Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization and Clinical Relevance of ALDHbright Populations in Prostate Cancer

Purpose: High aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) has been suggested to selectively mark cells with high tumorigenic potential in established prostate cancer cell lines. However, the existence of cells with high ALDH activity (ALDHbright) in primary prostate cancer specimens has not been shown so far. We investigated the presence, phenotype, and clinical significance of ALDHbright populations in clinical prostate cancer specimens. Experimental Design: We used ALDEFLUOR technology and fluorescence-activated cell-sorting (FACS) staining to identify and characterize ALDHbright populations in cells freshly isolated from clinical prostate cancer specimens. Expression of genes encoding ALDH-specific isoforms was evaluated by quantitative real-time PCR in normal prostate, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), and prostate cancer tissues. ALDH1A1-specific expression and prognostic significance were assessed by staining two tissue microarrays that included more than 500 samples of BPH, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN), and multistage prostate cancer. Results: ALDHbright cells were detectable in freshly excised prostate cancer specimens (n = 39) and were mainly included within the EpCAM(+) and Trop2(+) cell populations. Although several ALDH isoforms were expressed to high extents in prostate cancer, only ALDH1A1 gene expression significantly correlated with ALDH activity (P < 0.01) and was increased in cancers with high Gleason scores (P = 0.03). Most importantly, ALDH1A1 protein was expressed significantly more frequently and at higher levels in advanced-stage than in low-stage prostate cancer and BPH. Notably, ALDH1A1 positivity was associated with poor survival (P = 0.02) in hormone-naïve patients. Conclusions: Our data indicate that ALDH contributes to the identification of subsets of prostate cancer cells of potentially high clinical relevance. Clin Cancer Res; 19(19); 5361–71. ©2013 AACR.
Parametrization based synthesis of static feedback stabilizing controllers for uncertain discrete linear repetitive processes

The paper considers uncertain discrete-time linear repetitive processes described by a polytopic state-space model. Several parametrizations of the set of members in the class of (static) control laws that robustly stabilize these processes are developed. These are LQR, truncated LQR and stochastic parametrizations respectively. A numerical example which demonstrates the application one of the parametrizations to robust control synthesis is also given.
Ultrasound elastography. A possible improvement into the paraphernalia of pancreatic imaging.

Traditional imaging studies for evaluating pancreatic disease including abdominal ultrasound (US) and computerized tomography (CT) are widely utilized due to their availability, non-invasiveness, and familiarity on the part of physicians. Recently, the addition of endoscopic ultrasound (EUS), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) has significantly contributed to the ability of evaluating the pancreatic ductal and parenchymal anatomy and staging the malignancy using tissue samples. At the same time, the role of endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) has diminished with the use of these less invasive modalities. Limitations in these conventional techniques include a lack of sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing early chronic pancreatitis, difficulties in differentiating malignancy from chronic or focal pancreatitis, and accuracy of staging pancreatic malignancy, particularly with regard to vascular involvement. Several recent advances in traditional imaging techniques have been described, which may improve the capability of accurately diagnosing and staging pancreatic disease, i.e., multidetector CT, micro-bubble contrast-enhanced ultrasound, secretin-stimulated MRCP, optical coherence tomography, diffusion-weighted MRI and MR spectroscopy [1]. Very recently a novel method of pancreatic imaging has been introduced, namely the US/EUS elastography. Initial clinical applications have shown that US elastography might be able to distinguish tissues due to their specific consistency regarding differences of hardness and strain allowing diseased tissue to be distinguished from normal tissue. To tell the truth, elasticity imaging is nothing but an extension of the echopalpation of the earlier US methods for viewing tissue rigidity. Elasticity images consist of either an image of strain in response to force or an image of estimated elastic modulus. There are three main types of US elasticity imaging: elastography which tracks tissue movement during compression to obtain an estimate of strain, sonoelastography which uses color-Doppler to generate an image of tissue movement in response to external vibrations and tracking of shear wave propagation through tissue to obtain the elastic modulus [2]. Elasticity imaging is possible in almost all tissues. Breast mass elastography has potential for enhancing the specificity of US and mammography for cancer detection. Lesions in the thyroid, prostate gland and lymph nodes have been successfully imaged using elastography. Elasticity imaging may also be important in assessing the progress of ablation therapy, liver transplant rejection and cirrhosis. Vascular imaging including myocardium, blood vessel wall, plaque, lymphatic vessels and venous thrombi has also shown great potential. EUS elastography might also enhance the detection and differentiation of various solid tumors
Chinese Terminology Extraction Using Bilingual Web Resources

Automatic terminology extraction requires termhood verification for extracted terms in a specific domain. Chinese terminology extraction suffers from insufficient domain corpora for verification even though there is abundance of information in other languages. This paper presents a novel approach to overcome this problem by using word translations and bilingual web resources to improve both coverage and precision. The proposed approach incorporates bilingual information from within candidate terms themselves and from existing domain knowledge to conduct termhood calculation. In contrast to previous researches, this method is not confined to only pre-determined corpora. Preliminary experiments show a 14.8% improvement in coverage and 26.3% improvement in precision, respectively.
Camelot, a role playing simulation for political decision making

Part I: Understanding Political Decision Making. Local Government: Why Study It? Who Governs, And to What Ends? The Legal Authority of Cities: Constraints and Powers. Sources of Local Government Revenues and Their Constraints. Organized Interest in the Decision-Making Process. Implementing Democracy. Forms of Local Government. Land-Use Planning, Planning Departments, And Planning Commissions. Part II: Simulating Political Decision Making. Introduction to Simulation. Starting the Simulation. Issues. Reference Materials. Elections. Role Descriptions, Settings, And Lists of Duties.
BlueFinder: recommending wikipedia links using DBpedia properties

DBpedia knowledge base has been built from data extracted from Wikipedia. However, many existing relations among resources in DBpedia are missing links among articles from Wikipedia. In some cases, adding these links into Wikipedia will enrich Wikipedia content and therefore will enable better navigation. In previous work, we proposed PIA algorithm that predicts the best link to connect two articles in Wikipedia corresponding to those related by a semantic property in DBpedia and respecting the Wikipedia convention. PIA calculates this link as a path query. After introducing PIA results in Wikipedia, most of them were accepted by the Wikipedia community. However, some were rejected because PIA predicts path queries that are too general. In this paper, we report the BlueFinder collaborative filtering algorithm that fixes PIA miscalculation. It is sensible to the specificity of the resource types. According to the conducted experimentation we found out that BlueFinder is a better solution than PIA because it solves more cases with a better recall.
Semantic annotations in clinical documentation: exploring potentials for future information retrieval

Clinical documentation pose an interesting challenge to the Information Retrieval community, as it contains a large amount of knowledge and experience documented in both free text and structured information. In this position paper, we discuss the use of semantic annotations for this type of data, such as certainty and pain levels, and the potentials for exploiting these in information access settings such as for hypothesis generation and adverse event identification.
Gephyrin, the enigmatic organizer at GABAergic synapses

GABAA receptors are clustered at synaptic sites to achieve a high density of postsynaptic receptors opposite the input axonal terminals. This allows for an efficient propagation of GABA mediated signals, which mostly result in neuronal inhibition. A key organizer for inhibitory synaptic receptors is the 93 kDa protein gephyrin that forms oligomeric superstructures beneath the synaptic area. Gephyrin has long been known to be directly associated with glycine receptor β subunits that mediate synaptic inhibition in the spinal cord. Recently, synaptic GABAA receptors have also been shown to directly interact with gephyrin and interaction sites have been identified and mapped within the intracellular loops of the GABAA receptor α1, α2, and α3 subunits. Gephyrin-binding to GABAA receptors seems to be at least one order of magnitude weaker than to glycine receptors (GlyRs) and most probably is regulated by phosphorylation. Gephyrin not only has a structural function at synaptic sites, but also plays a crucial role in synaptic dynamics and is a platform for multiple protein-protein interactions, bringing receptors, cytoskeletal proteins and downstream signaling proteins into close spatial proximity.
Honey and Cancer: Current Status and Future Directions

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and poses a challenge to treatment. With overwhelming evidence of the role played by diet and lifestyle in cancer risk and prevention, there is a growing interest into the search for chemopreventative or chemotherapeutic agents derived from natural products. Honey is an important source of bioactive compounds derived from plants and recent years have seen an increased interest in its anticancer properties. This review examines the role of honey in targeting key hallmarks of carcinogenesis, including uncontrolled proliferation, apoptosis evasion, angiogenesis, growth factor signalling, invasion, and inflammation. The evidence for honey as an adjunct to conventional cancer therapy is also presented. The review also highlights gaps in the current understanding and concludes that, before translation of evidence from cell culture and animal studies into the clinical setting, further studies are warranted to examine the effects of honey at a molecular level, as well as on cells in the tumour environment.
Vampire Bat Rabies: Ecology, Epidemiology and Control

Extensive surveillance in bat populations in response to recent emerging diseases has revealed that this group of mammals acts as a reservoir for a large range of viruses. However, the oldest known association between a zoonotic virus and a bat is that between rabies virus and the vampire bat. Vampire bats are only found in Latin America and their unique method of obtaining nutrition, blood-feeding or haematophagy, has only evolved in the New World. The adaptations that enable blood-feeding also make the vampire bat highly effective at transmitting rabies virus. Whether the virus was present in pre-Columbian America or was introduced is much disputed, however, the introduction of Old World livestock and associated landscape modification, which continues to the present day, has enabled vampire bat populations to increase. This in turn has provided the conditions for rabies re-emergence to threaten both livestock and human populations as vampire bats target large mammals. This review considers the ecology of the vampire bat that make it such an efficient vector for rabies, the current status of vampire-transmitted rabies and the future prospects for spread by this virus and its control.
Application of Digital image processing techniques for asphalt concrete mixture images

This paper presents an automated digital image processing (DIP) algorithm called Volumetricsbased Global Minima (VGM) thresholding algorithm for processing asphalt concrete (AC) X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. It utilizes known volumetric properties of AC mixtures as the main criterion for establishing the air-mastic and mastic-aggregate gray scale boundary thresholds. Several DIP techniques were utilized to characterize the AC microstructure. It is well demonstrated that the VGM processed images are significantly improved compared to the raw X-ray CT images. It can be concluded that VGM thresholding algorithm was shown to be a major improvement over the largely manual/subjective techniques used in the past.
Different Effects of Hypertension and Age on the Function of Large Conductance Calcium‐ and Voltage‐Activated Potassium Channels in Human Mesentery Artery Smooth Muscle Cells

Background Large‐conductance calcium‐ and voltage‐activated potassium channels (BKC a channels) play important roles in the maintenance of vascular tone, and their dysregulation is associated with abnormal vascular relaxation and contraction. We tested the changes in BKC a channel properties in patients at different ages to assess the effects of hypertension and aging on the functional changes of BKC a channels. Methods and Results Patch clamp was performed to detect the activities of BKC a channels in freshly isolated human mesenteric artery smooth muscle cells from younger patients (aged ≤45 years) without hypertension, older patients (aged ≥65 years) without hypertension, and older patients with hypertension. The expression of mRNA and protein from BKC a channels was evaluated by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and Western blot analysis, respectively. Results showed that the whole‐cell current density, spontaneous transient outward current, and Ca2+ sensitivity of the artery smooth muscle cells were significantly decreased in the older patients with hypertension; the decreases were insignificant in the older patients without hypertension, although a clear tendency to have spontaneous transient outward current was detected in these patients. The expression of both mRNA and protein of BKC a subunits α and β1 was significantly decreased in the older patients with hypertension but not in the older patients without hypertension compared with the younger patients without hypertension. Conclusions Our findings demonstrate for the first time that hypertension is an important factor for the pathological alteration of the properties of BKC a channels in human mesenteric artery smooth muscle cells, and aging itself may also be a factor in these changes in the cells.
Marching Cubes 33 : Construction of Topologically Correct

An algorithm implemented in the HIGZ graphics package for the construction of isosurfaces from vol-umetric datasets is discussed. This algorithm is an improved version of the Marching Cubes method. For each cell considered independently, the algorithm permits the construction of a triangle model, the topology of which coincides exactly with the topology of the iso-surface of the trilinear function. It is shown that there are 33 topologically diierent conngurations, instead of 15 as with the MC-method.
The Journal of Global Business Management Volume 9 * Number 1 * Organizational Change in Erp Implementation: a Dialectical Perspective

Dialectical perspectives have been used as logics of change driving organizational change in ERP implementation context. The dialectical logic of opposition explains organizational change by identifying forces both promoting and impeding change through lenses of organizational politics, organizational culture, institutional theory, and organizational learning. Although the literature survey of this study is not exhaustive, it can serve to some degree as a representative database for the understanding of mechanisms driving organizational change in ERP implementation. Many opposing forces and conflict may happen in user organizations from different phases in ERP implementation. ERP packages are culture-laden business applications, cross-cultural misfit issues may be worse in Asian cultural, economic, and regulatory contexts. In addition, ERP systems can engender a duality: in the pre-implementation and implementation stages, they act as objects of institutional forces; in the post-implementation stage, they show as carriers of institutional logics. An effective experiential learning strategy in ERP implementation is learning from failure which encourages double-loop exploration, consequently leads an organization resilient to change and seeks long-term success through short-term failure. Adopting vicarious learning strategy to partner with experienced implementation consultants and successful knowledge transfer plays a critical role in both overcoming knowledge barriers and mitigating misfit problems.
Shape- Based Tracking and Analysis of Myocardial Function from 4D Images

"his paper is a status report of work- in- progress, unded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hat is aimed at more accurately and objectively deteraining and quantifying the regional and global function f the left ventricle (LV) of the heart under both noraal and ischemic conditions, fundamentally relying on omputer vision- like models and strategies.
Comparing Survival between Peritoneal Dialysis and Hemodialysis Patients with Subclinical Peripheral Artery Disease: a 6-Year Follow-Up

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is known to be an increased mortality risk in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). The aim of this study was to compare patient survival between patients with subclinical PAD undergoing peritoneal dialysis (PD) and hemodialysis (HD). Subclinical peripheral artery was defined as an ankle-brachial index of less than 0.9. This study was conducted from April 2005, and the observation period ended on 30 June 2011. At the end of the follow-up, the status of all patients was assessed and data on mortality were obtained for the entire cohort. A total of 91 patients (61 HD and 30 PD) were included for analyses in this study. Mortality rate was 60.0% (18/30) for PD and 52.5% (32/61) for HD. Kaplan-Meier estimate demonstrate that PD patients had a higher mortality rate than those underwent HD (log-rank p = 0.0039). Cox regression model demonstrated that PD was an independent predictor for further mortality in ESRD patients with subclinical peripheral artery disease. (p = 0.012, HR: 1.776, 95% CI: 1.136-2.775). In multivariate analysis, the HD group still had a greater survival than PD group (p = 0.005, HR:1.916, 95% CI: 1.218-3.015). In patients with subclinical peripheral artery disease, the patient survival is better in HD patients as compared with PD patients.
Increased Expression of HER2, HER3, and HER2:HER3 Heterodimers in HPV-Positive HNSCC Using a Novel Proximity-Based Assay: Implications for Targeted Therapies

Purpose: In other cancer types, HPV infection has been reported to coincide with overexpression of HER2 (ERBB2) and HER3 (ERBB3); however, the association between HER2 or HER3 expression and dimer formation in HNSCC has not been reported. Overexpression of HER2 and HER3 may contribute to resistance to EGFR inhibitors, including cetuximab, although the contribution of HPV in modulating cetuximab response remains unknown. Determination of heterodimerization of HER receptors is challenging and has not been reported in HNSCC. The present study aimed to determine the expression of HER proteins in HPV+ versus HPV− HNSCC tumors using a proximity-based protein expression assay (VeraTag), and to determine the efficacy of HER-targeting agents in HPV+ and HPV− HNSCC cell lines. Experimental Design: Expression of total HER1, HER2, and HER3, p95HER2, p-HER3, HER1:HER1 homodimers, HER2:HER3 heterodimers, and the HER3–PI3K complex in 88 HNSCC was determined using VeraTag, including 33 baseline tumors from individuals treated in a trial including cetuximab. Inhibition of cell growth and protein activation with cetuximab and afatinib was compared in HPV+ and HPV− cetuximab-resistant cell lines. Results: Expression of total HER2, total HER3, HER2:HER3 heterodimers, and the HER3:PI3K complex were significantly elevated in HPV+ HNSCC. Total EGFR was significantly increased in HPV− HNSCC where VeraTag assay results correlated with IHC. Afatinib significantly inhibited cell growth when compared with cetuximab in the HPV+ and HPV− cetuximab-resistant HNSCC cell lines. Conclusions: These findings suggest that agents targeting multiple HER proteins may be effective in the setting of HPV+ HNSCC and/or cetuximab resistance. Clin Cancer Res; 21(20); 4597–606. ©2015 AACR.
The Melanocortin-3 Receptor Is Required for Entrainment to Meal Intake

Entrainment of anticipatory activity and wakefulness to nutrient availability is a poorly understood component of energy homeostasis. Restricted feeding (RF) paradigms with a periodicity of 24 h rapidly induce entrainment of rhythms anticipating food presentation that are independent of master clocks in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) but do require other hypothalamic structures. Here, we report that the melanocortin system, which resides in hypothalamic structures required for food entrainment, is required for expression of food entrainable rhythms. Food anticipatory activity was assessed in wild-type (WT) and melanocortin-3 receptor-deficient (Mc3r−/−) C57BL/J mice by wheel running, spontaneous locomotory movement, and measurement of wakefulness. WT mice housed in wheel cages subject to RF exhibited increased wheel activity during the 2 h preceding meal presentation, which corresponded with an increase in wakefulness around meal time and reduced wakefulness during the dark. WT mice also exhibited increased x- and z-movements centered around food initiation. The activity-based responses to RF were significantly impaired in mice lacking Mc3r. RF also failed to increase wakefulness in the 2 h before food presentation in Mc3r−/− mice. Food entrainment requires expression of Neuronal PAS domain 2 (Npas2) and Period2 (Per2) genes, components of the transcriptional machinery maintaining a clock rhythm. Analysis of cortical gene expression revealed severe abnormalities in rhythmic expression of clock genes (Bmal1, Npas2, Per2) under ad libitum and RF conditions. In summary, Mc3r are required for expression of anticipatory patterns of activity and wakefulness during periods of limited nutrient availability and for normal regulation of cortical clock function.