Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the effect of GLP‐1 agonists on quality of bowel preparation for colonoscopy in patients with diabetes

People with diabetes mellitus warrant a greater need for colonoscopy owing to the increased risk of colorectal cancer and autonomic neuropathy. Unfortunately, this population is reported to have a higher proportion of inadequate bowel preparation during colonoscopy, which translates into lower adenoma detection rates and repeat colonoscopies. Glucagon‐like peptide‐1 (GLP‐1) agonists commonly used in the management of diabetes are well known to cause delayed gastrointestinal (GI) transit times, yet it is unknown if they contribute to the higher frequency of inadequate bowel preparation in people with diabetes.
Alvarado vs Lintula Scoring Systems in Acute Appendicitis

Background : Timely and correct diagnosis of acute appendicitis reduces complications and avoids unnecessary surgeries. Scoring systems are used as adjuncts to aid in diagnosis. Methods: This was a prospective observational study carried out at Kenyatta National Hospital, from November 2014 to April 2015. Demographic, clinical and laboratory data was collected from consenting patients. The gold standard of diagnosis was histopathology. Data analysis was done using SPSS. The receiver operating characteristics, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive values and negative predictive values of both scoring systems were then calculated for each of the scoring systems and compared between the two. Results : Majority of patients presented with right iliac fossa pain and underwent appendectomy. The sensitivity of the Lintula and Alvarado scoring systems were 60.8% and 84.3% respectively, while the specificity was 60% and 35% respectively. The PPV of the Lintula was 79.5% while that of the Alvarado 76.8%. Conclusion : The Lintula system compares well with the Alvarado system for diagnosis of acute appendicitis and can therefore be employed in situations where laboratory facilities may be limited. Key words : Acute Appendicitis, Scoring systems, Lintula, Alvarado
The Dark Energy Survey and Operations: Year 6 – The Finale

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an optical and near-infrared imaging survey aimed at understanding the accelerating expansion of the universe using four complementary methods: weak gravitational lensing, galaxy cluster counts, baryon acoustic oscillations, and Type Ia supernovae. To perform the 6-season 5000 sq-degree wide field and the 5season 30 sq-degree supernova surveys, the DES Collaboration built the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 squaredegree, 570-Megapixel CCD camera that was installed at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). DES started its observations in “Year 1” (Y1) on Aug. 31, 2013 and completed its sixth and final observing season on January 9, 2019. This paper describes DES Y6, the survey strategy, an outline of the survey operations procedures, the efficiency of operations and the causes of lost observing time. It provides details about the quality of the final season's data, and a summary of the Y1-Y6 observing. It contains a brief description of the last night of observations.
Micro-pellet culture reveals that bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cell (BMSC) chondrogenic induction is triggered by a single day of TGF-β1 exposure

Despite immense promise, engineering of stable cartilage tissue from bone marrow-derived stromal cells (BMSCs, also known as bone marrow-derived “mesenchymal stem cells”) remains elusive. Relative cartilage-like matrix deposition is commonly used to guide BMSC chondrogenic optimisation efforts. However, matrix deposition is heterogeneous in most models, and notably, it lags behind cell fate decisions. We reason that the lag time between cell fate decision and matrix accumulation, coupled with matrix heterogeneity, has obscured basic BMSC biological characteristics, such as differentiation kinetics. Here, we utilize a customized microwell platform to assemble hundreds of small-diameter BMSC micro-pellets and characterized chondrogenic differentiation kinetics in response to the canonical signaling molecule, transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1). Micro-pellets provide a homogeneous readout, and our experimental design accounts for the significant time delay between growth factor signal and deposition of cartilage-like matrix. While 14-to-21-day induction protocols are routine, BMSC micro-pellet cultures reveal that a single day of TGF-β1 exposure was sufficient to trigger chondrogenic differentiation cascades resulting in outcomes similar to micro-pellets exposed to TGF-β1 for 21 days. RNA-sequencing analysis demonstrated that one day of TGF-β1 exposure was also sufficient to induce hypertrophic cascades in BMSC, not observed in articular chondrocytes. Refocusing chondrogenic induction optimisation efforts from weeks to the first hours or days of culture, using homogeneous model systems, may benefit efforts to build stable cartilage formed by BMSCs. Significance The macro-pellet model, and assumptions generated using it, have permeated BMSC-based cartilage tissue engineering strategies since the 1990s. Using a micro-pellet model, we show that BMSC chondrogenic kinetics are significantly more rapid than historical macro-pellets data suggests, and that BMSC chondrogenic and hypertrophic commitment is instructed by a single day of TGF-β1 exposure. This highly relevant study demonstrates that: (1) macro-pellets, which are large heterogeneous tissue models confound the differentiation kinetics visible in micro-pellet models; (2) induction strategies should focus on the first hours or days of culture; (3) even a single day of TGF-β1 exposure drives BMSC to form hypertrophic tissue in vivo, requiring early intervention to prevent hypertrophy; and (4) articular chondrocytes and BMSCs respond distinctly to TGF-β1.
Sarcopenia and Sarcopenic Obesity in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Patients with Different Levels of Severity

Background : Sarcopenia is defined as loss of muscle mass with attendant loss of muscle strength and physical function and is associated with advancing age. Inflammatory condition of chronic disease leads to more rapid progression of this syndrome, which may adversely affect quality of life. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and sarcopenia. Methods : This study included 108 COPD patients who were treated in the pulmonary clinic at Masih Daneshvari Hospital. Patients were categorized into three groups based on Global Initiative for Obstructive Lung Disease criteria. Sarcopenic parameters including muscle mass, muscle strength, and physical performance were measured by Bioimpedance Analysis, hand grip dynamometer, and the Short Physical Performance Battery test, respectively. According to the European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People cutoff points and the definition of sarcopenic obesity, sarcopenic patients were diagnosed and categorized based on different COPD severity scores. Results : The relationship between sarcopenia and COPD grading, which was assessed using multiple regression models with adjustment of confounding factors, including age, chronic diseases, and smoking, was statistically insignificant. However, by using forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) or ratio of FEV1 to forced vital capacity in this model, the results were significant ( P = 0.026). A positive linear correlation was observed between skeletal muscle index (SMI) and spirometric data, which was assessed by Spearman’s correlation test. By exploring the association between sarcopenia and obesity with the one-way analysis of variance test, sarcopenic patients represented to have the minimal spirometric measures. However, this difference was only significant for actual measurements. Conclusion: This study showed that sarcopenic COPD patients had smaller spirometric measurements and that sarcopenia and magnitude of SMI were positively correlated with obstruction severity.
Anatomical Self-Portraits as Fieldwork: Observations, Improvisations, and Elicitations in the Medical School

This exposition discusses an artistic research project involving a field trip to a medical school. It introduces part of my postdoctoral project as a case study, discussing photography and video self-portraits as a means for exploring anatomy and clinical skills education. Instead of analysing the resulting artworks, the exposition has a focus on process and methodology: it elaborates on the artistic process and the various roles an artist-researcher can claim at the site of the medical school and in the study outcomes. The exposition also discusses the ways in which this process may engage medical school participants, and how the participants’ reflections intertwine with the artistic outcomes.
Injury prevention in physical education teacher education students: Lessons from sports. A systematic review

Sports injuries are a considerable problem in physical education teacher education (PETE) students. They have important consequences and might affect the attitude that PETE students have towards sports and physical activity. Up to now, several efficacious injury prevention programmes have been developed for various sports disciplines. There is a high probability that several components of those prevention programmes are transferable to the PETE environment. A systematic review was conducted to identify intrinsic components that are potentially applicable in PETE programmes. The databases PubMed and Web of Science were searched for articles published between 1974 and 1 February 2015. The systematic study selection resulted in the inclusion of 59 studies. Seventeen studies were rated as having a low risk of bias. Efficacy of the applied programme was proven in 11 of these. Analysis led to guidelines for an injury prevention programme for PETE students. A multiple preventive intervention should include an awareness programme, functional strength training, stretching, warm-up, core stability and dynamic stability exercises of the lower limbs. This multiple preventive intervention preferably has a gradual build-up, makes use of no or only simple materials and is executed around three times per week.
Performance Comparison of Gesture Recognition System Based on Different Classifiers

The hand plays a very important role in our daily life, and the amputees suffer a lot from the loss of hands or upper limbs. Hence, assisting devices are desired urgently. Today, the prosthetic hands based on surface electromyography (sEMG) signals can recognize many hand gestures, but some problems still exist. To identify more gestures, some recognition systems require multiple electrodes, which are unable to be applied to the amputees with less residual muscles. Meanwhile, better computing performance is required as the number of electrodes increases, which is difficult to be applied to the real-time embedded systems. In this article, we aim to recognize six hand gestures by using sEMG sensors as little as possible. To realize this goal, we compare the accuracy and processing time of different feature extraction and classification methods offline, and the results indicate that the combination of time-domain features and backpropagation neural network has better performance. In total, nine subjects participated in the offline experiments, and the accuracy is up to 95.46% by employing two sEMG sensors to recognize six hand gestures.
Recognize Various Scenes using Classification methods in Million Images Dataset: A Review

: - The scene reocognition provides the visual data from the level of the objects and the relation between the objects. The aim of the scene recognition is to reduce the semantic gap between the computer system and social life. In the form of the example,one can determine the contexts of an input image and classify them in to scenes such as forest, buildings seashores. Some of the issues of the scene recognition is forest, coast,tall buildings highways and street. The applications of the scene recognition are object detection , object recognition,text and video detection, matching human perception,robotics and graphics.This paper surveys on different techniques of scene recognition from single image to multi-million images. Scene recognition performs a task for context for the object recognition. The availability of the large datasets like Image Net leads to multi-million-item dataset initiatives. Scene Recognition is one of the successful methods of the recognition of the images.The variations in color, size of the image are often affected by complex backgrounds, different lighting conditions, shadows and reflections of the image. So solution to this problem is to enhance the accuracy of scene image recognition. This leads to a variety of applications such as understanding the scene, automatic localisation of the image.
More intimate, more generous? Behaviour control can reduce children’s self-relevance effect in sharing behaviour

ABSTRACT Children exhibit a self-relevance effect whereby they share more candies with close friends and acquaintances than with strangers. The present study aimed to reduce the negative consequences of self-relevance effects by enhancing the behavioural control of sharing behaviour. This study initiated two behavioural control levels to investigate sharing behaviours in children aged 5–6 years. Results revealed that children with high-behavioural control had elevated sharing levels compared with those with neutral behavioural control. Compared with strangers and acquaintances, children shared more with those who have close relationships with them. Switching from neutral behavioural control to high behavioural control can improve the range of children’s sharing level to strangers more than acquaintances and close friends. This suggests that the behavioural control did reduce the self-relevance effect, and the behavioural control was more effective in improving the children’s sharing behaviour with strangers than acquaintances and close friends.
Context-Aware Task Execution Using Apprenticeship Learning

An essential measure of autonomy in assistive service robots is adaptivity to the various contexts of human-oriented tasks, which are subject to subtle variations in task parameters that determine optimal behaviour. In this work, we propose an apprenticeship learning approach to achieving context-aware action generalization on the task of robot-to-human object hand-over. The procedure combines learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning: a robot first imitates a demonstrator’s execution of the task and then learns contextualized variants of the demonstrated action through experience. We use dynamic movement primitives as compact motion representations, and a model-based C-REPS algorithm for learning policies that can specify hand-over position, conditioned on context variables. Policies are learned using simulated task executions, before transferring them to the robot and evaluating emergent behaviours. We additionally conduct a user study involving participants assuming different postures and receiving an object from a robot, which executes hand-overs by either imitating a demonstrated motion, or adapting its motion to hand-over positions suggested by the learned policy. The results confirm the hypothesized improvements in the robot’s perceived behaviour when it is context-aware and adaptive, and provide useful insights that can inform future developments.
Physics-Based Simulation of Ocean Scenes in Marine Simulator Visual System

The realistic simulation of ocean scenes is of great significance in many scientific fields. We propose an improved Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework to simulate the ocean scenes. The improved SPH combines nonlinear constant density constraints and divergence-free velocity field constraint. Density constraints adjust the particle distribution on position layer, so that the density is constrained to a constant state. The addition of the divergence-free velocity field constraint significantly accelerates the convergence of constant density constraint and further reduces the density change. The simulation results show that the improved SPH has high solution efficiency, large time steps, and strong stability. Then, we introduce a unified boundary handling model to simulate coupling scenes. The model samples the boundary geometry as particles by means of single layer nonuniform sampling. The contribution of the boundary particles is taken into account when the physical quantities of fluid particles are computed. The unified model can handle various types of complex geometry adaptively. When rendering the ocean, we propose an improved anisotropic screen space fluid method, which alleviates the discontinuity problem near the boundary and maintains the anisotropy of particles. The research provides a theoretical reference for the highly believable maritime scene simulation in marine simulators.
Investigating variables related to cyber bullying and exposure to cyberbullying behaviors in adolescents (TRNC sample)

The aim of this study is to investigate whether cyber bullying behaviors differ in terms of different socio-demographic variables in the secondary adolescent students. The research was conducted in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the 2017-2018 academic year. It was conducted in high schools and secondary schools. The sample of the study consists of 145 students aged 13-17 who are 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th grade students. 63.4% of the participants were female and 36.6% were male. It is a descriptive study using quantitative research method. In the study, Personal Information Form, Revised Cyber Bullying Inventory (Topcu and Erdur-Baker, 2018) were used. Independent sample t test, One Way Analysis of Variance was used. There were no significant differences between the variables such as age, number of siblings, family income level, parents' occupational status, maternal occupational status and cyberbullying/doing. Although there is no significant difference in age, cyberbullying is observed in 15 years of age.
Prevalence of Chronic Kidney Disease in Relatives of Patients with Advanced Renal Disease in a Nigerian Tertiary Hospital

Genetic predisposition plays a key role in many forms of Chronic Kidney Disease diabetes, use of herbal medications and non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs as well as alcohol use in relatives of patients with CKD compared with controls. Conclusion: This study has shown that relatives of patients with advanced CKD are at increased risk of developing CKD.
Students’ psychological hardiness in relation to career adaptability

This study explored the relationship between psychological hardiness and career adaptability of students at Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges. Participants were a convenience sample of 198 college students, predominantly single (96.0%), female (57.6%), black African students (92.9%), aged 21 years and younger (93.9%). They completed a Personal Views Survey (PVS III-R) and the Career Adapt-Abilities Inventory (CAAI). Stepwise regression analysis indicated gender and the hardiness attributes (commitment, control, and challenge) to predict career adaptability. Student development services should seek to leverage college students’ psychological hardiness for career development counselling.
The differentiation commitment point closes a proliferative window that controls the total number of terminally differentiated cells

Terminal cell differentiation is essential for developing and maintaining tissues in all multi-cellular organisms. However, when and how the opposing processes of proliferation and cell differentiation interact to regulate permanent exit from the cell cycle is not well understood. Using adipogenesis as a model system, we here measure cell cycle progression and terminal cell differentiation live in single cells. We show that terminal cell differentiation occurs through a probabilistic competition that can last over several cell cycles with progenitor cells deciding between three cell-fates: proliferation, differentiation, and quiescence. We identify a terminal differentiation commitment point during a lengthening G1-phase that completely and rapidly suppresses future cell cycles, thereby closing a proliferative window that controls the total number of terminally differentiated cells. The combination of a terminal differentiation commitment point and regulated duration of a proliferative window may allow organisms to precisely control tissue development and regeneration.
Dual band low loss metamaterial structure at millimetre wave band

In this paper, the Dual band modified split square resonator (MSSR) metamaterial (MM) structure was designed and numerically investigated at millimetre wave (mm-Wave) frequency range. The proposed structure operated at two resonance frequencies 28 GHz and 32.54 GHz. The dual-band behaviour of the proposed structure because of the self and mutual coupling between two metallic squares of the structure. Furthermore, The MSRR structure performed very well at both resonance frequencies by providing high transmission coefficient, S21, with a loss of -0.3 dB (0.97 linear scale) at lower resonance frequency 28 GHz and -0.18 dB (0.98 linear scale) at upper resonance frequency 32.54 GHz. In this regard, the numerical simulation was conducted to optimize the MSSR structure in such a way that the ratio of effective inductance-to-capacitance (L/C) was raised. As a result, the inherent MM losses were reduced. The robust retrieval algorithm was utilized to reconstruct the refractive index, effective permittivity, and effective permeability and to verify the left-hand property of the proposed structure. The simulation results showed that the MSSR unit cell introduces two regions of the negative refractive index below the lower resonance frequency, 28 GHz and above the upper resonance frequency, 32.54 GHz.
Unusual Trapped Mountain Lee Waves with Deep Vertical Penetration and Significant Stratospheric Amplitude

Simulations of the weather over the South Island of New Zealand on 28 July 2014 reveal unusual wave activity in the stratosphere. A series of short-wavelength perturbations resembling trapped lee waves were located downstream of the topography, but these waves were in the stratosphere, and their crests were oriented north–south, in contrast to both the northeast–southwest orientation of the spine of the Southern Alps and the crests of trapped waves present in the lower troposphere. Vertical cross sections through these waves show a nodal structure consistent with that of a higher-order trapped-wave mode. Eigenmode solutions to the vertical structure equation for two-dimensional, linear, Boussinesq waves were obtained for a horizontally homogeneous sounding representative of the 28 July case. These solutions include higher-order modes having large amplitude in the stratosphere that are supported by just the zonal wind component. Two of these higher-order modes correspond to trapped waves that develop in an idealized numerical simulation of the 28 July 2014 case. These higher-order modes are trapped by very strong westerly winds in the midstratosphere and are triggered by north–south-oriented features in the subrange-scale topography. In contrast, the stratospheric cross-mountain wind component is too weak to trap similar high-order modes with crest-parallel orientation.