Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Internal Medicine Residents Towards Deep Vein Thrombosis Prophylaxis in a University Hospital in Tehran

Background: Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) is a major problem in hospitalized patients. There is discrepancy between healthcare providers’ knowledge and their clinical practice regarding DVT prophylaxis. In this study we aimed to evaluate knowledge, attitude and practices of internal medicine residents at an educational hospital in Tehran. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted during December 2015 at Shariati hospital of Tehran, IRAN. A questionnaire covering five domains of clinical scenarios, adherence to guidelines, personal beliefs, practice, preferences and personal beliefs, was distributed between internal medicine residents. Medical records of patients at the internal ward were reviewed to assess the status of DVT prophylaxis in patients, who needed DVT prophylaxis based on American college of chest physicians’ (ACCP) guidelines. Results: Overall, 71 residents out of 88 residents returned the questionnaire, and 43.7% were aware of the guidelines. Furthermore, 97.2% thought DVT prophylaxis is clinically important but only 66.90% of the patients, who needed DVT prophylaxis, were receiving DVT prophylaxis. More than 50% of the residents underestimated the incidence of DVT and mortality rate due to pulmonary embolism. The most common reason for not prescribing DVT prophylaxis was concern about bleeding in 53.5% of the participants. Further analysis of different components of the questionnaire showed that there is a significant association between “awareness” and “adherence” scores (P = 0.041) and correct answers to “clinical scenarios” and “practice” (P = 0.012). Conclusions: Although the level of knowledge on these clinical situations is good, underestimation of the risk of DVT development in hospitalized patients needs more attention. This might be due to low levels of awareness of presence and content of DVT prophylaxis guidelines. Programs should be designed to uphold the levels of information of DVT prophylaxis guidelines among internal
Regulation of calcium signaling and cellular localization of NFAT in CD8+ anergic T cells.

Title of Document: REGULATION OF CALCIUM SIGNALING AND CELLULAR LOCALIZATION OF NFAT IN CD8 ANERGIC T CELLS. Mathangi Srinivasan, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Directed By: Kenneth Frauwirth, Assistant Professor, Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics Anergy is an important mechanism of maintaining peripheral immune tolerance. T cells rendered anergic, are refractory to further stimulation and are characterized by defective proliferation and IL-2 production. I have used a model of in vivo anergy induction in murine CD8 T cells to analyze the initial signaling events in anergic T cells. Tolerant T cells displayed reduced PLCγ activation and calcium mobilization, indicating a defect in calcium signaling. This defect could be overcome by facilitating complete release of calcium from the ER. Reduced calcium signaling in CD8 anergic T cells is therefore predominantly regulated by modulations in signaling events upstream of ER store release of calcium. Impaired calcium mobilization correlated with a block in nuclear localization of NFAT1 in anergic cells, upon stimulation. However, I found that stimulation of anergic, but not naive T cells induced nuclear translocation of NFAT2. This suggested that NFAT2 is activated preferentially by reduced calcium signaling, and I confirmed this hypothesis by stimulating naive T cells under conditions of calcium limitation (by addition of the calcium chelator EGTA), or partial calcineurin inhibition. This phenomenon was independent of the phosphorylation activity of the NFAT1 and 2 kinases p38 and JNK, and resultant nuclear exit, as cellular translocation assays using specific kinase and nuclear export inhibitors caused no change in pattern of NFAT1 and NFAT2 nuclear localization. Proliferative and transcriptional changes were also observed under conditions of calcium limitation or sub optimal calcineurin activity. Thus, my work provides new insight into how T cell stimulation conditions might dictate activation of a specific member of the NFAT family and aid in differential transcriptional activation. My results have also led to the hypothesis that NFAT1 and NFAT2 transcriptional activation profiles in anergic T cells are different from responsive T cells. The preferential nuclear accumulation of NFAT2 in anergic T cells might be important for the regulation of genes related to anergy maintenance. REGULATION OF CALCIUM SIGNALING AND CELLULAR LOCALIZATION OF NFAT IN CD8 ANERGIC T CELLS. By Mathangi Srinivasan Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008 Advisory Committee: Professor Kenneth Frauwirth, Chair Professor David Mosser Professor Richard Payne Professor Louisa Wu Professor Hey-Kyoung Lee Professor Thomas Castonguay © Copyright by Mathangi Srinivasan 2008
Development of In Vitro Bioengineered Vascular Grafts for Microsurgery and Vascular Surgery Applications

Introduction: The use of vascular grafts is continuing to rise due to the increasing prevalence of coronary artery bypass grafting and microvascular flap-based tissue reconstructions. The current options of using native vessels (saphenous vein) or the synthetic grafts (Dacron) have been unable to manage current needs. In this study, we employed an original tissue engineering approach to develop a multi-layered vascular graft that has the potential to address some of the limitations of the existing grafts. Materials and Methods: Biomaterials, gelatin and fibrin, were used to develop a two-layered vascular graft. The graft was seeded with endothelial cells and imaged using confocal microscopy. The graft’s architecture and its mechanical properties were also characterized using histology, Scanning Electron Microscopy and rheological studies. Results: Our methodology resulted in the development of a vascular graft with precise spatial localization of the two layers. The endothelial cells fully covered the lumen of the developed vascular graft, thus providing a non-thrombogenic surface. The elastic modulus of the biomaterials employed in this graft was found to be 5.186 KPa, paralleling that of internal mammary artery. The burst pressure of this graft was also measured and was found close to that of the saphenous vein (~2000 mm Hg). Conclusions: We were successfully able to employ a unique method to synthesize a multi-layered vascularized graft having adequate biological and mechanical properties. Studies are ongoing involving implantation of this developed vascular graft in the rat femoral artery and characterization of parameters such as vascular remodeling and patency.
A computer model of case-based reasoning in problem solving: an investigation in the domain of dispute mediation (analogy, machine learning, conceptual memory)

Abstract : Rather than approach each problem as a unique event, people often try to solve problems by recalling similar previous experiences as guides to problem solving. This analogical process, which we call case-based reasoning, seems to provide an explanation for the change in problem solving behavior of people over time. This research presents a computer process model of problem solving based on the use of case-based reasoning. The necessary reasoning processes, operational measures of similarity, and memory structures needed for effective storage and retrieval are presented via the specifications for an advisory system called the MEDIATOR, which offers advice on resolving common sense disputes. In this context, issues associated with enabling machines to dynamically adapt their reasoning and automatically recover from failure are discussed. The model of case-based problem solving which has been developed seems to offer promise as an integrated solution for some issues in problem solving, analogical reasoning, and machine learning.
A hybrid approach to keyframe extraction from motion capture data using curve simplification and principal component analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract keyframes from motion capture data. A hybrid approach, which combines a curve‐simplification algorithm with an initialization procedure including principal component analysis, is adopted. The developed method automatically extracts an appropriate number of keyframes at high speed without performance degradation. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the present method. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Unfractionated heparin attenuates histone-mediated cytotoxicity in vitro and prevents intestinal microcirculatory dysfunction in histone-infused rats.

BACKGROUND Extracellular histones are major mediators of organ dysfunction and death in sepsis, and they may cause microcirculatory dysfunction. Heparins have beneficial effects in sepsis and have been reported to bind to histones and neutralize their cytotoxicity. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of histones on intestinal microcirculation and the intestinal endothelium and to discuss the protective effect of unfractionated heparin (UFH) on the endothelial cytotoxicity and microcirculatory dysfunction induced by histones. METHODS Anesthetized rats were infused with 30 mg/kg calf thymus histones, and UFH was administered intravenously at a concentration of 100 IU/kg per hour. The intestinal microcirculation was visualized and measured with incident dark field microscope. Plasma von Willebrand factor (vWF) and soluble thrombomodulin were detected, and structural changes in the rat intestinal microvascular endothelium were examined. The effects of histones and UFH on cell survival rates, vWF release and calcium influx were investigated in human intestinal microvascular endothelial cells (HIMECs). RESULTS Histone infusion caused severe intestinal microcirculatory dysfunction in the absence of obvious hemodynamic changes, and UFH protected intestinal microcirculation in histone-infused rats. Concentrations of the plasma endothelial injury markers vWF and soluble thrombomodulin were elevated, and structural abnormalities were found in the intestinal microvascular endothelium in the histone-infused rats. These events were attenuated by UFH. In vitro, UFH significantly reduced the histone-induced cytotoxicity of HIMECs, reduced the release of vWF from the cytoplasm into the culture medium, and inhibited calcium influx into HIMECs. CONCLUSION Histones induce intestinal microcirculatory dysfunction followed by direct injury to the endothelial cells; UFH protects the intestinal microcirculation partly by antagonizing the endothelial toxicity of histones.
SWISSspine: An outcome and quality registry of orthopaedic implants as a condition for reimbursement by basic health insurance

Abstract In the Swiss healthcare system, procedures yet to completely fulfil the criteria for basic health insurance reimbursement can be covered if they are considered promising and if healthcare providers participate in evaluation activities. Such has been the case with spinal disc arthroplasty, where, for evaluation purposes, the federal bodies linked reimbursement to the documentation of cases in a nationwide spine registry. Stakeholders from industry, medicine and science formed a working group and implemented SWISSspine, the first orthopaedic outcome registry for post-market surveillance of medical implants in which cases must be documented in order to receive basic health insurance reimbursement. Within the prescribed three-year timeframe, primary and follow-up data from over 550 cervical and 400 lumbar disc replacements were available for evaluation. Based on the treatment outcomes, the federal bodies granted continued reimbursement subject to a further year of mandatory documentation of the interventions. SWISSspine provides a model of successful cooperation between industry and the medical profession, and an example of a national outcome registry which generated sufficient evidence to complete a health technology assessment report and achieve the continued reimbursement of the surveyed products.
INFLUENZAL MENINGITIS TREATED WITH SPECIFIC ANTISERUM AND COMPLEMENT: REPORT OF FIVE CASES

Influenzal meningitis 1 is an acute inflammation of the meninges caused by the influenza bacillus, accompanied often but not always by a bacteremia. In its clinical picture it cannot be distinguished from acute meningitis caused by other organisms, such as the meningococcus, pneumococcus and streptococcus. The relative success of specific serum treatment in meningococcus meningitis and the absence in the literature of any reported success with similar treatment in influenzal meningitis have stimulated this study. In the course of this work, we gained the impression that the influenza bacillus was a more common cause of meningitis in young children than was generally supposed. This impression prompted a study of the relative frequency of this form of meningitis in children under 2 years of age, and we were surprised at the high percentage of cases that the records disclosed. The records of the Infant's and Children's Hospital for the last five
Highlights From the American Heart Association's EPI|LIFESTYLE 2019 Scientific Sessions

Alvaro Alonso, MD, PhD; Madison D. Anderson, MPH; Michael P. Bancks, PhD, MPH; Sherry-Ann Brown, MD, PhD; Melissa C. Caughey, PhD; Alex R. Chang, MD, MS; Erin Delker, MPH; Kathryn Foti, MPH; V eronique Gingras, PhD, RD; Michael G. Nanna, MD; Alexander C. Razavi, BA; Jewel Scott, MSN, RN, FNP-C; Elizabeth Selvin, PhD, MPH; Catherine Tcheandjieu, DVM, PhD; Alvin G. Thomas, MSPH; Ruth-Alma N. Turkson-Ocran, MPH, MSN, RN, FNP-BC; Allison Webel, PhD, RN, FAAN; Deborah R. Young, PhD, FAHA; Bailey M. DeBarmore, MHS, RD
Information Extraction from Unstructured Texts by Means of Syntactic Dependencies and Constituent Trees

This paper presents a technology of automated knowledge extraction from unstructured text corpora by leveraging computer linguistic tools and cross-fertilizing them with the semantic ontologies techniques. In our approach, the quality of information (e.g., in form of OWL ontologies) that is derived by semantic analysis techniques from large domain- specific text corpora can be considerably improved by incorporating linguistic analysis tools that help gain a deeper insight into the grammatical structure of the analysed texts and thus allow the reasoning engines to cover a much wider set of rules and patterns, also positively impacting the performance. The novelty of our approach lies in a possibility of its application to the domains that require a very high quality of the knowledge extraction and analysis, such as reasoning for legacy data collections. We propose a system architecture for the implementation of our approach and illustrate its use on a practical use case for legislative and regulatory information analysis. Keywords-Knowledge Representation; Legal Systems; Ontology; OWL; Big Data; Reasoning; DreamCloud Project.
Developmental stress in South African hominins: Comparison of recurrent enamel hypoplasias in Australopithecus africanus and Homo naledi

Discovery of a new hominin (Homo naledi) in the same geographical area as Australopithecus africanus creates the opportunity to compare developmental dental stress in higher latitude hominins with low that in latitude apes, among whom repetitive linear enamel hypoplasia (rLEH) recurs seasonally at about 6 or 12 months. In contrast to equatorial Africa, a single rainy/dry cycle occurs annually in non-coastal southern Africa. It is predicted that LEH will recur annually but not differ in duration between ancient and more recent hominins. Data were collected from epoxy casts of anterior teeth attributed to H. naledi (18 incisors, 13 canines) and A. africanus (29 incisors, 8 canines) using a digital microscope, surface scanner and scanning electron microscope. The location, number, width, depth and distance between defects (including perikymata counts and spatial measurements) of 136 LEH events were compared among crown moieties (deciles 4–6 and 7–9), tooth types and taxa. Enamel defects are concentrated in the cervical half of anterior crowns, and in similar numbers in each taxon. Contrary to expectations, H. naledi show bimodal LEH durations reconstructed at about 2 and 8 weeks compared to just 4 weeks in A. africanus. Both taxa show bimodally recurrent episodes of LEH centring on 2 and, more commonly and severely, 6 months. A combination of two independent annual stressor types, one disease and one seasonal, could explain the observations. These estimations of duration and recurrence of developmental stress require evaluation using actual perikymata periodicity for H. naledi and more refined understanding of palaeoenvironments for both taxa. Significance: Seasonal stress is a central concern in the biological and health sciences. Because of the innate way that enamel is deposited, the timing of stress in the childhood of apes, modern humans and their fossil ancestors can be measured with a precision of about 1 week. Application of this method to South African Pliocene Australopithecus africanus and Mid-Pleistocene Homo naledi reveals that, unexpectedly, both forms show semi-annual stress – a finding that is tentatively attributed to two independent annual stressors, possibly disease and malnutrition.
ISOdb: A Comprehensive Database of Full-Length Isoforms Generated by Iso-Seq

The accurate landscape of transcript isoforms plays an important role in the understanding of gene function and gene regulation. However, building complete transcripts is very challenging for short reads generated using next-generation sequencing. Fortunately, isoform sequencing (Iso-Seq) using single-molecule sequencing technologies, such as PacBio SMRT, provides long reads spanning entire transcript isoforms which do not require assembly. Therefore, we have developed ISOdb, a comprehensive resource database for hosting and carrying out an in-depth analysis of Iso-Seq datasets and visualising the full-length transcript isoforms. The current version of ISOdb has collected 93 publicly available Iso-Seq samples from eight species and presents the samples in two levels: (1) sample level, including metainformation, long read distribution, isoform numbers, and alternative splicing (AS) events of each sample; (2) gene level, including the total isoforms, novel isoform number, novel AS number, and isoform visualisation of each gene. In addition, ISOdb provides a user interface in the website for uploading sample information to facilitate the collection and analysis of researchers' datasets. Currently, ISOdb is the first repository that offers comprehensive resources and convenient public access for hosting, analysing, and visualising Iso-Seq data, which is freely available.
Study of Methanol Extracts from Different Parts of Peganum harmala L. Using 1H-NMR Plant Metabolomics

A nuclear magnetic resonance- (NMR-) based metabolomics method was used to identify differential metabolites of methanol extracts obtained from six parts of Peganum harmala L. (P. harmala), namely, the root, stem, leaf, flower, testa, and seed. Two multivariate statistical analysis methods, principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), were combined to clearly distinguish among the P. harmala samples from the six different parts. Eleven differential components were screened by the PLS-DA loading plot, and the relative contents were calculated by univariate analysis of variance. Chemometric results showed significant differences in the metabolites of the different parts of P. harmala. The seeds contained large amounts of harmaline, harmine, and vasicine compared to other organs. The acetic acid, proline, lysine, and sucrose contents of the roots were significantly higher than those of the other parts. In the testa, the vasicine, asparagine, choline, and 4-hydroxyisoleucine contents were clearly dominant. The obtained data revealed the distribution characteristics of the metabolomes of the different P. harmala parts and provided fundamental knowledge for the rational development of its medicinal parts.
Development of the Decoupled Discreet-Time Jacobian Eigenvalue Approximation for Situational Awareness Utilizing Open PDC

With the increased number of PMUs in the power grid, effective high speed, realtime methods to ascertain relevant data for situational awareness are needed. Several techniques have used data from PMUs in conjunction with state estimation to assess system stability and event detection. However, these techniques require system topology and a large computational time. This paper presents a novel approach that uses real-time PMU data streams without the need of system connectivity or additional state estimation. The new development is based on the approximation of the eigenvalues related to the decoupled discreet-time power flow Jacobian matrix using direct openPDC data in real-time. Results are compared with other methods, such as Prony’s method, which can be too slow to handle big data. The newly developed Discreet-Time Jacobian Eigenvalue Approximation (DDJEA) method not only proves its accuracy, but also shows its effectiveness with minimal computational time: an essential element when considering situational awareness.
Oral Fludrocortisone Test for Salt-Sensitive Screening in Hypertensive Patients: A Randomized Crossover Trial

Background Salt sensitivity is associated with an increased cardiovascular risk, but the gold standard method (diet cycles) requires 24-h urine samples and has poor patient compliance. Objectives Test the hypothesis that oral fludrocortisone (0.4 mg per day for 7 days) is a good alternative in identifying salt-sensitive patients. Methodology We conducted a randomized crossover study with 30 hypertensive individuals comprising the following steps: (1) washout; (2) phase A (low- and high-sodium diet cycles); (3) washout 2; (4) phase B (fludrocortisone test). Phase A and B steps were performed in a random way. Consistent with the literature, we found that 53.3% were salt-sensitive according to the reference test. Using the ROC curve, the fludrocortisone test defined salt sensitivity by a median blood pressure increase of ≥3 mmHg. A good accuracy of fludrocortisone in detecting salt sensitivity was observed (AUC: 0.732±0.065; p<0.001), with 80% sensitivity and 53% specificity. Conclusion The fludrocortisone test is a good option for screening salt sensitivity in hypertensive patients. However, the low specificity prevents this test from being an ideal substitute to the labor-intensive diet cycles exam in the definition of salt sensitivity. This clinical trial is registered with NCT01453959.