Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polymorphisms in Autophagy-Related Gene IRGM Are Associated with Susceptibility to Autoimmune Thyroid Diseases

Background To date, studies have shown that polymorphisms in an autophagy-related gene, IRGM, are linked with different diseases, especially autoimmune diseases. The present study aimed to examine the roles of IRGM polymorphisms in autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITD). Methods Three polymorphisms in IRGM gene (rs10065172, rs4958847, and rs13361189) were genotyped in 1569 participants (488 with Graves' disease, 292 with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and 789 healthy controls) using PCR-based ligase detection reaction method. Gene-disease associations were evaluated for the three SNPs. Results T allele of rs10065172, A allele of rs4958847, and C allele of rs13361189 were all higher in Graves' disease patients than controls, and the ORs were OR = 1.207 (P = 0.022), OR = 1.207 (P = 0.027), and OR = 1.200 (P = 0.027), respectively. After adjusting for sex and age, rs10065172 and rs13361189 were still associated with GD under both the allele model and dominant model, and the adjusted ORs for rs10065172 were 1.20 (P = 0.033) and 1.33 (P = 0.024), while the adjusted ORs for rs13361189 were 1.19 (P = 0.042) and 1.33 (P = 0.026), respectively. No significant difference was found between Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients and controls. Haplotype analysis found that CTA frequency was distinguishingly higher in Graves' disease patients (OR = 1.195, P = 0.030). The frequency of TCG haplotype was distinguishingly lower in AITD and Graves' disease patients (OR = 0.861, P = 0.044; OR = 0.816, P = 0.017). Conclusions Our study reveals IRGM as a susceptibility gene of AITD and Graves' disease for the first time.
The Combination of Human Urinary Kallidinogenase and Mild Hypothermia Protects Adult Rats Against Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy-Induced Injury by Promoting Angiogenesis and Regeneration

Objectives: Human Urinary Kallidinogenase (HUK) is a tissue kallikrein that plays neuroprotective role in ischemic conditions via different mechanisms. Mild hypothermia (MH) is another robust neuroprotectant that reduces mortality but does not profoundly ameliorate the neurological outcome in hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) patients. However, whether the combination of HUK and MH can be used as a promising neuroprotective treatment in HIE is unknown. Methods: One-hundred and forty-four adult Wistar rats were randomly divided into five groups: Sham, HIE, HUK, MH and a combination of HUK and MH treatment. The HIE rat model was established by right carotid dissection followed by hypoxia aspiration. The survival curve was created within 7 days, and the neurological severity scores (NSS) were assessed at days 0, 1, 3, and 7. Nissl staining, Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labeling (TUNEL), immunofluorescent staining and western blotting were used to evaluate neuronal survival, apoptosis and necrosis, tight-junction proteins Claudin-1 and Zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), doublecortex (DCX), bradykinin receptor B1 (BDKRB1), BDKRB2 and Ki67 staining. Results: The combined treatment rescued all HIE rats from death and had a best survival curve compared to HIE. The Combination also reduced the NSS scores after HIE at days 7, better than HUK or MH alone. The combination of HUK and MH reserved more cells in Nissl staining and inhibited neuronal apoptosis and necrosis as well as significantly attenuated HIE-induced decreases in claudin-1, ZO-1, cyclin D1 and BDKRB1/B2 in comparison to HUK or MH treatment alone. Moreover, the combined treatment increased the expression of VEGF and DCX as well as the number of Ki67-labeled cells. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that both HUK and MH are neuroprotective after HIE insult; however, the combined therapy with HUK and MH enhanced the efficiency and efficacy of either therapy alone in the treatment of HIE, at least partially by promoting angiogenesis and regeneration and rescuing tight-junction loss. The combination of HUK and MH seems to be a feasible and promising clinical strategy to alleviate cerebral injury following HIE insult. Highlights: - The combination of HUK and MH distinctly reduces neurological dysfunction in HIE rats. - HUK enhances the neuroprotective effects of MH in HIE. - MH attenuates tight-junction disruption, upregulates the BDKR B1/2, DCX and cyclin D1. - The combination of MH and HUK enhances the expressions of MH/HUK mediated-BDKR B1/2, DCX, cyclin D1 and Ki67 positive cells.
Social Cognition for Human-Robot Symbiosis—Challenges and Building Blocks

The next generation of robot companions or robot working partners will need to satisfy social requirements somehow similar to the famous laws of robotics envisaged by Isaac Asimov time ago (Asimov, 1942). The necessary technology has almost reached the required level, including sensors and actuators, but the cognitive organization is still in its infancy and is only partially supported by the current understanding of brain cognitive processes. The brain of symbiotic robots will certainly not be a “positronic” replica of the human brain: probably, the greatest part of it will be a set of interacting computational processes running in the cloud. In this article, we review the challenges that must be met in the design of a set of interacting computational processes as building blocks of a cognitive architecture that may give symbiotic capabilities to collaborative robots of the next decades: (1) an animated body-schema; (2) an imitation machinery; (3) a motor intentions machinery; (4) a set of physical interaction mechanisms; and (5) a shared memory system for incremental symbiotic development. We would like to stress that our approach is totally un-hierarchical: the five building blocks of the shared cognitive architecture are fully bi-directionally connected. For example, imitation and intentional processes require the “services” of the animated body schema which, on the other hand, can run its simulations if appropriately prompted by imitation and/or intention, with or without physical interaction. Successful experiences can leave a trace in the shared memory system and chunks of memory fragment may compete to participate to novel cooperative actions. And so on and so forth. At the heart of the system is lifelong training and learning but, different from the conventional learning paradigms in neural networks, where learning is somehow passively imposed by an external agent, in symbiotic robots there is an element of free choice of what is worth learning, driven by the interaction between the robot and the human partner. The proposed set of building blocks is certainly a rough approximation of what is needed by symbiotic robots but we believe it is a useful starting point for building a computational framework.
Low Levels of Chito-Oligosaccharides Are Not Effective in Reducing Deoxynivalenol Toxicity in Swine Jejunal Explants

Deoxynivalenol (DON) is a mycotoxin that affects the intestinal morphology of animals, impairing nutrient intake and growth. On the other hand, dietary supplementation with functional oligosaccharides as chito-oligosaccharides (COS) has shown positive effects on the intestinal health of piglets. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to evaluate the effect of low doses of COS in preventing DON-induced intestinal histological changes, using a swine jejunal explant technique. The intestinal explants were incubated at 37 °C in culture medium for 4 h and exposed to the following treatments: (a) control (only culture medium), (b) DON (10 µM), (c) 25COS (0.025 mg·mL−1 of COS); (d) 50COS (0.05 mg·mL−1 of COS); (e) 25COS plus DON (25COS + DON); (f) 50COS plus DON (50COS + DON). Explants exposed to COS presented intestinal morphology similar to control samples. DON induced a significant decrease in the histological score as a consequence of moderate to severe histological changes (apical necrosis, villi atrophy, and fusion) and a significant decrease in morphometric parameters (villi height, crypt depth, villi height:crypt depth ratio, and goblet cells density). The intestinal morphology of samples exposed to COS + DON remained similar to DON treatment. In conclusion, low levels of COS did not counteract DON-induced intestinal lesions.
Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy versus flexible ureterorenoscopy in the treatment of untreated renal calculi

ABSTRACT Background The reported success rates for treatments of kidney stones with either extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) or flexible ureterorenoscopy (URS) are conflicting. We aimed to compare the efficacy and safety of ESWL and URS for previously untreated renal calculi. Methods All patients treated with ESWL or URS at our tertiary care centre between 2003 and 2015 were retrospectively identified. Patients with previously untreated kidney stones and a stone diameter of 5–20 mm were included. Stone-free, freedom from reintervention and complication rates were recorded. Independent predictors of stone-free and freedom from reintervention rates were identified by multivariable logistic regression and a propensity score-matched analysis was performed. Results A total of 1282 patients met the inclusion criteria, of whom 999 (78%) underwent ESWL and 283 (22%) had URS. During post-operative follow-up, only treatment modality and stone size could independently predict stone-free and freedom from reintervention rates. After propensity score matching, ESWL showed significantly lower stone-free rates [ESWL (71%) versus URS (84%)] and fewer patients with freedom from reintervention [ESWL (55%) versus URS (79%)] than URS. Complications were scarce for both treatments and included Clavien Grade 3a in 0.8% versus 0% and Grade 3b in 0.5% versus 0.4% of ESWL and URS treated patients, respectively. Conclusions Treatment success was mainly dependent on stone size and treatment modality. URS might be the better treatment option for previously untreated kidney stones 5–20 mm, with similar morbidity but higher stone-free rates and fewer reinterventions than ESWL.
Beyond Straightforward Vectorization of Lightweight Data Compression Algorithms for Larger Vector Sizes

Data as well as hardware characteristics are two key aspects for efficient data management. This holds in particular for the field of in-memory data processing. Aside from increasing main memory capacities, efficient in-memory processing benefits from novel processing concepts based on lightweight compressed data. Thus, an active research field deals with the adaptation of new hardware features such as vectorization using SIMD instructions to speedup lightweight data compression algorithms. Most of the vectorized implementations have been proposed for 128-bit vector registers. A straightforward transformation to wider vector sizes is possible. However, this straightforward way does not exploit the capabilities of newer SIMD extensions to the maximum extent as we will show in this paper. On the one hand, we present a novel implementation concept for run-length encoding using conflict-detection operations which have been introduced in Intel’s AVX-512 SIMD extension. On the other hand, we investigate different data layouts for vectorization and their impact on wider vector sizes.
Estimation of Salivary Glucose, Calcium, Phosphorus, Alkaline Phosphatase, and Immunoglobulin A among Diabetic and Nondiabetic Children: A Case-Control Study

Introduction Saliva is vital for oral health and helps to maintain oral homeostasis. It may show qualitative and quantitative variations owing to any changes in the systemic health. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a metabolic disease and the individuals may be at higher risk for oral health problems. Objective The study was aimed to estimate the levels of various salivary components among diabetic and nondiabetic children with similar caries status and also to analyze possible association between caries status and possible caries determinants in the saliva of diabetic children. Materials and methods A total of 70 children in the age group of 6 to 13 years with minimal dental caries (Decayed, Missing and Filled Teeth index (DMFT/dmft >1 and <5)) were selected. Group I comprised of type I diabetic children and on medication for diabetes and group II included healthy nondiabetic children. Salivary samples were collected from the participants by passive drool method and estimation of all salivary parameters was done using autoanalyzer. Results Statistical analyses were done using Student’s t-test and results are presented as mean ± standard deviation (SD). There was a highly significant difference in mean glucose value between diabetic and nondiabetic children. Levels of salivary calcium, phosphorus, and salivary immunoglobulin A (s-IgA) did not show any significant difference between the two groups. There was also a statistically significant difference in the alkaline phosphatase (AP) levels, which was found to be higher in diabetics. Conclusion An elevation in the levels of salivary glucose and AP was evident in diabetic children, which can be a risk marker for dental caries. There was no correlation in the levels of salivary calcium, phosphorus, and s-IgA levels among diabetic and healthy children. Clinical significance The salivary factors evaluated in the study may prove to be useful measures of caries experience in diabetic children. How to cite this article: Uppu K, Sahana S, Madu GP, Vasa AAK, Nalluri S, Raghavendra KJ. Estimation of Salivary Glucose, Calcium, Phosphorus, Alkaline Phosphatase, and Immunoglobulin A among Diabetic and Nondiabetic Children: A Case-Control Study. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2018;11(2):71-78.
Effects of Plant Diversity, Vegetation Composition, and Habitat Type on Different Functional Trait Groups of Wild Bees in Rural Beijing

Abstract The loss of flower-rich habitats and agricultural intensification have resulted in significant losses of wild bee diversity from agricultural landscapes that is increasingly threatening the pollination of zoochorous agricultural crops and agricultural sustainability. However, the links of different wild bee functional trait groups with habitat types and plant resources in agricultural landscapes remain poorly understood, thus impeding the formulation of effective policies for bee conservation. We therefore analyzed how bees representing different functional groups responded to variations in habitat type, vegetation composition and plant diversity. Natural shrubland sustained the highest diversity in bees overall, in large-sized bees, solitary bees and belowground-nesting bees, while each habitat harbored unique species. In half of the functional bee groups, species were negatively linked to tree coverage and herb coverage, respectively, while plant diversity was positively related to all functional groups except large-sized bees and aboveground-nesting bees. Overall bee abundance was positively related to abundance of plants in the Sympetalae, and negatively related to abundance of plants in the Archichlamydeae. Different bee functional groups showed distinct preferences for different plant communities. In order to conserve the diversity of wild bees across functional groups to optimize associated pollination services, a diverse habitat mosaic, and particularly plant species in Sympetalae need to be promoted in agricultural landscapes. Future studies should aim to enhance our understanding of plant-pollinator associations and specific food requirement of different wild bee species for their effective conservation.
Artificial intelligence diagnosis of Helicobacter pylori infection using blue laser imaging-bright and linked color imaging: a single-center prospective study

Background: Deep learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that imitates the neural network in the brain. We generated an AI to diagnose Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection using blue laser imaging (BLI)-bright and linked color imaging (LCI). The aim of this pilot study was to establish an AI diagnosing system that predicts H. pylori infection status using endoscopic images to improve the accuracy and productivity of endoscopic examination. Methods: A total of 222 enrolled subjects (105 H. pylori-positive) underwent esophagogastroduodenoscopy and a serum test for H. pylori IgG antibodies. During esophagogastroduodenoscopy, an endoscopist sequentially took 3 still images of the lesser curvature of the stomach using white light imaging (WLI), BLI-bright, and LCI. EG-L580NW endoscopic equipment (FUJIFILM Co., Japan) was used for the study. The specifications of the AI were as follows: operating system, Linux; neural network, GoogLeNet; framework, Caffe; graphic processor unit, Geforce GTX TITAN X (NVIDIA Co., USA). Results: The area under the curve (AUC) on receiver operating characteristics analysis was 0.66 for WLI. In contrast, the AUCs of BLI-bright and LCI were 0.96 and 0.95, respectively. The AUCs obtained for BLI-bright and LCI were significantly larger than those for WLI (P<0.01). Conclusions: The results demonstrate that the developed AI has an excellent ability to diagnose H. pylori infection using BLI-bright and LCI. AI technology with image-enhanced endoscopy is likely to become a useful image diagnostic tool.
Serum Adipocyte Fatty Acid-Binding Protein 4 Levels Are Independently Associated with Radioisotope Glomerular Filtration Rate in Type 2 Diabetic Patients with Early Diabetic Nephropathy

Serum fatty acid-binding protein 4 (FABP4) has been linked to renal dysfunction. This study evaluated the association between serum FABP4 and the radioisotope glomerular filtration rate (rGFR) in type 2 diabetic patients (T2DM) with early diabetic nephropathy. Twenty healthy controls and 172 patients with T2DM were enrolled. Serum FABP4 and renal impairment biomarkers including urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR), serum retinal-binding protein 4 (RBP4), urinary cystatin C-to-creatinine ratio (CysC/Cr), and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin-to-creatinine ratio (NGAL/Cr) were measured. Diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (99mTc-DTPA) was used to test rGFR. Serum FABP4 levels were higher in T2DM patients compared with the controls. There was no significant correlation between serum FABP4 and UACR in patients with T2DM. Multivariate stepwise regression analysis showed that, in patients with T2DM, FABP4 was significantly associated with rGFR while CysC/Cr and RBP4 were significantly associated with UACR independently. But UACR had no independent association with rGFR. NGAL/Cr had no significant correlation with either rGFR or UACR. FABP4 might be an early biomarker for diabetic nephropathy if combined with UACR.
Field-Based Scoring of Soybean Iron Deficiency Chlorosis Using RGB Imaging and Statistical Learning

Iron deficiency chlorosis (IDC) is an abiotic stress in soybean that can cause significant biomass and yield reduction. IDC is characterized by stunted growth and yellowing and interveinal chlorosis of early trifoliate leaves. Scoring IDC severity in the field is conventionally done by visual assessment. The goal of this study was to investigate the usefulness of Red Green Blue (RGB) images of soybean plots captured under the field condition for IDC scoring. A total of 64 soybean lines with four replicates were planted in 6 fields over 2 years. Visual scoring (referred to as Field Score, or FS) was conducted at V3–V4 growth stage; and concurrently RGB images of the field plots were recorded with a high-throughput field phenotyping platform. A second set of IDC scores was done on the plot images (displayed on a computer screen) consistently by one person in the office (referred to as Office Score, or OS). Plot images were then processed to remove weeds and extract six color features, which were used to train computer-based IDC scoring models (referred to as Computer Score, or CS) using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM). The results showed that, in the fields where severe IDC symptoms were present, FS and OS were strongly positively correlated with each other, and both of them were strongly negatively correlated with yield. CS could satisfactorily predict IDC scores when evaluated using FS and OS as the reference (overall classification accuracy > 81%). SVM models appeared to outperform LDA models; and the SVM model trained to predict IDC OS gave the highest prediction accuracy. It was anticipated that coupling RGB imaging from the high-throughput field phenotyping platform with real-time image processing and IDC CS models would lead to a more rapid, cost-effective, and objective scoring pipeline for soybean IDC field screening and breeding.
The usefulness of chemical-shift magnetic resonance imaging for the evaluation of osteoid osteoma

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine whether chemical-shift magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could be useful in the diagnosis of osteoid osteoma when clinical and radiological tumor features are inconclusive. Materials and Methods This retrospective study included 17 patients who underwent chemical-shift MRI for the evaluation of osteoid osteoma. For all patients, two musculoskeletal radiologists independently recorded signal intensities on in-phase and out-of-phase images in the nidus of the tumor, in abnormal-intensity bone marrow surrounding the lesion, and in normal-appearing bone marrow. For each region, relative signal intensity ratios were calculated by dividing out-of-phase by in-phase values. Relative ratios > 1 were considered indicative of neoplastic lesions. Statistical analysis was carried out to analyze the sample. Inter-observer and intra-observer agreement for each imaging method were assessed using intraclass correlation coefficients according to the Fleiss method and a value > 0.65 was considered to indicate substantial agreement. Results The mean relative signal intensity ratios were 1.2 (range, 0.9-1.4) for the nidus and 0.35 (range, 0.11-0.66) for the surrounding tissue; these values differed significantly from the relative signal-intensity ratios for normal-appearing bone marrow (p < 0.05). Conclusion Chemical-shift MRI is useful for the diagnosis and evaluation of osteoid osteoma.
Addressing Overgeneration Error: An Effective and Effcient Approach to Keyphrase Extraction from Scientific Papers

Keyphrases provide a concise summary of a document and play an important role for many other tasks like searching and clustering. With the large and increasing amount of online documents, automatic keyphrase extraction has attracted much attention. Existing unsupervised methods suffer from overgeneration error, since they typically identify key ”words” and then return phrases that contain keywords as keyphrases. To alleviate this problem, we propose an unsupervised ranking scheme directly on ”phrases” by exploring essential properties of keyphrases such as informativeness and positional preference. Experiments on two datasets show our approach significantly alleviates the overgeneration error and obtains improvement in performance over stateof-the-art keyphrase extraction approaches.