Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future strategies for the treatment of cryptococcal meningoencephalitis in pediatric patients

Introduction: Cryptococcal meningoencephalitis (CM) is a rare infection in pediatric patients, which is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. Since symptoms of this infection are nonspecific, the diagnosis relies on risk assessment and laboratory-confirmed clinical findings. Initial management commonly utilizes amphotericin B and flucytosine, followed by prolonged fluconazole to clear the yeast and prevent relapse. Since no prospective clinical trials have been performed in pediatric patients, much of the data are extrapolated from adult studies and pediatric pharmacokinetic data. This highlights the need for this review and additional studies. Areas covered: Here, the pathophysiology, epidemiology, presentation and treatment of CM in pediatric patients are described. Additionally, the relative safety and pharmacokinetic differences in pharmacologic treatment between pediatric and adult patients are highlighted. Expert opinion: Guidelines for the management of pediatric patients with CM are extrapolated from those for adults with HIV. Therefore, pharmacokinetic differences should be considered. Pediatric CM is a treatable disease with many children infected but rarely manifesting disease. Additionally, new advances promise to make an impact on the management and outcome of CM. New antifungal drugs are not likely to be available in the near future for CM treatment.
Automatic Liver Segmentation Based on Shape Constrained Differeomorphic Demons Atlas Registration

Liver segmentation from abdominal Computer Tomography (CT) images plays an important role in liver disease diagnosis as well as liver surgical planning. In this paper, a hybrid approach is proposed for fully automatic liver position search and liver segmentation in CT images. First liver intensity range is detected based on prior knowledge of liver volume. Then region of interest (ROI) is extracted using atlas-based affine and non-rigid registration. At the last step, to achieve more accurate segmentation, major liver tumors are detected using gray level and distance prior knowledge, and then a modified diffeomorphic demons registration with shape constrain is applied. Thirty CT image datasets are tested, and the effectiveness is evaluated using volume mean overlay coefficient (Dice) and a comprehensive metric. Results show that our method can be a potential tool in clinical application.
Is Severe Early Childhood Caries Associated with Dental Caries in Adulthood? ~A Pilot Project~

Dental caries in the primary dentition is a risk factor for dental caries in the permanent dentition. The aim of this pilot project was to establish if high levels of dental caries very early in life translate into increased levels of dental caries in adulthood. Our objective was to determine the mean DMFT score of individuals with a history of severe early childhood caries (S-ECC) and compare it with the mean DMFT score of individuals who were cariesfree in the primary dentition. The results of our analyses indicate that adults who experienced S-ECC manifest significantly higher levels of dental caries in their adulthood. The best predictor for dental caries in adulthood was caries experience in primary dentition. This preliminary study, the first of its kind, suggests that early childhood caries might indeed be associated with dental caries in adulthood.
Diagnostic Assessment in Learning Optics Based on Inquiry Laboratory

-This study aims to determine the improvement and differences of learners' learning outcomes based on diagnostic assessment on learning optics based on inquiry lab. The research used experimental design on students of grade VIII SMPN 27 Samarinda as research subjects. Quantitative data were collected using a limited response instrument with multiple choice model. The instruments used are arranged based on the dimensions of knowledge that include conceptual and procedural, while the cognitive process includes remembering, understanding, applying, and analyzing. The inquiry laboratory approaches used include: observation, manipulation, generalization, verification, and application. The results showed an increase in student learning outcomes. Learning optics based on Inquiry laboratory shows differences in learning outcomes. Keywords--diagnostic assessment, inquiry laboratory, optical
Reflections of stress in US abortion narratives

A trauma-informed, thematic analysis that identified stress-related themes evident in 39 personal abortion narratives from the Tennessee Stories Project in the United States is presented in this paper. Using the Braun and Clarke model of thematic analysis, guided by the trauma-informed social work framework, researchers examined these narratives to identify stress related themes. Findings An overall theme of stress and traumatic stress was found to be present throughout the abortion narratives. These themes were categorized into subthemes, including: (a) existing life stressors preceding the abortion experience, (b) stressors while trying to access abortion services, (c) stressors while obtaining abortion services, and (d) stressors arising after the procedure. Applications These results suggest that stress and traumatic stress were reflected in these abortion narratives throughout the abortion seeking experience. This finding supports the need for social work practice responses that are designed to address and eliminate stress during the process of seeking and obtaining an abortion in the United States. A trauma-informed framework is recommended for guiding social work education about abortion, social worker interactions with clients who are seeking abortions, and the development of abortion policy in the United States in order to better align the abortion seeking experience with the principles of trauma-informed care.
Automated analysis of flow cytometry data: a systematic review of recent methods

Flow cytometry (FCM) is a very well-known method that is broadly used in clinical and research laboratories. Both clinical and research laboratories have been the target domains of FCM applications. The key research question in this particular field is “how to effectively automate FCM data analysis? ”. To answer this question, this paper systematically reviews current advances in the automation of FCM data analysis. All recent techniques have been studied in a way readers can recognize current trends, challenges, limitations and future directions. For future research, we have identified three main venues. First, the identification of the number of clusters prior to starting cell population identification is still a challenging process. Second, automating the process of cluster labeling still requires more improvement to be fully automated. Last, benchmark datasets are essential in order for researchers to be able to comparatively evaluate different techniques of FCM data analysis under fixed conditions.We end up this paper with a discussion about how flow cytometry data analysis techniques and datasets are correlated with open source technology.
Arbeid en stress : het vaststellen van aanpassingsproblemen in werksituaties

De beschikbaarheid van diagnostische instrumenten om negatieve afwijkingen van lichamelijk en geestelijk welzijn vast te stellen is een belangrijke factor in de integrale gezondheidszorg. Deze integratie brengt veel problemen met zich mee. Bedrijfsartsen hebben de neiging hun aandacht te richten op effecten die het resultaat zijn van kortdurende blootstelling aan factoren met een hoge intensiteit. Psychologen aan de andere kant zijn speciaal geinteresseerd in eigenschappen die met de persoonlijkheid samenhangen en min of meer onafhankelijk zijn van de omgeving. In dit onderzoek wordt een poging gedaan een diagnostiek te ontwerpen om de graad waarin een werksituatie een negatieve invloed uitoefent op het lichamelijk en geestelijk welzijn van werknemers vast te stellen.
The Long-Term Consequences of the Irish Marriage Bar

A Marriage Bar is the requirement that women in certain jobs must leave that job when they marry. Ireland had a Marriage Bar in place until the 1970s. In 2014/2015, women participating in the The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing were asked – for the first time in a nationally representative survey – specific questions about their experience of the Marriage Bar. In this paper, we use the information from the TILDA respondents for two purposes. The first is to investigate the extent of the Marriage Bar in Ireland. Our analysis suggests that the Marriage Bar was widespread and not confined to specific sectors or occupations (such as the civil service). The second purpose is to investigate the long-term consequences of the Marriage Bar. We do so by comparing the outcomes of women who were affected by the Marriage Bar with the outcomes of women who were not affected by the Marriage Bar. Regression analysis shows that women affected by the Marriage Bar have shorter working lives, lower individual income but higher household wealth at present, more children and more educated children. However, there are no statistically significant differences in the current health status of the two groups of women. The differences in long-term outcomes do not appear to be confounded by the endogeneity of marriage, education, employment and occupational choices.
An improved enhancement layer for octree based point cloud compression with plane projection approximation

Recent advances in point cloud capture and applications in VR/AR sparked new interests in the point cloud data compression. Point Clouds are often organized and compressed with octree based structures. The octree subdivision sequence is often serialized in a sequence of bytes that are subsequently entropy encoded using range coding, arithmetic coding or other methods. Such octree based algorithms are efficient only up to a certain level of detail as they have an exponential run-time in the number of subdivision levels. In addition, the compression efficiency diminishes when the number of subdivision levels increases. Therefore, in this work we present an alternative enhancement layer to the coarse octree coded point cloud. In this case, the base layer of the point cloud is coded in known octree based fashion, but the higher level of details are coded in a different way in an enhancement layer bit-stream. The enhancement layer coding method takes the distribution of the points into account and projects points to geometric primitives, i.e. planes. It then stores residuals and applies entropy encoding with a learning based technique. The plane projection method is used for both geometry compression and color attribute compression. For color coding the method is used to enable efficient raster scanning of the color attributes on the plane to map them to an image grid. Results show that both improved compression performance and faster run-times are achieved for geometry and color attribute compression in point clouds.
Exact and Heuristic Methods for Minimizing the Total Completion Time in Job-shops

In this paper we consider the total completion time minimization in a job-shop. We propose a new mathematical formulation based on a strip packing model. This formulation is enhanced by introducing some valid inequalities in order to compute an efficient lower bound. It is also exploited to derive an exact method; branch-and-bound algorithm which uses an improved solution of a genetic algorithm. The proposed algorithms are tested on standard benchmarks and the results are satisfactory in term of solution quality and the distance to the optimal solution.
Performance evaluation of joint per-VC scheduling and credit-based flow control in high-speed ATM WANs

Per-VC scheduling and credit-based flow control were studied separately in the past. This paper presents the performance evaluation of joint per-VC scheduling and credit-based flow control in a three-node high-speed ATM wide area network. The traffic types used in the study are a combination of delay-sensitive (DS), delay-insensitive (DI) and best effort (BE) qualities of service. At the network level the ATM switches perform credit-based flow control for DI and BE traffic and peak rate allocation for DS traffic. At the node level a per-connection scheduling algorithm is used to determine the eligibility of a connection to transmit cells during a given slot. In this paper we simulate the behavior of the above mentioned network in order to evaluate ifs performance.
Resultados do registro de cirurgias colorretais videolaparoscópicas realizadas no Estado de Minas Gerais - Brasil de 1996 a 2009 Colorectal laparoscopic surgeries performed in the State of Minas Gerais - Brasil from 1996 to 2009

INTRODUCAO: A partir de 1991, a videolaparoscopia comecou a ser considerada no tratamento de doencas colorretais. O aprimoramento da tecnica cirurgica associado aos beneficios encontrados em diversos estudos publicados levou a modificacoes nas perspectivas da videolaparoscopia. A partir da publicacao do estudo COST as resseccoes oncologicas laparoscopicas foram reconhecidas como alternativa viavel, com resultados semelhantes a cirurgia convencional. PACIENTES E METODOS: Realizou-se pesquisa atraves de formulario especifico e consulta a prontuarios dos principais servicos de coloproctologia de Belo Horizonte. Avaliando-se sexo, idade, indicacao cirurgica, procedimento realizado, tecnica laparoscopica, complicacoes, conversao, estadiamento e recidiva (no caso de neoplasias). RESULTADOS: Foram levantados dados sobre 503 cirurgias colorretais laparoscopicas: 347 (68,9%) em mulheres e 156 (31,1%) homens. A tecnica cirurgica foi totalmente laparoscopica em 137 casos, video-assistida 245 casos. O procedimento mais realizado foi a retossigmoidectomia (41,1%), seguido pela colectomia direita (12,5%), colectomia esquerda (6,9%). Doencas benignas foram responsaveis por 259 (51,5%) casos, destes as principais indicacoes cirurgicas foram endometriose 126 (48,6%), polipos 40 (15,4%), doenca diverticular 30 (11,6%). Das 240 cirurgias realizadas por doencas malignas as mais frequentes foram retossigmoidectomia 102 (42,5%), colectomia direita 46 (19,1%), colectomia esquerda 18 (7,5%), amputacao abdominoperineal 18 (7,5%). Houve 54 conversoes (10.7%) dos casos, 12,9% (31/240) nos casos de neoplasias, 8,5% (22/259) nos de doencas benignas. Complicacoes sistemicas ou cirurgicas ocorreram em 31 (6,1%) e 56 (11,1%) casos, respectivamente. Foram registrados onze (2,18%) obitos nos primeiros 30 dias apos a cirurgia. CONCLUSAO: O estudo atual foi o primeiro levantamento da implantacao de cirurgias colorretais laparoscopicas realizado de forma multicentrica em Minas Gerais. Os dados levantados sao consistentes com registros nacionais de videocirurgia colorretal, mostrando a eficiencia do metodo de aprendizado com realizacao de cirurgias com tutor. Alem disso, que pequena parte das cirurgias colorretais sao realizadas por via laparoscopica no estado, restritos apenas a centros especializados, sobrecarregando esses servicos e limitando o acesso para a populacao.
Abstract OT2-07-03: IMpassion031: A phase III study comparing neoadjuvant atezolizumab vs placebo in combination with nab-paclitaxel–based chemotherapy in early triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)

Background Atezolizumab is an anti–programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) monoclonal antibody that blocks the binding of PD-L1 to PD-1 and B7.1 receptors, thereby restoring tumor-specific immunity. TNBC is characterized by PD-L1 expression on tumor-infiltrating immune cells (IC), high levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), and a higher mutation rate compared with other breast cancers suggesting a therapeutic opportunity for atezolizumab. Atezolizumab alone and in combination with nab-paclitaxel is well tolerated, with promising clinical activity in metastatic TNBC. Furthermore, cytotoxic chemotherapies like nab-paclitaxel can enhance anti-tumor immune responses via neoantigen release. Taken together, this supports the investigation of atezolizumab in combination with nab-paclitaxel in early-stage TNBC. IMpassion031 is a global Phase III, double-blind, randomized, multicenter, placebo-controlled study being conducted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of neoadjuvant treatment with nab-paclitaxel → doxorubicin + cyclophosphamide and either atezolizumab or placebo in invasive stage II/III early TNBC. The selection and sequence of chemotherapy has been chosen to maximize the opportunity for a robust immune response. Methods: Eligible patients are those with previously untreated, central laboratory–confirmed invasive TNBC with primary tumor size > 2 cm and ECOG PS 0-1. Exclusion criteria include history of invasive breast cancer, stage IV disease, bilateral breast cancer, prior systemic therapy for the treatment or prevention of breast cancer, prior immunotherapy and a history of autoimmune disease. Approximately 204 patients will be randomized 1:1 to receive atezolizumab (840 mg q2w) or placebo with nab-paclitaxel (125 mg/m2 qw) for 12 weeks. Subsequent atezolizumab (840 mg q2w) or placebo with doxorubicin (60 mg/m2 q2w) + cyclophosphamide (600 mg/m2 q2w) will be given for 4 cycles prior to surgery. Post-surgery, patients will be unblinded. Patients in the atezolizumab arm will continue to receive atezolizumab (1200 mg q3w × 11 doses) post-surgery. Stratification factors include stage II vs III TNBC at diagnosis and PD-L1 expression on tumor-infiltrating IC (IC0 Citation Format: Mittendorf E, Barrios CH, Harbeck N, Miles D, Saji S, Zhang H, Duc A-N, Rafii S, Lai C. IMpassion031: A phase III study comparing neoadjuvant atezolizumab vs placebo in combination with nab-paclitaxel–based chemotherapy in early triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2017 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(4 Suppl):Abstract nr OT2-07-03.
Evaluation of statistical methods for the analysis of forensic DNA mixtures

Analysis of forensic DNA mixtures recovered from crime scenes is one of the most challengingtasks in forensic science. DNA mixture raise two main questions: “how many contributors arethere” and “what are the genotypes of the contributing individuals? ” The genetic characterizationalone of such samples does not always answer these questions. In fact, whenever more thantwo alleles are observed at a given locus, several distinct genotypic combinations are plausiblefor the unknown contributors to the sample, and it is not possible to determine the number ofthese contributors with absolute certainty. Besides, the presence of anomalies related to DNAtyping techniques, such as contamination or allele loss (drop-out), can further complicate theanalysis.Numerous statistical developments facilitating DNA mixtures interpretation were proposed,but they did not receive the expected success in the forensic community. The main explanationfor this is that these methods are not validated for forensic casework.In order to achieve this validation criterion, the methods must undergo a rigorous evaluationstep. The latter raises two questions: i) how methods should be evaluated? and ii) whattools can be used to conduct evaluation studies? In this thesis we attempt to answer bothquestions. First, we evaluate methods dedicated to two key issues, the estimation of the numberof contributors to DNA mixtures and the estimation of drop-out probabilities. Second, wepropose an “open-source” software that offers a number of functionalities dedicated to facilitatingmethod evaluation through the simulation of data commonly encountered in forensic settings.This thesis aims to provide a concrete answer to the issues raised by forensic DNA mixtures,by providing a methodology for method evaluation and by offering necessary tools to enablemethod evaluation.
Enabling Real-Time Business Intelligence by Stream Data Mining

Traditionally Business Intelligence (BI) is defined as “a set of mathematical models and analysis methodologies that exploit the available data to generate information and knowledge useful for complex decision making processes” (Vercellis, 2009). The real-time aspect of BI seems to be missing from the classical studies. BI systems technically combine data collection, data storage, and knowledge management with analytical tools to present complex and competitive information to business strategic planner and decision makers (Negash, 2003). This type of BI systems or architectures has served for business usage for past decades (Rao, 2000). Nowadays businesses evolved to be more competitive and dynamic than the past, which demand for real-time BI and capability of making very quick decisions. With this new business market demand, recently published works (Yang & Fong, 2010; Sandu, 2008) advocated that BI should be specified in four dimensions: strategic, tactical, operational and real-time. Most of the existing decision-support systems however are strategic and tactical; BI is produced by data mining either in forms of regular reports or some actionable information in digital format within a certain frame time. Although the access to the BI database (sometimes called Knowledge base) and the decision generated from data-mining rules are instant; the underlying historical data used for analysis may not be most up-to-thelatest-minute or seconds. Compared with the operational BI, real-time BI (rt-BI) shall analyze the data as soon it enters the organization. The latency (data latency, analysis latency, decision latency) shall be zero ideally. In order to establish such real-time BI systems, relevant technologies to guarantee low/zero latency are necessary. For example, operational / real-time BI data warehouse techniques are able to provide fresh data access and update. Thus operational BI can be viewed as rt-BI as long as it can provide analytics within a very short time for decision making. The main approach is: system response time shall stay under a threshold that is less than the action taking time; and the rate of data processing shall be faster than the rate of data producing. However, there are many real-time data mining algorithms in theoretical fields, but their applicability and suitability towards various real-time applications are still vague; so far no one has conducted an in-depth study for rt-BI with consideration of streammining. We take this as the research motivation and hence the contribution of this chapter. The chapter is structured in the following way: Section 2 is an overview of rt-BI system; the high-level framework, system architecture and process are described. Section 3 is a
Nursing Pathways for Patient Safety

* Overview: NCSBN Practice Breakdown Initiative * Practice Breakdown: Medication Administration * Practice Breakdown: Clearly Communicating Patient Data and Clinical Assessments * Practice Breakdown: Attentiveness/Surveillance * Practice Breakdown: Clinical Reasoning or Judgment * Practice Breakdown: Prevention * Practice Breakdown: Intervention * Practice Breakdown: Interpretation of Authorized Provider Orders * Practice Breakdown: Professional Responsibility and Patient Advocacy * Mandatory Reporting * Organizational Use of TERCAP: Shifting From a Quality Management to a Whole Systems Approach
A COMPARISON OF HIERARCHICAL AND LINEAR BROWSER BACK MENUS

The most common method to revisit web pages is the Back button; however, due to its stack-based nature, pages frequently "pop off" the stack, resulting in those pages being inaccessible from the Back menu. A user study was performed on three alternatives to the regular Back menu – a recency list algorithm, and Histree and FamilyTree, two hierarchical algorithms. Results indicate that both FamilyTree and Recency have strengths and weaknesses. A combination of these two interfaces is suggested to incorporate some of their strengths.