Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[Real-time elastography for quantitative assessment of liver fibrosis in a rat model].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the feasibility of real-time elastography for quantitative evaluation of liver fibrosis in a rat model. METHODS A total of 70 male Wistar rats were included in the group for dimethylnitrosamine (DMN)-induced liver injury, and 10 saline-injected rats were used as normal control. Hepatic injury was induced by a single intraperitoneal injection of DMN at a dose of 50 mg/kg of body weight. Nine or ten rats in the group with DNM injected and one or two rats in the normal control group were randomly selected and sacrificed at each of the following post-injection time: day 5, 7, 10, 14, 21, 24, and 28. And their livers were taken for pathology analysis. All the rats underwent real-time elastography before sacrificed in order to acquire area ratio of low-strain region (% AREA) and liver fibrosis index (LF index) which were compared with the stage of liver fibrosis and grade of necroinflammatory pathologically. By the different data, Spearman correlation analysis, rank-sum test or receiver operating characteristic curve was used. RESULTS Among 58 successfully modeled rats, there were nine, 13, 14 and 12 rats of S1, S2, S3 and S4 liver fibrosis on pathology, respectively, which were with or without mild necroinflammatory. The other 10 rats were found to be S0 with severe necroinflammatory. Values of LF index and % AREA both increased with liver fibrosis stage (P less than 0.05). There was certain correlation between LF index and liver fibrosis stage (r=0.643, P=0.000), so was % AREA and liver fibrosis stage (r=0.662, P=0.000). As for LF index, Areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (Az) was 0.943, 0.890, 0.743 and 0.821 for the diagnosis of hepatic fibrosis S1 or higher, S2 or higher, S3 or higher and S4, respectively; as for % AREA, they were 0.948, 0.883, 0.772 and 0.842, respectively. However, we found a significant difference for LF index or % AREA between S0 with and without severe inflammatory activity rats (P=0.005 and P=0.017). CONCLUSION Real-time elastography is available for quantitative assessment of liver fibrosis in rats induced by DMN, but severe inflammatory activity can affect its accuracy.
A 22 kW on-board charger for automotive applications based on a modular design

In this paper a 22 kW on-board charger for electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles is proposed. To achieve high quantities of devices, a fully modular circuit and control structure is chosen. The circuit arrangement consists of three identical phase units (7.4 kW), which are comprised of two identical (3.7 kW) base units. The proposed charger is implemented and has a volume of 11.1 liters and a weight of 12 kg. The experimental result indicates an efficiency of more than 94 percent over the full battery voltage range at an input voltage of 230 Vac. The output voltage for full load and best efficiency varies from 315-395 V.
Teamwork in Self-Organised Robot Colonies

Swarm robotics draws inspiration from decentralised, self-organising biological systems in general a nd from the collective behaviour of social insects in particular. I n social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher-order g roup or team entities, whose task solving capacities transcend t hose of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher-order entities. We report on an experimental study in which a team of physical robots perfor ms a foraging task. The robots are “identical” in hardware and control. They make little use of memory and take actions purely on the basis of local information. Our study advances the current state of the art in swarm robotics with respect to the number of real-world robots engaging in teamwork (up to 12 robots in the most challenging experime nt). To the best of our knowledge, in this paper we present the first self-organised system of robots that displays a dynamical h ierarchy of teamwork (with cooperation also occurring among higherorder entities). Our study shows that teamwork requires nei ther individual recognition nor differences between individuals. This result might also contribute to the ongoing debate on the rol e of these characteristics in the division of labour in social insects.
Grafting Neural Precursor Cells Promotes Functional Recovery in an SCA1 Mouse Model

The B05 transgenic SCA1 mice, expressing human ataxin-1 with an expanded polyglutamine tract in cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs), recapitulate many pathological and behavioral characteristics of the neurodegenerative disease spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1), including progressive ataxia and PC loss. We transplanted neural precursor cells (NPCs) derived from the subventricular zone of GFP-expressing adult mice into the cerebellar white matter of SCA1 mice when they showed absent (5 weeks), initial (13 weeks), and significant (24 weeks) PC loss. Only in mice with significant cell loss, grafted NPCs migrated into the cerebellar cortex. These animals showed improved motor skills compared with sham-treated controls. No grafted cell adopted the morphological and immunohistochemical characteristics of PCs, but the cerebellar cortex in NPC-grafted SCA1 mice had a significantly thicker molecular layer and more surviving PCs. Perforated patch-clamp recordings revealed a normalization of the PC basal membrane potential, which was abnormally depolarized in sham-treated animals. No significant increase in levels of several neurotrophic factors was observed, suggesting, along with morphological observation, that the neuroprotective effect of grafted NPCs was mediated by direct contact with the host PCs. We postulate that a similar neuroprotective effect of NPCs may be applicable to other cerebellar degenerative diseases.
Rab39a Binds Caspase-1 and Is Required for Caspase-1-dependent Interleukin-1β Secretion*

Interleukin-1β (IL-1β) is an important pro-inflammatory cytokine that is secreted by unconventional means in a caspase-1-dependent manner. Using a one-step immunoprecipitation approach to isolate endogenous caspase-1 from the monocytic THP1 cell line, we identified previously undescribed binding partners using mass spectrometry. One of the proteins identified was Rab39a, a member of the Rab GTPase family, a group of proteins that have important roles in protein trafficking and secretion. We confirmed by co-immunoprecipitation that Rab39a binds caspase-1. Knock down of Rab39a with small interfering RNA resulted in diminished levels of secreted IL-1β but had no effect on induction of pro-IL-1β mRNA by lipopolysaccharide. Rab39a contains a highly conserved caspase-1 cleavage site and was cleaved in the presence of recombinant caspase-1 or lipopolysaccharide. Finally, overexpression of Rab39a results in an increase in IL-1β secretion, and furthermore, overexpression of a Rab39a construct lacking the caspase-1 cleavage site leads to an additional increase in IL-1β secretion. Altogether, our findings show that Rab39a interacts with caspase-1 and suggest that Rab39a functions as a trafficking adaptor linking caspase-1 to IL-1β secretion.
Medicine And The Family: A Feminist Perspective

Medicine and the Family: A Feminist Perspective. Lucy M. Candib. New York: Basic Books. 1995. 360 pp. Hardcover ISBN 0-46502374-6. $38.00 cloth. In 35 years, I have never seen anyone in the medical profession take on the problems related to their interaction with families. Medicine and the Family is the first book I have encountered written by a physician who critiques the role of the medical profession regarding family health care. Thank goodness there are physicians who are females, feminists, and capable of putting into words the thoughts and feelings I have experienced for years as a woman and a nurse. The theory as well as the practice of medicine, says Lucy Candib, is male-gendered. "Medicine as an institution is rooted in sexism and racism and organized to the greater glory of capitalism. " She offers a "feminist understanding of the conceptual problems in contemporary medical practice and proposes a feminist view of clinical work. " She accomplishes what she set out to do: to write about "what is the matter with male medicine. " Candib describes her own physician father as a "physician-addict," and it was in the house of her father that she learned the magic and misery wrought by male medicine. Her early mission in life was to not keep up false appearances but to name the evils as she saw them. A product of the 1960s, she wondered if she could become a radical and a physician at the same time and bring change from within. What is wrong with male medicine? Women's experience in the health care system offers ample ground for criticism. Historically, women have had their symptoms blamed on their reproductive systems; they have undergone excessive, inappropriate, and experimental surgery; they have been overmedicated; and to this day they are underrepresented in scientific studies that have a bearing on their health. Candib shows how traditional male medicine continues to be an intellectual tradition that is oppressive to women. She also points out that medicine, transformed by feminism, requires a change in how society views persons and relationships. The first section of the book examines the bias in the theoretical groundings of modem medicine. The second section is devoted to a feminist reconsideration of the clinical relationship. In Chapters 1 and 2, "Infant and Child Development" and "Women's Adult Development," the author analyzes how medicine applies the template of male development to all of human development and assumes that male outlooks and experiences are representative of the viewpoints and experiences of women as well. Growth and development theory and common health care teachings reveal a preoccupation with separation and autonomy, key themes in male identity development. In this view, women's adult development appears as an aberration or truncated version of male development. Females primarily are viewed in terms of their family commitments and productive status. As an alternative, Candib begins to sketch another paradigm-that of "beings-in-relation. …
An Integrative Conceptual Framework for Assessing Personality and Personality Pathology

As a contribution to the ongoing debate over the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5, we present a framework for jointly conceptualizing personality and personality pathology. The key element is an explicit distinction between personality description (which is the realm of basic personality psychology) and personality evaluation (which is the realm of clinical personality psychology). Previous diagnostic systems did not acknowledge this crucial distinction. We created a sample diagnostic system, to illustrate how a practical application of our conceptual framework may look like. The system comprises two ingredients: First, a list of personality dispositions that may become problematic. These are described at a “basic level” of abstraction (i.e., the level at which patients and clinicians intuitively communicate about personality problems). Second, a list of negative consequences that are used to evaluate the extent to which a patient's personality pattern is “problematic. ” A sample of therapists used the system for describing actual patients and found it to be better than the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 and DSM–IV. Based on our conceptual deliberations, we analyze the DSM-5 proposal for personality and personality disorders. The proposal contains three different sets of “higher-order concepts” (personality traits, personality types, and levels of personality functioning). Only the first of these is sufficiently supported by empirical evidence, including analyses of our own set of personality dispositions.
Gender differences in alcohol treatment: an analysis of outcome from the COMBINE study.

BACKGROUND Relatively few studies have examined gender differences in the effectiveness of specific behavioral or pharmacologic treatment of alcohol dependence. The aim of this study is to assess whether there were gender differences in treatment outcomes for specific behavioral and medication treatments singly or in combination by conducting a secondary analysis of public access data from the national, multisite NIAAA-sponsored COMBINE study. METHODS The COMBINE study investigated alcohol treatment among 8 groups of patients (378 women, 848 men) who received medical management (MM) with 16 weeks of placebo, naltrexone (100 mg/day), acamprosate (3 g/day), or their combination with or without a specialist-delivered combined behavioral intervention. We examined efficacy measures separately for men and women, followed by an overall analysis that included gender and its interaction with treatment condition in the analyses. These analyses were performed to confirm whether the findings reported in the parent trial were also relevant to women, and to more closely examine secondary outcome variables that were not analyzed previously for gender effects. RESULTS Compared to men, women reported a later age of onset of alcohol dependence by approximately 3 years, were significantly less likely to have had previous alcohol treatment, and drank fewer drinks per drinking day. Otherwise, there were no baseline gender differences in drinking measures. Outcome analyses of 2 primary (percent days abstinent and time to first heavy drinking day) and 2 secondary (good clinical response and percent heavy drinking days) drinking measures yielded the same overall pattern in each gender as that observed in the parent COMBINE study report. That is, only the naltrexone by behavioral intervention interaction reached or approached significance in women as well as in men. There was a naltrexone main effect that was significant in both men and women in reduction in alcohol craving scores with naltrexone-treated subjects reporting lower craving than placebo-treated subjects. CONCLUSIONS This gender-focused analysis found that alcohol-dependent women responded to naltrexone with COMBINE's Medical Management, similar to the alcohol-dependent men, on a wide range of outcome measures. These results suggest that clinicians can feel comfortable prescribing naltrexone for alcohol dependence in both men and women. In this study, it is also notable that fewer women than men reported receiving any alcohol treatment prior to entry into the COMBINE study. Of note, women tend to go to primary health care more frequently than to specialty substance abuse programs for treatment, and so the benefit we confirm for women of the naltrexone and MM combination has practical implications for treating alcohol-dependent women.
Unvoiced Landmark Detection for Segment-based Mandarin Continuous Speech Recognition

This paper presents an attempt to introduce unvoiced landmarks into statistical continuous speech recognition system. The unvoiced landmark detection algorithm proposed here locates the points in speech where the vocal folds stop or begin freely vibrating. In our experiments, 87.47% of stops and 98.94% of fricatives are segmented from speech after the unvoiced landmark detection, with a very low insertion error rate of 0.13%. Then these landmarks are incorporated into decoding process of segment model based recognizer as search beginning indicators. The effectiveness of landmark detection algorithm is verified in our landmark-guided recognition system with 240 sentences in 863Test database.
Analysis of Structural Equation Model for the Student Pleasure Travel Market: Motivation, Involvement, Satisfaction, and Destination Loyalty

Greater understanding of the model that plays a role in attracting certain visitor segments thus allows travel businesses to develop marketing strategies. This research analyzes an empirical model including push motivations, pull motivations, cognitive involvement, affective involvement, satisfaction, and loyalty to students' top domestic and international destinations. Results suggest push motivations are a good predictor of pull motivations, which in turn are considered a good predictor of cognitive involvement. Cognitive involvement is a good predictor of both affective involvement and satisfaction. Affective involvement is a good predictor of satisfaction. This study also confirms the significant association of satisfaction with destination loyalty. Hence, the proposed model provides a good quality of theoretical framework to positively predict travel demand toward domestic and international destinations.
How to make climate change research relevant for Indigenous communities in Torres Strait, Australia

Several Torres Strait communities have significant infrastructure and sacred sites located only a few metres above sea level. As a consequence, these areas are vulnerable to erosion due to the projected increase in storm surge intensity caused by climate change. Common sense suggests that Islanders would welcome new scientific research about how climate change might affect them, in order to understand the significance of these impacts and the timeframes involved. However, one leader has taken a seemingly counterintuitive stance, and has refused to let new climate research occur. We explore why this position was taken, and the implications of this decision for ongoing scientific research. In order to carry out this analysis, we provide a contextual background by assessing Islanders' recent experience with scientific researchers, and the response of policy-makers to it. We find that despite a clearly documented problem with “top-down” decision-making, this process remains. In this instance, we find that there is a systemic lack of collaboration with Islanders to allow them to prioritise their concerns, and a lack of adequate resources to allow them to build their resilience to climate impacts. We conclude that only through a genuine collaborative approach to climate adaptation can activities be properly developed, prioritised and undertaken.
Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism

Wirth's (1938) theory of urban life has been eclipsed in recent years by a perspective that denies the importance of ecological factors. This view, though more accurate than Wirth's, fails to account for the pervasive "unconventionality" (deviance, invention, etc.) of urban life. A model is presented here to remedy that problem; it reintroduces the variable of size but in a manner distinct from Writh's. Population concentration produces a diversityof subcultures, strengthens them, and fosters diffusion among them. Together, these three mediating variables account for urban unconventionality. The four propositions of the theory and three others deducible from it are examined against existing research.
How to Further the Divide Between Evolutionary and Nonevolutionary Thinkers

(MIT Press) in which they invoke data and theory from evolutionary psychology and biology to articulate the causes of rape and to dismantle the socially constructed myths that surround the topic. Unsurprisingly, their work was met with mixed reviews; it was applauded by most evolutionary-minded thinkers (e.g., the dust jacket includes endorsements from S. Pinker, M. Ghiglieri, D. Geary, L. Betzig, and B. Low) and denounced by the rest. Added to
Testing olfaction in a clinical setting.

Assessment of olfactory functioning at the CCCRC entails a threshold test and an odor identification test that contains eight everyday items. A performance average on the two tests yields a composite score on a scale from 0 (anosmia) to 7 (normosmia). The performance of normal volunteers is stable over most of an individual's life span, but decreases for persons over the age of 65 years. Approximately half the patients with olfactory complaints display anosmia, and the other half have hyposmia. The distribution of scores, however, varies with etiologic category, emplified by the fact that patients with nasal/sinus disease display anosmia more frequently than hyposmia. The tests can determine cause (e.g., improvement of score with corticosteroid treatment in cases of nasal/sinus disease) and can also assess degree of improvement with treatment, such as sinus operation.
THE SLOAN BRIGHT ARCS SURVEY: SIX STRONGLY LENSED GALAXIES AT z = 0.4–1.4

We present new results of our program to systematically search for strongly lensed galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging data. In this study six strong lens systems are presented which we have confirmed with follow-up spectroscopy and imaging using the 3.5 m telescope at the Apache Point Observatory. Preliminary mass models indicate that the lenses are group-scale systems with velocity dispersions ranging from 464 to 882 km s-1 at z = 0.17 − 0.45 which are strongly lensing source galaxies at z = 0.4 − 1.4. Galaxy groups are a relatively new mass scale just beginning to be probed with strong lensing. Our sample of lenses roughly doubles the confirmed number of group-scale lenses in the SDSS and complements ongoing strong lens searches in other imaging surveys. As our arcs were discovered in the SDSS imaging data they are all bright (r ≲ 22), making them ideally suited for detailed follow-up studies.
Glucose and insulin abnormalities relate to functional capacity in patients with congestive heart failure.

AIMS In addition to diabetes mellitus, less severe abnormalities of glucose and insulin metabolism may be related to functional status in patients with heart failure. We examined the relationship of hyperglycaemia (> or =6.1 mmol. l(-1)) and hyperinsulinaemia (> or =11.2 mU. l(-1)) to functional status and cardiac function in patients with heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS Fasting plasma glucose and insulin levels were obtained in 663 heart failure patients. The average left ventricular ejection fraction was 0.28+/-0.07, 63% were in New York Heart Association Functional Class (NYHA-FC) I/II and 37% were in NYHA-FC III/IV. Twenty seven percent had diabetes mellitus, but an additional 8% had undiagnosed diabetes mellitus (glucose > or =7 mmol. l(-1)) and 9% had glucose levels between 6.1 and 7 mmol. l(-1), so that a total of 43% (287) of patients had elevated glucose levels (> or =6.1 mmol. l(-1)). In general, more diabetic patients had NYHA-FC III/IV symptoms, shorter 6 min walk distances, but similar left ventricular ejection fractions compared to non-diabetic patients. The non-diabetic patients in NYHA-FC III/IV had higher glucose and insulin levels than patients in NYHA-FC I/II (6.3+/-0.2 vs 5.6+/-0.1 mmol. l(-1), P<0.001 and 19.6+/-2.3 vs 10. 2+/-0.6 mU. l(-1), P<0.001). Non-diabetic patients with elevated glucose levels had shorter 6 min walk distances compared to those with normal glucose levels (368.2+/-8 m vs 389.+/-4 m, P=0.02), however, left ventricular ejection fraction was similar. CONCLUSION Glucose abnormalities are extremely common in heart failure patients (43% of patients). Diabetes mellitus and hyperglycaemia or hyperlinsulinaemia in non-diabetic patients were related to worse symptomatic status but not worsening left ventricular ejection fraction compared to patients with normal glucose and insulin levels.