Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vascular endothelial growth factor levels in active pulmonary tuberculosis.

BACKGROUND Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a mediator with potent angiogenic, mitogenic, and vascular permeability-enhancing activities that are specific for endothelial cells. Intense angiogenesis has been found in active pulmonary tuberculosis lesions. OBJECTIVES To determine whether active pulmonary tuberculosis is associated with increased serum levels of VEGF compared with inactive tuberculosis and VEGF levels in healthy subjects, and to assess the changes in serum VEGF levels before and after therapy. DESIGN Prospective clinical study. SETTING Chest clinic of a university hospital, Eskisehir, Turkey. PATIENTS AND MEASUREMENTS Serum VEGF levels of 44 patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis, 24 patients with inactive pulmonary tuberculosis, and 20 healthy subjects were determined. RESULTS VEGF levels were increased in active pulmonary tuberculosis patients (mean [+/- SD] VEGF level, 598.03 +/- 298.25 pg/mL) compared to both inactive pulmonary tuberculosis patients (mean VEGF level, 296.98 +/- 115.31 pg/mL) and control subjects (mean VEGF level, 339.67 +/- 74.65 pg/mL). The increase in VEGF level observed in patients with active tuberculosis was statistically significant when compared with levels in two other groups (p < 0.001 for both). Serum VEGF levels were statistically different before treatment and after treatment in 10 patients who were observed from diagnosis to the end of treatment (p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Increased serum VEGF levels may be an indicator of active pulmonary tuberculosis, since levels were higher in patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis and were lower after successful treatment. The role of VEGF-mediated angiogenesis in the pathogenesis and progression of pulmonary tuberculosis lesions should be further elucidated.
An autonomous explore/exploit strategy

In reinforcement learning problems it has been considered that neither exploitation nor exploration can be pursued exclusively without failing at the task. The optimal balance between exploring and exploiting changes as the training progresses due to the increasing amount of learnt knowledge. This shift in balance is not known a priori so an autonomous online adjustment is sought. Human beings manage this balance through logic and explorations based on feedback from the environment. The XCS learning classifier system uses a fixed explore/exploit balance, but does keep multiple statistics about its performance and interaction in an environment. Utilising these statistics in a non-linear manner, autonomous adjustment of the explore/exploit balance was achieved. This resulted in reduced exploration in simple environments, which could increase with the complexity of the problem domain. It also prevented unsuccessful 'loop' exploit trials and suggests a method of dynamic choice in goal setting.
Towards single-cell genome analysis of circulating tumor cells based on microcavity array

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are defined as tumor cells circulating in the peripheral blood of patients with metastatic cancer. CTCs are well recognized as accessible and valuable biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and are a potential target for drug discovery. However, the recovery of such extremely rare CTCs from the peripheral blood, which contains a mixture of CTCs and a large number of hematologic cells, presents a technical challenge. In this study, techniques for the recovery of CTCs based on the microcavity array (MCA) are introduced. The MCA can specifically obtain tumor cells from whole blood based on differences in the size and deformability between tumor cells and hematologic cells. By controlling the size and shape of the cavity, efficient CTC recovery was achieved in our study. Furthermore, an automated CTC recovery system using a MCA was developed for subsequent high-throughput analysis. The MCA system was finally applied to single-cell genome analysis, and accurate single-cell manipulation and genome amplification without any contamination of neighboring cells and without loss of target cells was achieved.
Bile Acid Nuclear Receptor Farnesoid X Receptor: Therapeutic Target for Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the causes of fatty liver, occurring when fat is accumulated in the liver without alcohol consumption. NAFLD is the most common liver disorder in advanced countries. NAFLD is a spectrum of pathology involving hepatic steatosis with/without inflammation and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis with accumulation of hepatocyte damage and hepatic fibrosis. Recent studies have revealed that NAFLD results in the progression of cryptogenic cirrhosis that leads to hepatocarcinoma and cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure. The main causes of NAFLD have not been revealed yet, metabolic syndromes including obesity and insulin resistance are widely accepted for the critical risk factors for the pathogenesis of NAFLD. Nuclear receptors (NRs) are transcriptional factors that sense environmental or hormonal signals and regulate expression of genes, involved in cellular growth, development, and metabolism. Several NRs have been reported to regulate genes involved in energy and xenobiotic metabolism and inflammation. Among various NRs, farnesoid X receptor (FXR) is abundantly expressed in the liver and a key regulator to control various metabolic processes in the liver. Recent studies have shown that NAFLD is associated with inappropriate function of FXR. The impact of FXR transcriptional activity in NAFLD is likely to be potential therapeutic strategy, but still requires to elucidate underlying potent therapeutic mechanisms of FXR for the treatment of NAFLD. This article will focus the physiological roles of FXR and establish the correlation between FXR transcriptional activity and the pathogenesis of NAFLD.
Quasilinear parabolic equations, unbounded solutions and geometrical equations III. Uniqueness through classical viscosity solutions’ methods

In this article, we are interested in uniqueness results for viscosity solutions of a general class of quasilinear, possibly degenerate, parabolic equations set in IRN . Using classical viscosity solutions’ methods, we obtain a general comparison result for solutions with polynomial growths but with a restriction on the growth of the initial data. The main application is the uniqueness of solutions for the mean curvature equation for graphs which was only known in the class of uniformly continuous functions. An application to the mean curvature flow is given. Key-words: Quasilinear parabolic equations, solutions with polynomial growth, comparison results, mean curvature equation, viscosity solutions. AMS subject classifications: 35A05, 35B05, 35D05, 35K15, 35K55, 53C44
Towards a Cost Optimal Design for a 5G Mobile Core Network Based on SDN and NFV

With the rapid growth of user traffic, service innovation, and the persistent necessity to reduce costs, today’s mobile operators are faced with several challenges. In networking, two concepts have emerged aiming at cost reduction, increase of network scalability and deployment flexibility, namely Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). NFV mitigates the dependency on hardware, where mobile network functions are deployed as software virtual network functions on commodity servers at cloud infrastructure, i.e., data centers. SDN provides a programmable and flexible network control by decoupling the mobile network functions into control plane and data plane functions. The design of the next generation mobile network (5G) requires new planning and dimensioning models to achieve a cost optimal design that supports a wide range of traffic demands. We propose three optimization models that aim at minimizing the network load cost as well as data center resources cost by finding the optimal placement of the data centers as well the SDN and NFV mobile network functions. The optimization solutions demonstrate the trade-offs between the different data center deployments, i.e., centralized or distributed, and the different cost factors, i.e., optimal network load cost or data center resources cost. We propose a Pareto optimal multi-objective model that achieves a balance between network and data center cost. Additionally, we use prior inference, based on the solutions of the single objectives, to pre-select data center locations for the multi-objective model that results in reducing the optimization complexity and achieves savings in run time while keeping a minimal optimality gap.
Screening and Production of Manganese Peroxidase from Fusarium sp. on Residue Materials

Abstract In this study, we report the manganese peroxidase production ability from a Fusarium sp. strain using an inexpensive medium of agriculture residues of either rice straw or wood chips as carbon source. The highest manganese peroxidase activity on rice straw medium and on wood chips was 1.76 U/mL by day 9 and 1.91 U/mL by day 12, respectively.
Impact of Optical Power in the Guard-Band Reduction of an Optimized DDO-OFDM System

A multiobjective optimization on the parameters of direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DDO-OFDM) systems in short-range links is proposed. Based on genetic algorithms, the optimization process takes into account the influence of optical power in the guard-band reduction of such multicarrier systems with 4and 16-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) subcarrier mapping and for propagation in 40 km of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). Simulation results show that the parameters optimization is responsible for a gain of approximately 2.5 dB [≈ 1.8 dB] in the required optical power for bit-errorrate ≤10-3, for DDO-OFDM system transmission over 40 km of uncompensated SSMF, with a guard band BG equals to 50% of the signal bandwidth Bw and 16-QAM [4-QAM] subcarrier mapping. For an extremely reduced guard band of only 1% of Bw, the gain reduced to ≈ 0.5 dB and ≈ 1.5 dB for 16and 4-QAM mapping, respectively. The optimization process is experimentally validated under the transmission of the optimized DDO-OFDM systems in optical back-to-back (B2B) configuration and 40 km of uncompensated SSMF. A fair performance comparison is discussed in the experimental results considering BG/Bw = 0.5 and BG/Bw = 0.01 in the range of the optimized optical powers. It is shown that a maximum optical power penalty of approximately 2 dBm is registered according to a guard-band reduction from 50% to 1% of the useful bandwidth, for transmission over the 40 km of SSMF, considering 16-QAM subcarrier mapping.
On the existence of stable asymmetric limit cycles and chaos in unforced symmetric relay feedback systems

We study the occurrence of bifurcations leading to the formation of asymmetric orbits and chaos in unforced relay feedback systems with a symmetric relay characteristic. We show that novel bifurcation mechanisms cause the formation of stable periodic solutions with segments of sliding motion. We then characterise the formation of asymmetric stable periodic solutions and detail the route to chaos exhibited by a representative third-order example.
Overweight and Sympathetic Overactivity in Black Americans

A large body of clinical investigation implicates an important role for the sympathetic nervous system in linking obesity with hypertension. However, the experimental support for this hypothesis is derived from strictly white cohorts. The goal of this study was to determine whether being overweight begets sympathetic overactivity in black Americans, the ethnic minority at highest risk for hypertension. We recorded postganglionic sympathetic nerve discharge with microelectrodes in muscle nerve fascicles of the peroneal nerve in 92 normotensive young adult black men and women within a wide range of body mass index. The same experiments were performed in a control group of 45 normotensive white men and women of similar ages and body mass indices. The major new findings are 2-fold. First, in young, normotensive, overtly healthy black women, being overweight begets sympathetic overactivity (r =0.45, P =0.0009), a putative intermediate phenotype for incident hypertension. Second, in black men, sympathetic nerve discharge is dissociated from body mass index (r =0.03, P =NS). This dissociation is explained in part by a 20% to 40% higher rate of sympathetic nerve discharge in lean black men compared with lean white men and lean black and white women (28±3 versus 18±2, 21±2, and 17±2 bursts/min, respectively;P <0.05). Sympathetic nerve discharge in lean black men is comparable to that of overweight black men and women as well as white men and women. These data provide the first microneurographic evidence for tonic central sympathetic overactivity in blacks, both adiposity-related sympathetic overactivity in black women and adiposity-independent sympathetic overactivity in black men.
A basic gesture and motion format for virtual reality multisensory applications

The question of encoding movements such as those produced by human gestures may become central in the coming years, given the growing importance of movement data exchanges between heterogeneous systems and applications (musical applications, 3D motion control, virtual reality interaction, etc.). For the past 20 years, various formats have been proposed for encoding movement, especially gestures. Though, these formats, at different degrees, were designed in the context of quite specific applications (character animation, motion capture, musical gesture, biomechanical concerns .). The article introduce a new file format, called GMS (for 'Gesture and Motion Signal'), with the aim of being more low-level and generic, by defining the minimal features a format carrying movement/gesture information needs, rather than by gathering all the information generally given by the existing formats. The article argues that, given its growing presence in virtual reality situations, the "gesture signal" itself must be encoded, and that a specific format is needed. The proposed format features the inner properties of such signals: dimensionality, structural features, types of variables, and spatial and temporal properties. The article first reviews the various situations with multisensory virtual objects in which gesture controls intervene. The proposed format is then deduced, as a mean to encode such versatile and variable "gestural and animated scene".
High-Precision Guidance of Ablation Catheters to Arrhythmic Sites using Electrocardiographic Signals

Hemodynamically unstable ventricular arrhythmias are frequently untreatable with radio-frequency ablation due to the difficulty of rapidly and accurately localizing the site of origin of an arrhythmia with current technologies. We demonstrate a new catheter guidance method that will direct the tip of an ablation catheter to the site of origin of an arrhythmia and reduce the time needed to locate the site such that a patient need only be maintained in the arrhythmia for a few beats. The algorithm, based on a single-equivalent moving dipole (SEMD) model, is used to identify the bioelectric dipole corresponding to a site of origin of an arrhythmia. If a current dipole is produced at the ablation catheter tip, the tip position may also be calculated using this algorithm, and the catheter can be guided towards the site of origin of the arrhythmia. We present a method to compensate for the effect of systematic non-idealities, such as boundary effects, on the accuracy of this algorithm. In simulations, this method is able to guide the catheter tip to within 1.5 mm of the arrhythmic site at any location within the model torso with almost 100% success and with a realistic number of movements of the ablation catheter. These results suggest that this method has great potential to direct radio-frequency ablation procedures, especially in the significant patient population that is currently untreatable
Dietary Habits and Stomach Cancer Risk in the JACC Study

BACKGROUND: Despite a declining incidence, stomach cancer is still a dominant cancer in Japan. The association between dietary habits and stomach cancer risk was investigated in a large prospective study in Japan. METHODS: Data were obtained using a self-administered questionnaire from 1988 through 1990. Food frequency questionnaire was used to evaluate the consumption of 33 selected food items. Proportional hazard model was used to determine the hazard ratios (HRs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of stomach cancer for different levels of the dietary intakes. RESULTS: A western style breakfast showed an inverse association with stomach cancer risk in males (HR=0.49, 95% CI: 0.35-0.70). Women who consumed liver three to four times per week and more than once per day had a significant increased risk, respectively (HR=2.02, 95% CI: 1.12-3.63, HR=3.16, 95% CI: 1.16-8.62 ). A clear dose-response relationship between the intake of liver and stomach cancer risk was observed. We found no association between stomach cancer mortality and the consumption of fruit such as mandarin orange, and vegetables such as carrots and spinach in both men and women. The consumption of high salt foods such as miso soup and pickles was also not significantly associated with the mortality of stomach cancer in both sexes. CONCLUSION: This prospective study suggested that a western-style breakfast is associated with a lower risk of stomach cancer, although some differences in the association were seen between men and women.
Scaling Overlapping Clustering

Identifying communities plays a central role in understanding the structure of large networks. As practitioners analyze progressively larger networks, it becomes increasingly important to understand the computational complexity of candidate algorithms. We examine the complexity of the link clustering algorithm (Ahn et al., 2010) for overlapping community detection. We provide new, tight bounds for the original implementation and propose modifications to reduce algorithmic complexity. These new bounds are a function of the number of wedges in the graph. Additionally, we demonstrate that for several community detection algorithms, wedges predict runtime better than commonly cited graph features. We conclude by proposing a method to reduce the wedges in a graph by removing high-degree vertices from the network, identifying communities with an optimized version of link clustering, and heuristically matching communities with the removed vertices in post-processing. We empirically demonstrate a large reduction in processing time on several common datasets.
Serum Cholesterol Reduction by Feeding a High-Cholesterol Diet Containing a Lower-Molecular-Weight Polyphenol Fraction from Peanut Skin

Feeding a high-cholesterol diet with a water-soluble peanut skin polyphenol fraction to rats reduced their plasma cholesterol level, with an increase in fecal cholesterol excretion. The hypocholesterolemic effect was greater with the lower-molecular-weight rather than higher-molecular-weight polyphenol fraction. This effect was possibly due to some oligomeric polyphenols which reduced the solubility of dietary cholesterol in intestinal bile acid-emulsified micelles.
Stroke Patients’ Awareness of Risk and Readiness to Change Behaviors

Abstract Purpose: Behavior change is an important component of secondary stroke prevention. The transtheoretical model, which describes behavior change as occurring through a series of stages, may be a useful way of assessing patients’ readiness to change behavior. The model has been successfully applied to other chronic conditions and argues that people progressing “forward” through the stages are more likely to successfully change their behavior. The aim of this study was to describe stroke patients’ readiness to change behaviors for stroke-related risk factors using this model, in the absence of a behavior modification intervention. Method: Patients (n = 27) from an acute stroke ward of a major metropolitan hospital in Brisbane, Australia, were interviewed prior to and at 3 months following hospital discharge regarding their awareness of stroke risk factors and their readiness to change stroke risk–related behaviors. Results: At both points in time, 30% of patients could not spontaneously nominate one or more stroke risk factors. Despite a trend of “forward” progression in stages of change between the 2 interviews for behaviors relating to hypertension, heart disease, and high cholesterol, there were no statistically significant changes over time for any of the behaviors. Patients’ readiness to change stroke risk–related behaviors differed for each risk factor. Conclusion: Acknowledging that patients’ readiness to change may differ for each risk factor may promote more effective facilitation of stroke secondary prevention behaviors.
The PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization

Background The PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization was formed in 2016 as an international consortium of medical practitioners involved in pre-hospital treatment of patients with acute stroke. Aims PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization’s mission is to improve stroke outcomes by supporting research and advocacy for pre-hospital stroke treatment in Mobile Stroke Units. PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization will provide a platform to enhance collaborative research across the spectrum of acute stroke management in the pre-hospital setting. PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization will also facilitate the appropriate proliferation and distribution of Mobile Stroke Units by providing a forum for professional communication, resource for public education, and stimulus for government, industry, and philanthropic support. Summary of review In this “white paper”, we describe the evidence supporting pre-hospital stroke treatment, progress to date, practical issues such as application in various environments and staffing, planned research initiatives, and organizational structure. Conclusions PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization is not-for-profit, with membership open to anyone involved (or hoping to become involved) in pre-hospital stroke care. PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization has a Steering Committee comprised of members from Europe, U.S., Canada, Australia, and other regions having a Mobile Stroke Unit in operation. PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization convenes satellite meetings for membership at the International Stroke Conference and European Stroke Congress each year to address the PRE-hospital Stroke Treatment Organization mission. The first research collaborations agreed upon are to: (1) develop a list of common data elements to be collected by all Mobile Stroke Unit programs and entered into a common research database, and (2) develop a protocol for investigating the natural history of hyper-acute Intracerebral Hemorrhage.
An Analytical Framework for Device-to-Device Communication in Cellular Networks

This paper presents a framework that enables characterizing analytically the spectral efficiency achievable by device-to-device (D2D) communication integrated with a cellular network. This framework is based on a stochastic geometry formulation with a novel approach to the modeling of interference and with the added possibility of incorporating exclusion regions to protect cellular receivers from excessive interference from active D2D transmitters. To illustrate the potential of the framework, a number of examples are provided. These examples confirm the potential of D2D communication in situations of strong traffic locality, as well as the effectiveness of properly sized exclusion regions.