dataset for lung squamous cell carcinoma and a genome methylation dataset for uterine cervical carcinogenesis. Our proposed module discovery method produced better results than the traditional gene-module discovery measures. In summary, our proposed rule-based method is useful for exploring biomarker modules from transcriptomic data.
Unresponsiveness of plasma mineralocorticoids to angiotensin II in diabetic patients with asymptomatic normoreninemic hypoaldosteronism.

offlated hypoaldosteronism with or without hyperkalemia in patients with diabetes mellitus has been shown to exist occasionally without hyporeninemia. To assess in detail the adrenal function in this disorder, the responses of plasma aldosterone (PA) and its precursor steroids to angiotensin II (AII) infusion and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) injection were studied in seven patients with asymptomatic normoreninemic hypoaldosteronism (ANH) and 11 age-matched normal subjects. The ANH diabetic patients had, by definition, a low PA level after furosemide (80 mg orally) plus upright posture (4 hours) stimulation, low PA and high plasma renin activity (PRA) increases after the stimulation (a low delta PA/delta PRA ratio), and normokalemia. Plasma inactive renin and the inactive renin/total renin ration were similar in the ANH diabetic patients and in the normal subjects. Under the pre-AII condition, plasma DOC and corticosterone levels tended to be low, and the plasma 18-OHB and PA levels were low in the ANH diabetic patients compared with the normal subjects. The ratio of plasma 18-OHB to PA was similar in the two groups. All infusion produced no increases in plasma 18-OHB and PA in the ANH diabetic patients, whereas the infusion caused dose-dependent increases in these steroids in the normal subjects. Plasma DOC and corticosterone levels remained unchanged during AII infusion in the two groups. ACTH injection produced appropriate PA increases relative to the basal PA in the two groups. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Biographical disruption, adjustment and reconstruction of everyday occupations and work participation after mild traumatic brain injury. A focus group study

Abstract Purpose: To explore traumatic brain injury (TBI) as a biographical disruption and to study the reconstruction of everyday occupations and work participation among individuals with mild TBI. Methods: Seven focus groups were conducted with 12 women and 8 men (22–60 years) who had sustained mild TBI and participated in a return-to-work program. Interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results: Four interrelated themes emerged: disruption of occupational capacity and balance; changes in self-perceptions; experience of time; and occupational adjustment and reconstruction. The meaning of the impairments lies in their impact on the individual’s everyday occupations. The abandonment of meaningful daily occupations and the feeling of not recognizing oneself were experienced as threats to the sense of self. Successful integration of the past, present and future was paramount to continuing life activities. The unpredictability of the future seemed to permeate the entire process of adjustment and reconstruction of daily life. Conclusions: Our findings show that the concept of time is important in understanding and supporting the reconstruction of daily life after TBI. The fundamental work of rehabilitation is to ameliorate the disruptions caused by the injury, restoring a sense of personal narrative and supporting the ability to move forward with life. Implications for Rehabilitation Individuals with a protracted recovery after a mild traumatic brain injury must reconstruct a new way of being and acting in the world to achieve biographical continuity. The perceived anxiety regarding changes in self and occupational identity, as well as loss of control over the future, can be attenuated through informational sessions during the hospital stay and at follow-up visits. The significant personal costs of returning to full-time employment too early indicate the need for early and ongoing vocational support in achieving a successful return to work.