Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Postprandial remnant lipoproteins as targets for the prevention of atherosclerosis

Purpose of review Oxidized low-density lipoprotein (Ox-LDL) and chylomicron remnants were previously proposed as the most atherogenic lipoproteins for the causal lipoproteins of atherosclerosis. However, there are still controversies on these hypothesizes. Therefore, we have proposed a new hypothesis based on our recent findings of remnant lipoproteins (RLPs) in postprandial plasma. Recent findings Plasma RLP-C and RLP-TG increased significantly after fat load. More than 80% of the increased triglycerides after fat load consisted of the triglycerides in RLP, which contained greater amount of apoB100 than apoB48 particles as mostly very low density lipoproteins (VLDL) remnants. The majority of lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in plasma was found in RLP as RLP-LPL complex, which is released into circulation after hydrolysis. LPL activity and concentration in plasma did not increase after food intake associated with the insufficient hydrolysis of chylomicrons and VLDL and resulted in the significant increase of RLP-TG. Plasma LPL was inversely correlated with RLP particle size and number. Summary VLDL remnants have been shown as the major atherogenic lipoproteins in postprandial plasma associated with LPL activity as the targets for prevention of atherosclerosis. We also proposed a new definition of RLPs, ‘LPL bound TG-rich lipoproteins’ based on the findings of RLP-LPL complex.
Subquadratic Kernels for Implicit 3-Hitting Set and 3-Set Packing Problems

We consider four well-studied NP-complete packing/covering problems on graphs: Feedback Vertex Set in Tournaments (FVST), Cluster Vertex Deletion (CVD), Triangle Packing in Tournaments (TPT) and Induced P3-Packing. For these four problems, kernels with O(k2) vertices have been known for a long time. In fact, such kernels can be obtained by interpreting these problems as finding either a packing of k pairwise disjoint sets of size 3 (3-Set Packing) or a hitting set of size at most k for a family of sets of size at most 3 (3-Hitting Set). In this article, we give the first kernels for FVST, CVD, TPT, and Induced P3-Packing with a subquadratic number of vertices. Specifically, we obtain the following results. • FVST admits a kernel with O(k3/2) vertices. • CVD admits a kernel with O(k5/3) vertices. • TPT admits a kernel with O(k3/2) vertices. • Induced P3-Packing admits a kernel with O(k5/3) vertices. Our results resolve an open problem from WorKer 2010 on the existence of kernels with O(k2−ε) vertices for FVST and CVD. All of our results are based on novel uses of old and new “expansion lemmas” and a weak form of crown decomposition where (i) almost all of the head is used by the solution (as opposed to all), (ii) almost none of the crown is used by the solution (as opposed to none), and (iii) if H is removed from G, then there is almost no interaction between the head and the rest (as opposed to no interaction at all).
Image filtering by reduced kernels exploiting kernel structure and focal-plane averaging

Incorporating multi-resolution capabilities into imagers renders additional power saving mechanisms in the subsequent image processing. In this paper, we show how, by exploiting a certain mask structure, 3 × 3 kernels can be reduced to 2 × 2 kernels if charge redistribution is provided at the focal plane of the imaging device. More precisely, by averaging and shifting a half-resolution pixel grid, we will have a pre-processed image, subsampled by a factor of 2 on each dimension, that can be filtered with a mask of a reduced size. Very useful image filtering kernels, like a 3 × 3 Gaussian kernel for image smoothing, or the well-known Sobel operators, fall into this category of reducible kernels. Operating onto the pre-processed image with one of these reduced kernels represents a smaller number of operations per pixel than realizing all the multiply-accumulate operations needed to apply a 3 × 3 kernel. Memory accesses are reduced in the same fraction. Concerning the difficulties of providing this pre-processed image representation, we propose a methodology for obtaining it at a very low power cost. It requires the implementation of user definable image subdivision and subsampling at the focal plane. Experimental results are given, obtained from measurements on a CMOS imager prototype chip incorporating these multi-resolution capabilities.
Malicious-Secure Private Set Intersection via Dual Execution

Private set intersection (PSI) allows two parties, who each hold a set of items, to compute the intersection of those sets without revealing anything about other items. Recent advances in PSI have significantly improved its performance for the case of semi-honest security, making semi-honest PSI a practical alternative to insecure methods for computing intersections. However, the semi-honest security model is not always a good fit for real-world problems. In this work we introduce a new PSI protocol that is secure in the presence of malicious adversaries. Our protocol is based entirely on fast symmetric-key primitives and inherits important techniques from state-of-the-art protocols in the semi-honest setting. Our novel technique to strengthen the protocol for malicious adversaries is inspired by the dual execution technique of Mohassel & Franklin (PKC 2006). Our protocol is optimized for the random-oracle model, but can also be realized (with a performance penalty) in the standard model. We demonstrate our protocol's practicality with a prototype implementation. To securely compute the intersection of two sets of size 220 requires only 13 seconds with our protocol, which is ~12x faster than the previous best malicious-secure protocol (Rindal & Rosulek, Eurocrypt 2017), and only 3x slower than the best semi-honest protocol (Kolesnikov et al., CCS 2016).
Using tertiary structure for the computation of highly accurate multiple RNA alignments with the SARA-Coffee package

MOTIVATION Aligning RNAs is useful to search for homologous genes, study evolutionary relationships, detect conserved regions and identify any patterns that may be of biological relevance. Poor levels of conservation among homologs, however, make it difficult to compare RNA sequences, even when considering closely evolutionary related sequences. RESULTS We describe SARA-Coffee, a tertiary structure-based multiple RNA aligner, which has been validated using BRAliDARTS, a new benchmark framework designed for evaluating tertiary structure-based multiple RNA aligners. We provide two methods to measure the capacity of alignments to match corresponding secondary and tertiary structure features. On this benchmark, SARA-Coffee outperforms both regular aligners and those using secondary structure information. Furthermore, we show that on sequences in which <60% of the nucleotides form base pairs, primary sequence methods usually perform better than secondary-structure aware aligners. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The package and the datasets are available from http://www.tcoffee. org/Projects/saracoffee and http://structure.biofold. org/sara/.
Extending Workers' Attention Span Through Dummy Events

This paper studies a new paradigm for improving the attention span of workers in tasks that heavily rely on user's attention to the occurrence of rare events. Such tasks are highly common, ranging from crime monitoring to controlling autonomous complex machines, and many of them are ideal for crowdsourcing. The underlying idea in our approach is to dynamically augment the task with some dummy (artificial) events at different times throughout the task, rewarding the worker upon identifying and reporting them. This, as an alternative to the traditional approach of exclusively relying on rewarding the worker for successfully identifying the event of interest itself. We propose three methods for timing the dummy events throughout the task. Two of these methods are static and determine the timing of the dummy events at random or uniformly throughout the task. The third method is dynamic and uses the identification (or misidentification) of dummy events as a signal for the worker's attention to the task, adjusting the rate of dummy events generation accordingly. We use extensive experimentation to compare the methods with the traditional approach of inducing attention through rewarding the identification of the event of interest and within the three. The analysis of the results indicates that with the use of dummy events a substantially more favorable tradeoff between the detection (of the event of interest) probability and the expected expense can be achieved, and that among the three proposed method the one that decides on dummy events on the fly is (by far) the best.
Diagnostic accuracy of the Xpert® MTB/RIF cycle threshold level to predict smear positivity: a meta-analysis.

SETTING Xpert® MTB/RIF is the most widely used molecular assay for rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB). The number of polymerase chain reaction cycles after which detectable product is generated (cycle threshold value, CT) correlates with the bacillary burden.OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between Xpert CT values and smear status through a systematic review and individual-level data meta-analysis. DESIGN Studies on the association between CT values and smear status were included in a descriptive systematic review. Authors of studies including smear, culture and Xpert results were asked for individual-level data, and receiver operating characteristic curves were calculated. RESULTS Of 918 citations, 10 were included in the descriptive systematic review. Fifteen data sets from studies potentially relevant for individual-level data meta-analysis provided individual-level data (7511 samples from 4447 patients); 1212 patients had positive Xpert results for at least one respiratory sample (1859 samples overall). ROC analysis revealed an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.85 (95%CI 0.82-0.87). Cut-off CT values of 27.7 and 31.8 yielded sensitivities of 85% (95%CI 83-87) and 95% (95%CI 94-96) and specificities of 67% (95%CI 66-77) and 35% (95%CI 30-41) for smear-positive samples. CONCLUSION Xpert CT values and smear status were strongly associated. However, diagnostic accuracy at set cut-off CT values of 27.7 or 31.8 would not replace smear microscopy. How CT values compare with smear microscopy in predicting infectiousness remains to be seen.
Linkage to HIV care following diagnosis in the WHO European Region: A systematic review and meta-analysis, 2006-2017

Background Timely linkage to care after HIV diagnosis is crucial as delayed access can result in poor patient outcomes. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesise the evidence to achieve a better understanding of what proportion of patients are linked to care and what factors impact linkage. Methods Systematic searches were run in six databases up to the end of February 2017. The grey literature was also reviewed. Inclusion criteria were: sample size ≥50 people (aged ≥15), from the WHO European Region, published 2006–2017 and in English. Linkage to care was defined as a patient seen for HIV care after diagnosis. Study selection, data extraction and quality assurance were performed by two independent reviewers. Random-effects meta-analysis was carried out to summarise linkage to care within three months of diagnosis. Results Twenty-four studies were included; 22 presented linkage to care data and seven examined factors for linkage. Linkage among 89,006 people in 19 countries was captured. Meta-analysis, restricted to 12 studies and measuring prompt linkage within three months, gave a pooled estimate of 85% (95% CI: 75%-93%). Prompt linkage was higher in studies including only people in care (94%; 95% CI: 91%-97%) than in those of all new diagnoses (71%; 95% CI: 50%-87%). Heterogeneity was high across and within strata (>99%). Factors associated with delaying or not linking to care included: acquiring HIV through heterosexual contact/injecting drug use, younger age at diagnosis, lower levels of education, feeling well at diagnosis and diagnosis outside an STI clinic. Conclusion Overall, linkage to care was high, though estimates were lower in studies with a high proportion of people who inject drugs. The high heterogeneity between studies made it challenging to synthesise findings. Studies should adopt a standardised definition with a three month cut-off to measure prompt linkage to care to ensure comparability.
Inactivation kinetics of food-borne pathogens subjected to thermal treatments: a review

Abstract Thermal processing technologies are safe and easy to control methods without leaving residues, and could be used to inactivate food-borne pathogens, ensure food quality and provide the food with sufficient stability during storage. Establishing inactivation kinetics of food-borne pathogens is essential in developing effective pasteurisation protocols without damaging food quality. This study presents a comprehensive review of recent progresses in inactivation kinetics of food-borne pathogens. It covers theoretical bases and experimental methods for developing thermal inactivation kinetics of food-borne pathogens and making comparisons and applications of the common thermal death kinetic models. Finally, it proposes possible recommendations on the future research directions of establishing inactivation kinetic models for food-borne pathogens in thermal processing.
Cochlear implant – state of the art

Cochlear implants are the treatment of choice for auditory rehabilitation of patients with sensory deafness. They restore the missing function of inner hair cells by transforming the acoustic signal into electrical stimuli for activation of auditory nerve fibers. Due to the very fast technology development, cochlear implants provide open-set speech understanding in the majority of patients including the use of the telephone. Children can achieve a near to normal speech and language development provided their deafness is detected early after onset and implantation is performed quickly thereafter. The diagnostic procedure as well as the surgical technique have been standardized and can be adapted to the individual anatomical and physiological needs both in children and adults. Special cases such as cochlear obliteration might require special measures and re-implantation, which can be done in most cases in a straight forward way. Technology upgrades count for better performance. Future developments will focus on better electrode-nerve interfaces by improving electrode technology. An increased number of electrical contacts as well as the biological treatment with regeneration of the dendrites growing onto the electrode will increase the number of electrical channels. This will give room for improved speech coding strategies in order to create the bionic ear, i.e. to restore the process of natural hearing by means of technology. The robot-assisted surgery will allow for high precision surgery and reliable hearing preservation. Biological therapies will support the bionic ear. Methods are bio-hybrid electrodes, which are coded by stem cells transplanted into the inner ear to enhance auto-production of neurotrophins. Local drug delivery will focus on suppression of trauma reaction and local regeneration. Gene therapy by nanoparticles will hopefully lead to the preservation of residual hearing in patients being affected by genetic hearing loss. Overall the cochlear implant is a very powerful tool to rehabilitate patients with sensory deafness. More than 1 million of candidates in Germany today could benefit from this high technology auditory implant. Only 50,000 are implanted so far. In the future, the procedure can be done under local anesthesia, will be minimally invasive and straight forward. Hearing preservation will be routine.
Investigation of the mechanism of chatter formation during metal cutting process

Experiments have been carried out to determine the physical nature and characteristics of the unstability of metal cutting process for different pairs of work and tool materials and their influence on chatter formation. Also the influence of the characteristics of various parameters of the elastic system of machine-tools and conditions of machining on chatter have been considered. Experimental results enabled the discovery of the mechanism of stable cutting conditions.
ENDOCRINE TREATMENT OF GENDER-DYSPHORIC/GENDER-INCONGRUENT PERSONS: AN ENDOCRINE SOCIETY CLINICAL PRACTICE GUIDELINE.

Transgender Health. Objective: To update the “ Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline, ” published by the Endocrine Society in 2009. Participants: The participants include an Endocrine Society – appointed task force of nine experts, a methodologist, and a medical writer. Evidence: This evidence-based guideline was developed using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation approach to describe the strength of recommendations and the quality of evidence. The task force commissioned two systematic reviews and used the best available evidence from other published systematic reviews and individual studies. Consensus Process: Group meetings, use in transgender individuals on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes. The review identified 29 eligible studies at moderate risk of bias. In transgender males (female to male), sex steroid therapy was associated with a statistically significant increase in serum triglycerides and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. High-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels decreased significantly across all follow-up time periods. In transgender females (male to female), serum triglycerides were significantly higher without any changes in other parameters. Few myocardial infarction, stroke, venous thromboembolism (VTE), and death events were reported. These events were more frequent in transgender females. However, the quality of the evidence was low. The second review summarized the available evidence regarding the effect of sex steroids on bone health in transgender individuals and identified 13 studies. In transgender males, there was no statistically significant difference in the lumbar spine, femoral neck, or total hip BMD at 12 and 24 months compared with baseline values before initiating masculinizing hormone therapy. In transgender females, there was a statistically significant increase in lumbar spine BMD at 12 months and 24 months compared with baseline values before initiation of feminizing hormone therapy. There was minimal information on fracture rates. The quality of evidence was also low.
Pulmonary Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) and Inflammatory Lung Disease

ABSTRACT In response to infectious and, in some instances, noninfectious insults, the affected tissues/cells of the host undergo inflammation. However, uncontrolled inflammation could be detrimental to the host, resulting in inflammatory disease, such as inflammatory lung disease. Although the etiology of the disease is well defined, the underling pathogenesis is still incompletely understood. The renin–angiotensin system (RAS), one of the primary cardiovascular regulatory systems, has been proposed to be involved in the pathogenesis of inflammatory lung disease. In particular, the RAS has been implicated as advances in the understanding of the multifunctionality of individual components of the system have been made, and by the fact that the RAS acts not only systemically, but also locally in a variety of tissues, including the lung. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), a relatively new member of the RAS, has drawn extensive attention since 2003, because of the findings that ACE2 is the receptor for SARS Corona virus and that maintenance of normal ACE2 levels in the lung is beneficial for the host to combat inflammatory lung disease. Nevertheless, the mechanism through which ACE2 plays a role in inflammatory lung disease has not been clearly identified. In an attempt to summarize current literature findings and progress made in uncovering the role of ACE2 in inflammatory lung disease, this review will focus on recent studies examining pulmonary ACE2 biology, its roles in inflammatory lung disease pathogenesis and possible underlying mechanisms. Finally, we will discuss pulmonary ACE2 as a potential therapeutic target for inflammatory lung disease.
Motives for Prescription Stimulant Misuse in a College Sample: Characteristics of Users, Perception of Risk, and Consequences of Use

ABSTRACT Background: Prescription stimulant misuse is increasingly prevalent in college populations, with some misuse estimates over 40%. Stimulant use is associated with a variety of health and psychological problems. Motives for use may provide insight into problematic trajectories. Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate characteristics of users and motives for prescription stimulant misuse in a large southeastern university. Method: College students reported on prescription stimulant use, motives for use, consequences associated with use, perceptions of risk, and social norms. We specifically elicited participation from prescription stimulant misusers. Of the 199 participants, 86 reported misusing prescription stimulants in the past 60 days. We assessed motives for use, rates of substance use, risk perception, normative beliefs, and consequences associated with use. We evaluated differences between misusers and non-misusers, differentiate motives subscales, and identify relationships between motives subscales, rates of use, and consequences. Results: Misusers used more alcohol and other drugs, held different normative beliefs regarding stimulants, and had lower risk perceptions than non-misusers. We evaluated seven motives subscales among misusers: coping, social, enhancement, expansion, conformity, academic performance, and weight loss. Enhancement, social, weight loss, and expansion scales were correlated with negative consequences, while social motives were correlated with use. Results from regression analyses revealed positive associations between weight and expansion with negative consequences, and a negative association between conformity and consequences. Conclusions/Importance:Motives for prescription stimulant use and user characteristics may provide insight into prevention and treatment. Continued work is needed to refine item content and replicate findings.
Analysis and Design of a Type of Retractable Roof Structure

This paper is concerned with the analysis and design of radially retractable roof structures (RRS). This new type of structure consists of a foldable lattice of angulated beams connected by scissor hinges to which cover plates or membranes are attached. However, the current design has two obvious shortcomings. First of all, there is a lack of a convenient way to keep all the pivots of an angulated beam within the boundary of its corresponding RRS plate. Secondly, the stiffness of the RRS is too small to resist external loads, which limits the practical application of this structure. This paper aims to tackle these two problems. Based on the analytical formulae given by previous studies, we propose a corresponding design method for the RRS plates and thus the designers can easily figure out plates which fit perfectly together for an RRS. To increase the stiffness of the RRS, a few support conditions for the RRS are discussed and then the structural behavior of numerical simulated models under different support conditions is investigated. Moreover, some measures to increase the stiffness of the RRS are proposed, providing additional choice to the designers. Physical model is built to demonstrate the design concepts and show that the geometrical and mechanical analysis is correct.