Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Triggers for Atrial Fibrillation: The Role of Anxiety

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most widely recognized arrhythmia. Systemic arterial hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart failure, and valvular heart diseases are major risk factors for the onset and progression of AF. Various studies have emphasized the augmented anxiety rate among AF patients due to the poor quality of life; however, little information is known about the possibility of triggering atrial fibrillation by anxiety. The present review sought to underline the possible pathophysiological association between AF and anxiety disorders and suggests that anxiety can be an independent risk factor for AF, acting as a trigger, creating an arrhythmogenic substrate, and modulating the autonomic nervous system. The awareness of the role of anxiety disorders as a risk factor for AF may lead to the development of new clinical strategies for the management of AF.
Combination of Ligusticum Chuanxiong and Radix Paeonia Promotes Angiogenesis in Ischemic Myocardium through Notch Signalling and Mobilization of Stem Cells

Objective To study the cardioprotective mechanism by which the combination of Chuanxiong (CX) and Chishao (CS) promotes angiogenesis. Methods Myocardial infarction (MI) mouse models were induced by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery. The effects on cardiac function were evaluated in the perindopril tert-butylamine group (PB group) (3 mg/kg/d), CX group (55 mg/kg/d), CS group (55 mg/kg/d), and CX and CS combination (CX-CS) group (27.5 mg/kg/d CX plus 27.5 mg/kg/d CS). RO4929097, an inhibitor of Notch γ secretase, was used (10 mg/kg/d) to explore the role of Notch signalling in the CX-CS-induced promotion of angiogenesis in the myocardial infarcted border zone (IBZ). The left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and percentage of MI area were evaluated with animal ultrasound and Masson staining. The average optical densities (AODs) of CD31 and vWF in the myocardial IBZ were detected by immunofluorescence. Angiogenesis-related proteins including hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha (HIF-1α), fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 (FGFR-1), Notch1 and Notch intracellular domain (NICD), and stem cell mobilization-related proteins including stromal cell-derived factor 1 (SDF-1), C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CXCR-4), and cardiotrophin1 were detected by western blot analysis. Results Compared with the model group, the CX-CS and PB groups both showed markedly improved LVEF and decreased percentage of MI area after 21 days of treatment. Although the CX group and CS group showed increased LVEF and decreased MI areas compared with the model group, the difference was not significant. The AOD of CD31 in the IBZ in both the model and the CX-CS-I group was markedly reduced compared with that in the sham group. CX-CS significantly increased the CD31 AOD in the IBZ and decreased the AODs of CD31 and vWF in the infarct zone compared with those in the model group. The expression of HIF-1α in both the model group and the CX-CS group was higher than that in the sham group. Compared with the model group, the expression of FGFR-1, SDF-1, cardiotrophin1, Notch1, and NICD was increased in the CX-CS group. Notch1 and NICD expression in the CX-CS-I group was reduced compared with that in the CX-CS group. Conclusions The combination of CX and CS protected cardiomyocytes in the IBZ better than CX or CS alone. The mechanism by which CX-CS protects ischemic myocardium may be related to the proangiogenesis effect of CX-CS exerted through Notch signalling and the mobilization of stem cells to the IBZ.
Statistical Privacy in Distributed Average Consensus on Bounded Real Inputs

This paper proposes a privacy protocol for distributed average consensus algorithms on bounded real-valued inputs that guarantees statistical privacy of honest agents' inputs against colluding (passive adversarial) agents, if the set of colluding agents is not a vertex cut in the underlying communication network. This implies that privacy of agents' inputs is preserved against $t$ number of arbitrary colluding agents if the connectivity of the communication network is at least (t + 1). A similar privacy protocol has been proposed for the case of bounded integral inputs in our previous paper [1]. However, many applications of distributed consensus concerning distributed control or state estimation deal with real-valued inputs. Thus, in this paper we propose an extension of the privacy protocol in [1], for bounded real-valued agents' inputs, where bounds are known apriori to all the agents.
Visceral Machines: Risk-Aversion in Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsic Physiological Rewards

As people learn to navigate the world, autonomic nervous system (e.g., “ﬁght or ﬂight”) responses provide intrinsic feedback about the potential consequence of action choices (e.g., becoming nervous when close to a cliff edge or driving fast around a bend.) Physiological changes are correlated with these biological preparations to protect one-self from danger. We present a novel approach to reinforcement learning that leverages a task-independent intrinsic reward function trained on peripheral pulse measurements that are correlated with humana autonomic nervous system responses. Our hypothesis is that such reward functions can circumvent the challenges associated with sparse and skewed rewards in reinforcement learning settings and can help improve sample efﬁciency. We test this in a simulated driving environment and show that it can increase the speed of learning and reduce the number of collisions during the learning stage.
Hierarchical Propagation Networks for Fake News Detection: Investigation and Exploitation

Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. However, social media also enables the wide dissemination of fake news. Because of the detrimental effects of fake news, fake news detection has attracted increasing attention. However, the performance of detecting fake news only from news content is generally limited as fake news pieces are written to mimic true news. In the real world, news pieces spread through propagation networks on social media. The news propagation networks usually involve multi-levels. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of investigating and exploiting news hierarchical propagation network on social media for fake news detection.In an attempt to understand the correlations between news propagation networks and fake news, first, we build hierarchical propagation networks for fake news and true news pieces; second, we perform a comparative analysis of the propagation network features from structural, temporal, and linguistic perspectives between fake and real news, which demonstrates the potential of utilizing these features to detect fake news; third, we show the effectiveness of these propagation network features for fake news detection. We further validate the effectiveness of these features from feature importance analysis. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the proposed features can significantly outperform state-of-the-art fake news detection methods by at least 1.7% with an average F1>0.84. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of hierarchical propagation network and fake news and paves the way towards a healthier online news ecosystem.
Giant effective charges and piezoelectricity in gapped graphene

Since the first realization of reversible charge doping in graphene via field-effect devices, it has become evident how the induction of a gap could further enhance its potential for technological applications. Here we show that the gap opening due to a sublattice symmetry breaking has also a profound impact on the polar response of graphene. By combining ab initio calculations and analytical modelling we show that for realistic band-gap values ( eV) the piezoelectric coefficient and the Born effective charge of graphene attain a giant value, independent on the gap. In particular the piezoelectric coefficient per layer of gapped mono- and bilayer graphene is three times larger than that of a large-gap full polar insulator as hexagonal Boron nitride (h-BN) monolayer, and 30% larger than that of a polar semiconductor as MoS2. This surprising result indicates that piezoelectric acoustic-phonons scattering can be relevant to model charge transport and charge-carrier relaxation in gated bilayer graphene. The independence of the piezoelectric coefficient and of the Born effective charge on the gap value follows from the connection between the polar response and the valley Chern number of gapped Dirac electrons, a relation previously identified for polar h-BN and made possible by the effective gauge-field description of the electron-lattice/strain coupling in these systems. In the small gap limit, where the adiabatic ab initio approximation fails, we implement analytically the calculation of the dynamical effective charge, and we establish a universal relation between the complex effective charge and the so-called Fano profile of the phonon optical peak. Our results provide a general theoretical framework to understand and compute the polar response in narrow-gap semiconductors, but may also be relevant for the contribution of piezoelectric scattering to the transport properties in Dirac-like systems.
Concurrent Transmission Scheduling for Perceptual Data Sharing in mmWave Vehicular Networks

Sharing perceptual data with other vehicles enhances the traffic safety of autonomous vehicles because it helps vehicles locate other vehicles and pedestrians in their blind spots. Such safety applications require high throughput and short delay, which cannot be achieved by conventional microwave vehicular communication systems. Therefore, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications are considered to be a key technology for sharing perceptual data because of their wide bandwidth. One of the challenges of data sharing in mmWave communications is broadcasting because narrow-beam directional antennas are used to obtain high gain. Because many vehicles should share their perceptual data to others within a short time frame in order to enlarge the areas that can be perceived based on shared perceptual data, an efficient scheduling for concurrent transmission that improves spatial reuse is required for perceptual data sharing. This paper proposes a data sharing algorithm that employs a graph-based concurrent transmission scheduling. The proposed algorithm realizes concurrent transmission to improve spatial reuse by designing a rule that is utilized to determine if the two pairs of transmitters and receivers interfere with each other by considering the radio propagation characteristics of narrow-beam antennas. A prioritization method that considers the geographical information in perceptual data is also designed to enlarge perceivable areas in situations where data sharing time is limited and not all data can be shared. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm doubles the area of the cooperatively perceivable region compared with a conventional algorithm that does not consider mmWave communications because the proposed algorithm achieves high-throughput transmission by improving spatial reuse. The prioritization also enlarges the perceivable region by a maximum of 20%.
SkelNetOn 2019 Dataset and Challenge on Deep Learning for Geometric Shape Understanding

We present SkelNetOn 2019 Challenge and Deep Learning for Geometric Shape Understanding workshop to utilize existing and develop novel deep learning architectures for shape understanding. We observed that unlike traditional segmentation and detection tasks, geometry understanding is still a new area for deep learning techniques. SkelNetOn aims to bring together researchers from different domains to foster learning methods on global shape understanding tasks. We aim to improve and evaluate the state-of-the-art shape understanding approaches, and to serve as reference benchmarks for future research. Similar to other challenges in computer vision, SkelNetOn proposes three datasets and corresponding evaluation methodologies; all coherently bundled in three competitions with a dedicated workshop co-located with CVPR 2019 conference. In this paper, we describe and analyze characteristics of datasets, define the evaluation criteria of the public competitions, and provide baselines for each task.
Blockage of TGF-α Induced by Spherical Silica Nanoparticles Inhibits Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition and Proliferation of Human Lung Epithelial Cells

Background. Xuanwei City in Yunnan province has been one of the towns with highest lung cancer mortality in China. The high content of amorphous silica in the bituminous coal from Xuanwei of Yunnan is mainly present as irregular and spherical silica nanoparticles (SiNPs). It has been reported that silica nanoparticles in bituminous coal correlated with the high incidence of lung cancer in Xuanwei. To explore the role and mechanism of SiNPs in the tumorigenesis of lung cancer in Xuanwei, human mononuclear cells (THP-1) and human bronchial epithelial cells (BEAS-2B) were cocultured in a transwell chamber. Combined with Benzo[a]pyrene-7, 8-dihydrodiol-9, and 10-epoxide (BPDE), SiNPs could significantly promote the proliferation and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and inhibit apoptosis of BEAS-2B cells and induce the release of TGF-α from THP-1 cells. After neutralizing TGF-α with antibody, the proliferation and EMT were decreased and enhanced apoptosis of BEAS-2B cells. Furthermore, the results showed that TGF-α in the sera of patients with lung adenocarcinoma in Xuanwei were significantly higher than in patients with benign pulmonary lesions in Xuanwei and those with lung adenocarcinoma in outside of Xuanwei of Yunnan. Taken together, our study found that SiNPs promoted the proliferation and EMT of BEAS-2B cells by inducing the release of TGF-α from THP-1 cells.
Surfing the Web Quicker Than QUIC via a Shared Address Validation

QUIC is a performance-optimized secure transport protocol and a building block of the upcoming HTTP/3 standard. To protect against denial-of-service attacks, QUIC servers need to validate the IP addresses claimed by their clients. So far, the QUIC protocol conducts address validation for each hostname separately using validation tokens. In this work, we review this practice and introduce a new QUIC transport parameter to allow a shared address validation across hostnames. This parameter indicates to the client, that an issued validation token can be used to abbreviate the address validation when connecting to specific other hostnames. Based on trust-relations between real-world hostnames we evaluate the performance benefits of our proposal. Our results suggest that a shared address validation saves a round-trip time on almost 60% of the required handshakes to different hosts during the first loading of an average website. Assuming a typical transatlantic connection with a round-trip time of 90 ms, we find that deploying our proposal reduces the delay overhead to establish all required connections for an average website by 142.2 ms.
Bayesian Bootstraps for Massive Data

In this article, we present data-subsetting algorithms that allow for the approximate and scalable implementation of the Bayesian bootstrap. They are analogous to two existing algorithms in the frequentist literature: the bag of little bootstraps (Kleiner et al., 2014) and the subsampled double bootstrap (SDB; Sengupta et al., 2016). Our algorithms have appealing theoretical and computational properties that are comparable to those of their frequentist counterparts. Additionally, we provide a strategy for performing lossless inference for a class of functionals of the Bayesian bootstrap, and briefly introduce extensions to the Dirichlet Process.
A Study of Measurement of Acetabular Depth Radiologically Among Haryana Population

Original Research Article The present study was conducted on 200 persons (100 males sand 100 females) of all age group of Haryana region. Antereo-posterior view of radiograph of right and left hip joints were taken, after written and informed consent. The depth of acetabulum were measured. The purpose of the study was to assess the depth of acetabulum and to compare with the previous studies and also to find out the significant sex difference. The mean acetabular depth in males was 14.20 mm in Right side and 14.70 mm in left side. Similarly in female the mean acetabular depth were 13.88 mm in right side and 14.60 mm in left side. There was a significant difference in value of acetabular depth in right and left side, in both sexes. Therefore knowledge of various parameters of acetabulum would be helpful for prosthetists, orthopaedcians and forensic experts.
Commutability of reference and control materials: an essential factor for assuring the quality of measurements in Laboratory Medicine

Abstract Traceability to a common reference ensures equivalence of results obtained by different assays. Traceability is achieved by an unbroken sequence of calibrations, using reference materials (RMs) that must be commutable. Using non-commutable RMs for calibration will introduce a bias in the calibrated method producing incorrect results for clinical samples (CS). Commutability was defined in 1973 as “the ability of an enzyme material to show inter-assay activity changes comparable to those of the same enzyme in human serum” and later extended as a characteristic of all RMs. However, the concept is still poorly understood and appreciated. Commutability assessment has been covered in CLSI guidelines and requires: (a) selection of 20 CS spanning the relevant concentration range; (b) analysis of both RM and CS with the pair of procedures; (c) data elaboration using regression analysis and calculation if RM fall within the 95% prediction interval defined by CS. This approach has been criticized and to improve it The International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine established a working group that recently finalized recommendations. Commutability is also a requirement for the applicability of external quality assessment (EQA) results in the evaluation of the performance of participating laboratories in terms of standardization of their measurements. Unfortunately, EQA materials are usually not validated for commutability.
Healthcare professionals' identity conflict in ethically-charged situations: an investigation of individual andsocio-ethical dynamics

In ethically-charged situations, such as End-of-Life circumstances, healthcare professionals may face identity conflict of moral nature due to incongruent values belonging to their multiple identities, e.g. professional and religious identities. Such conflict can significantly influence healthcare professionals' psychological outcomes, their practice and the overall quality of the healthcare service. However, despite these critical consequences, how identity conflict emerges, unfolds and affects doctors and nurses remains mostly unexplored. The overarching aim of this thesis is to advance the understanding of individual and socio-ethical dynamics of identity conflict. This aim is addressed through a mixed-method approach developed in three papers: a propositional paper, in which a narrative review is conducted; a qualitative paper, in which an inductive investigation based on semi-structured interviews is carried out; a quantitative paper, in which a mediated-moderation, multilevel analysis is run, implementing a two-time-lagged, questionnaire-based, design. This thesis extends the literature on identity conflict in four ways: (1) by conceptually integrating and explaining multiple individual and socio-ethical dynamics associated with identity conflict in a comprehensive and theoretically-justified model; (2) by providing an in-depth understanding of individual-level identity conflict dynamics, through the incorporation of novel ethical virtue-based decision-making approaches able to account for professional and religious values, emotions and interpersonal processes; (3) by exploring healthcare professionals' psychological and behavioural responses to identity conflict; (4) by sheding light on the extent to which individual and socio-ethical forces can affect identity conflict dynamics, thus filling a methodological gap in the identity literature regarding the implementation of multilevel approaches in identity research.
Gestational weight gain and newborn anthropometric outcomes in rural Bangladesh.

Low gestational weight gain (GWG) is a known predictor of fetal growth restriction in higher income countries, but there is little information on this association in lower income countries. Our objective is to describe the association between GWG and birth outcomes among pregnant women in rural Bangladesh. Pregnant women were identified in a community-based programme and enrolled into the study at an average of 13 weeks' gestation (n = 4,011). Maternal weight and height were measured at enrolment, maternal weight was measured at 36 weeks' gestation, and newborns were measured after birth. Rate of GWG (g/weeks) was calculated, and women were categorized as having adequate or inadequate GWG (Institute of Medicine recommendations). Newborn anthropometric outcomes included weight-for-age z score (WAZ), length-for-age z score (LAZ), head-circumference-for-age z score (HCZ), body mass index (BMI)-for-age z score (BMIZ), low birthweight (LBW < 2,500 g), WAZ < -2, LAZ < -2, HCZ < -2, BMIZ < -2, and small for gestational age (SGA: <10th percentile). Multivariate models were adjusted for confounders. Only 26% of the 2,562 women in these analyses had adequate GWG. Compared with newborns of women with inadequate GWG, infants of women with adequate GWG had a lower risk of adverse anthropometric outcomes (relative risk [95% confidence interval]: LBW = 0.68 [0.59, 0.80], LAZ < -2 = 0.64 [0.51, 0.80], HCZ < -2 = 0.75 [0.60, 0.93], BMIZ < -2 = 0.70 [0.59, 0.83], and SGA = 0.80 [0.73, 0.86]), but there was no significant difference in mean (SE) duration of gestation, 39.7 (0.08) versus 39.7 (0.05) weeks. In this population, GWG rate is a strong predictor of newborn anthropometric outcomes, but not duration of gestation.
Impact of Self-Efficacy on Radical and Incremental Creativity: Mediating Role of Work Engagement

This paper investigates the impact of self-efficacy (SE) on the two distinct dimensions of creativity; radical creativity (RC) and incremental creativity (IC), with work engagement (WE) as mediator. Drawing on the recent re-conceptualization of creativity as a multi-dimensional phenomenon; the current study attempts at better explaining the relationships of self-efficacy and work engagement with creativity dimensions among employees of advertising agencies working in creative departments. A three wave time lagged survey of 277 creative employees of advertising agencies in Rawalpindi/Islamabad was conducted.SPSSProcess Macro and AMOS were used for analyzing the collected data. Self-efficacy was found to have an impact of greater magnitude on radical creativity than on incremental creativity, while work engagement mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and radical creativity only. The findings may assist the managers to better plan, hire and manage their creative workforce according to the jobs requiring different forms of creativity. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijhss.12. 1.3