Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ERCC1 and telomere status in breast tumours treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy and their association with patient prognosis

Dysfunctional telomeres and DNA damage repair (DDR) play important roles in cancer progression. Studies have reported correlations between these factors and tumour aggressiveness and clinical outcome in breast cancer. We studied the characteristics of telomeres and expression of ERCC1, a protein involved in a number of DNA repair pathways and in telomere homeostasis, to assess their prognostic value, alone or in combination, in 90 residual breast tumours after treatment with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NCT). ERCC1 status was investigated at different molecular levels (protein and gene expression and gene copy‐number variations) by immunohistochemistry, qRT‐PCR and quantitative multiplex fluorescent‐PCR (QMF‐PCR). A comprehensive analysis of telomere characteristics was performed using qPCR for telomere length and qRT‐PCR for telomerase (hTERT), tankyrase 1 (TNKS) and shelterin complex (TRF1, TRF2, POT1, TPP1, RAP1 and TIN2) gene expression. Short telomeres, high hTERT and TNKS expression and low ERCC1 protein expression were independently associated with worse survival outcome. Interestingly, ERCC1 gains and losses correlated with worse disease‐free (p = 0.026) and overall (p = 0.043) survival as compared to survival of patients with normal gene copy‐numbers. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of all ERCC1 and telomere parameters identified four subgroups with distinct prognosis. In particular, a cluster combining low ERCC1, ERCC1 gene alterations, dysfunctional telomeres and high hTERT and a cluster with high TNKS and shelterin expression correlated with poor disease‐free (HR= 5.41, p= 0.0044) and overall survival (HR= 6.01, p= 0.0023) irrespective of tumour stage and grade. This comprehensive study demonstrates that telomere dysfunction and DDR can contribute synergistically to tumour progression and chemoresistance. These parameters are predictors of clinical outcome in breast cancer patients treated with NCT and could be useful clinically as prognostic biomarkers to tailor adjuvant chemotherapy post‐NCT.
Clinical Impact and Cost-Effectiveness of Expanded Voluntary HIV Testing in India

Background Despite expanding access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), most of the estimated 2.3 to 2.5 million HIV-infected individuals in India remain undiagnosed. The questions of whom to test for HIV and at what frequency remain unclear. Methods We used a simulation model of HIV testing and treatment to examine alternative HIV screening strategies: 1) current practice, 2) one-time, 3) every five years, and 4) annually; and we applied these strategies to three population scenarios: 1) the general Indian population (“national population”), i.e. base case (HIV prevalence 0.29%; incidence 0.032/100 person-years [PY]); 2) high-prevalence districts (HIV prevalence 0.8%; incidence 0.088/100 PY), and 3) high-risk groups (HIV prevalence 5.0%; incidence 0.552/100 PY). Cohort characteristics reflected Indians reporting for HIV testing, with a median age of 35 years, 66% men, and a mean CD4 count of 305 cells/µl. The cost of a rapid HIV test was $3.33. Outcomes included life expectancy, HIV-related direct medical costs, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs), and secondary transmission benefits. The threshold for “cost-effective” was defined as 3x the annual per capita GDP of India ($3,900/year of life saved [YLS]), or for “very cost-effective” was <1x the annual per capita GDP ($1,300/YLS). Results Compared to current practice, one-time screening was very cost-effective in the national population (ICER: $1,100/YLS), high-prevalence districts (ICER: $800/YLS), and high-risk groups (ICER: $800/YLS). Screening every five years in the national population (ICER: $1,900/YLS) and annual screening in high-prevalence districts (ICER: $1,900/YLS) and high-risk groups (ICER: $1,800/YLS) were also cost-effective. Results were most sensitive to costs of care and linkage-to-care. Conclusions In India, voluntary HIV screening of the national population every five years offers substantial clinical benefit and is cost-effective. Annual screening is cost-effective among high-risk groups and in high-prevalence districts nationally. Routine HIV screening in India should be implemented.
Distributed least mean squares strategies for sparsity-aware estimation over Gaussian Markov random fields

In this paper we propose distributed strategies for the estimation of sparse vectors over adaptive networks. The measurements collected at different nodes are assumed to be spatially correlated and distributed according to a Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) model. We derive optimal sparsity-aware algorithms that incorporate prior information about the statistical dependency among observations. Simulation results show the potential advantages of the proposed strategies for online recovery of sparse vectors.
Pre-reduction Graph Products: Hardnesses of Properly Learning DFAs and Approximating EDP on DAGs

The study of graph products is a major research topic and typically concerns the term f(G * H), e.g., to show that f(G * H) = f(G)f(H). In this paper, we study graph products in a non-standard form f(R[G * H]) where R is a “reduction”, a transformation of any graph into an instance of an intended optimization problem. We resolve some open problems as applications. The first problem is minimum consistent deterministic finite automaton (DFA). We show a tight n1-ϵ approximation hardness, improving the n1/14-ϵ hardness of [Pitt and Warmuth, STOC 1989 and JACM 1993], where n is the sample size. (In fact, we also give improved hardnesses for the case of acyclic DFA and NFA.) Due to Board and Pitt [Theoretical Computer Science 1992], this implies the hardness of properly learning DFAs assuming NP ≠ RP (the weakest possible assumption). This affirmatively answers an open problem raised 25 years ago in the paper of Pitt and Warmuth and the survey of Pitt [All 1989]. Prior to our results, this hardness only follows from the stronger hardness of improperly learning DFAs, which requires stronger assumptions, i.e., either a cryptographic or an average case complexity assumption [Kearns and Valiant STOC 1989 and J. ACM 1994; Daniely et al. STOC 2014]. The second problem is edge-disjoint paths (EDP) on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). This problem admits an O(√n)-approximation algorithm [Chekuri, Khanna, and Shepherd, Theory of Computing 2006] and a matching Ω(√n) integrality gap, but so far only an n1/26-ϵ hardness factor is known [Chuzhoy et al., STOC 2007]. (n denotes the number of vertices.) Our techniques give a tight n1/2-ϵ hardness for EDP on DAGs, thus resolving its approximability status. As by-products of our techniques: (i) We give a tight hardness of packing vertex-disjoint k-cycles for large k, complimenting [Guruswami and Lee, ECCC 2014] and matching [Krivelevich et al., SODA 2005 and ACM Transactions on Algorithms 2007]. (ii) We give an alternative (and perhaps simpler) proof for the hardness of properly learning DNF, CNF and intersection of halfspaces [Alekhnovich et al., FOCS 2004 and J. Comput.Syst. Sci. 2008]. Our new concept reduces the task of proving hardnesses to merely analyzing graph product inequalities, which are often as simple as textbook exercises. This concept was inspired by, and can be viewed as a generalization of, the graph product subadditivity technique we previously introduced in SODA 2013. This more general concept might be useful in proving other hardness results as well.
Linguistic Society of America A Practical Introduction to Phonetics

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Effects of epinephrine on the cardiorespiratory response to hypoxia in sedated newborn piglets with intact and denervated carotid bodies.

In order to evaluate the effects of epinephrine on the cardiorespiratory response to hypoxia in the neonate, 35 sedated, spontaneously breathing newborn piglets (mean +/- SD, age 5 +/- 0.8 days; weight 1.6 +/- 0.3 kg) with intact (ICB) or denervated (DCB) carotid bodies were studied before and during an infusion of saline or epinephrine (2.2 +/- 1.0 microgram/kg/min, i.v.). Cardiorespiratory measurements were performed while the animals breathed room air and after 10 min of hypoxia (FiO2 0.10) during saline or epinephrine infusion. During epinephrine infusion, the ICB animals had a sustained increase in minute ventilation during hypoxia while the control group showed a biphasic ventilatory response with depression during sustained hypoxia. After the chemodenervation, the ventilatory response to hypoxia was completely blunted in saline and epinephrine animals. In the ICB and DCB animals, the arterial blood pressure decreased significantly with hypoxia during epinephrine infusion, while cardiac output increased significantly in all ICB and DCB saline animals. The oxygen consumption (VO2) decreased significantly after 10 min of hypoxia in all groups except in the ICB epinephrine animals, in whom the VO2 did not change with hypoxia. In conclusion, the administration of epinephrine to newborn piglets reverses the depressed ventilatory response to hypoxia and this effect requires the activity of the peripheral chemoreceptors.
In situ formation of TiC–(Ti–6Al–4V) composites

AbstractTitanium based alloys offer significant opportunities for weight reduction in aerospace design and more recently it has been considered that particle reinforced titanium based composites will provide the most practical solutions in this field. In the present paper it is identified that it is possible to produce an in situ TiC–(Ti–6Al–4V) composite via a blended elemental reaction powder metallurgical route. The effect of process parameters on the microstructure and on the presence of possible contaminants and undesirable phases is also examined.MST/3417
ORGANOPHOSPHATE POISONING

They are used as pesticides but can also be used as 'nerve gas'. This is prohibited under the Geneva Convention but could be used by terrorists or rogue regimes. There is some suggestion that the use of OP pesticides may have caused some neurotoxicity and be responsible for 'Gulf War syndrome'. Certainly, insecticides were freely used, as were many other chemicals. The syndrome is inconsistent in those affected but is neither simply a post-traumatic stress disorder nor the result of acute OP poisoning and is likely to represent low-level chronic toxicity. [1, 2, 3, 4] This is supported by a case control study which reported that chronic exposure to OP pesticides can lead both to depressive and anxiety disorders and also to cognitive defects (unrelated to psychiatric disorders). [4] This is a significant problem which may also affect children and further research in this field is necessary. [5]
Automatic Identification of Hexagonal Pattern Artifacts in Radio Astronomical Surveys

The Radio Astronomical Survey (RAS) is a collection of image cubes that represent specific regions in the sky. They are produced through an automated Data Processing Pipeline. In this process, radio astronomical signals received from a radio telescope are mapped to image cubes. Each image cube consists of thousands of two-dimensional images, each image represents the radio signals received by the telescope at a certain frequency. The final stage of the Pipeline process is to visually inspect the produced surveys to discover artifacts. In addition to being a time consuming process, the manual inspection is subjective which makes the validation process imperfect and non-uniform. One of the common artifacts in several RASs is the Hexagonal Pattern Artifact (HPA) which may happen due to telescope influence. Since these artifacts are undesirable, they should be removed or flagged before releasing the RAS to the community. This research presents the first algorithm for Automatic Identification of HPA in RAS (AIHR). The automation process will dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort invested to manually discover HPAs.
Global longitudinal strain: a novel hallmark of cardiac risk in arterial hypertension.

T he observational study of Lee et al. [1] investigated the prognostic value of global longitudinal strain (GLS), subendocardial and subepicardial longitudinal strain (EndLS and EpiLS, respectively) in regularly treated hypertensive patients after a mean follow-up of 7.3 years. Using multivariate Cox regression analysis, EpiLS was the only independent predictor of events and a cut-off point value of 17.57% distinguished the worse cardiovascular outcome in the population assessed. This is an important study, which confirms the prognostic value of GLS in the clinical setting and, particularly in the hypertensive population. Of interest, in the Coronary Artery Risk Development In young Adults study [2], among 2479 patients (average entry age1⁄4 25 years), high cumulative exposure (over 25 years) to SBP and DBP was not associated with the reduction of left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction but with lower longitudinal systolic and early diastolic strain rate derived by Speckle Tracking Echocardiography. Accordingly, GLS appeared to overcome the information provided by LV hypertrophy (LVH), allowing to identify a subclinical target organ damage, which could make possible a more targeted patient’s management. The prognostic power of GLS in arterial hypertension is largely supported by the physiopathologic meaning of this parameter. GLS refers mainly to LV longitudinal function of subendocardial fibers which are early involved in cardiac damage of several cardiac diseases including hypertension. Young, never treated hypertensives had lower GLS than both young sedentary controls and athletes and GLS extent was associated with the degree of E/e0 ratio, an estimate of LV filling pressure, independent of afterload and LV mass [3]. An early GLS reduction was also found in borderline prehypertension detected by ambulatory blood pressure [4].
KAAS: Kernel as a Service

Advances in cloud computing have led to advances in infrastructure, platforms and user applications. But the operating system space hasn't really kept pace with these advancements. In this paper we propose a model for cloud OS with Kernel As A Service (KAAS) offering. We describe the notion of KAAS and use it as a building block for developing Cloud OS. The KAAS model serves as the basic enabler for cross kernel switching, this offers an attractive set of possibilities like load balancing across kernels, fault resilience against kernel failures etc. The design, implementation and performance study of the this Cloud Operating System (SICLOPS) is presented in the paper.
Automatically Selecting Useful Phrases for Dialogue Act Tagging

We present an empirical investigation of various ways to automatically identify phrases in a tagged corpus that are useful for dialogue act tagging. We found that a new method (which measures a phrase's deviation from an optimally-predictive phrase), enhanced with a lexical filtering mechanism, produces significantly better cues than manually-selected cue phrases, the exhaustive set of phrases in a training corpus, and phrases chosen by traditional metrics, like mutual information and information gain.
Multiple Pitch Transcription using DBN-based Musicological Models

We propose a novel approach to solve the problem of estimating pitches of notes present in an audio signal. We have developed a probabilistically rigorous model that takes into account temporal dependencies between musical notes and between the underlying chords, as well as the instantaneous dependencies between chords, notes and the observed note saliences. We investigated its modeling ability by measuring the cross-entropy with symbolic (MIDI) data and then proceed to observe the model's performance in multiple pitch estimation of audio data.
Factors that Mediate Flight Plan Monitoring and Errors in Plan Revision: Planning Under Automated and High Workload Conditions

This paper describes an experiment that was conducted to explore the effects of automation and task loading on aviation plan monitoring and errors in plan revision. Pilots were asked to select one of two flight paths that traversed through hazardous airspace and to then monitor the safety of the path by seeking and reporting changes in dynamic traffic aircraft and weather systems. Following change detection, pilots were given the opportunity to revise their flight plan as a result of the changes. Attention guidance automation, which was reliable for plan selection, but failed to highlight a critical change that threatened safety after plan selection, was present on half of trials. Automation improved planning accuracy and confidence in high workload conditions. However, in nearly one third of trials, pilots failed to revise the flight plans as a result of a change, and were more likely to do so with imperfect automation in high workload.
Hereditary angioneurotic oedema in Finland. Clinical, immunological and genealogical studies.

A total of 7 families with hereditary angioneurotic oedema (HANE) have been found in Finland. Six HANE patients have died from laryngeal oedema, 27 patients with diagnosed HANE are alive and 21 members have a haematological abnormality typical of HANE, i.e. a deficiency of the inhibitor of the activated first component of complement (C1-INH), but no manifest symptoms. The largest family has 363 living members, 303 of whom were investigated for C1-INH, C4 and C3. Fourteen patients had HANE, 18 relatives were symptomless but had C1-INH deficiency, and 3 members of the family had died from laryngeal oedema. In two families only one case of HANE was diagnosed, the parents in both cases being symptomless with normal C1-INH levels. All patients who had died from laryngeal oedema and 10 of the 27 HANE patients still alive had a typical triad of paroxysmal abdominal pain, peripheral oedema and laryngeal oedema. Six patients have had abdominal attacks alone, three peripheral oedema alone and two only laryngeal oedema. The age at onset of symptoms was 1-51 years. Three patients, who have received continuous methyltestosterone therapy, had hardly any symptoms during the treatment. Thirteen patients have received tranexamic acid, either during an attack or continuously, with positive effects in all except two. Cinnarizine treatment was beneficial in three out of four cases, both when given continuously or during an attack.
Tracking People by Learning Their Appearance

An open vision problem is to automatically track the articulations of people from a video sequence. This problem is difficult because one needs to determine both the number of people in each frame and estimate their configurations. But, finding people and localizing their limbs is hard because people can move fast and unpredictably, can appear in a variety of poses and clothes, and are often surrounded by limb-like clutter. We develop a completely automatic system that works in two stages; it first builds a model of appearance of each person in a video and then it tracks by detecting those models in each frame ("tracking by model-building and detection"). We develop two algorithms that build models; one bottom-up approach groups together candidate body parts found throughout a sequence. We also describe a top-down approach that automatically builds people-models by detecting convenient key poses within a sequence. We finally show that building a discriminative model of appearance is quite helpful since it exploits structure in a background (without background-subtraction). We demonstrate the resulting tracker on hundreds of thousands of frames of unscripted indoor and outdoor activity, a feature-length film ("Run Lola Run"), and legacy sports footage (from the 2002 World Series and 1998 Winter Olympics). Experiments suggest that our system 1) can count distinct individuals, 2) can identify and track them, 3) can recover when it loses track, for example, if individuals are occluded or briefly leave the view, 4) can identify body configuration accurately, and 5) is not dependent on particular models of human motion
On the minimax robustness of the uniform transmission power strategy in MIMO systems

In this paper, it is shown that the uniform power allocation across transmit antennas is optimal in the sense that this strategy maximizes the minimum average mutual information of a multiple-input multiple-output system across the class of any arbitrary correlated fading channels, with constraints on the the total fixed transmit power (P/sub Q/), total power of the fades at the transmitter side (P/sub T/), and total power of the fades at the receiver side (P/sub R/), if the channel state information is perfectly known at the receiver side only.
The Anti-Rheumatoid Arthritis Effects of Rhododendron Molle Roots on Collagen-Induced Arthritis in Rats

Abbreviations: RA: Rheumatoid Arthritis; CIA: Collagen-Induced Arthritis; IL-1β: Interleukin-1β; IL-6: Interleukin-6; IL-17A: Interleukin17A; IFN-γ: Interferon-γ; TNF-α: Tumor; Necrosis Factor-α; GM-CSF: Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor; IL-8: Interleukin-8; MTX: Methotrexate; CSA: Cyclosporine; AZA: Azathioprine; LEF: Leflunomide; CFA: Complete Freund’s Adjuvant; ELISA: Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay; ANOVA: Analysis Of Variance.
SAR image processing algorithms based on the ambiguity function

This work focuses on hardware implementations of the ambiguity function defined in terms of signal operators for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor image formation applications. Due to the large quantity of data associated with SAR imaging, basic SAR operations demand high computational cost and are difficult to readily implement on existing commercial digital signal processing (DSP) units. In order to contribute to resolve this problem a search for new efficient algorithm variants in under way compute operations such as discrete Fourier transforms, discrete convolutions, discrete correlations, and Hadamard products of complex signals. These operations are commonly used in the computation of the discrete ambiguity function. Time-frequency tools have been the object of many different studies in SAR image formation operations. The principle behind SAR image formation is recovering a desired reflectivity density function through an inverse convolution process on the raw data generation. It is this particular fact that makes the ambiguity function so important in SAR image formation since it serves to model the impulse response function or point spread function of the SAR system itself. Algorithms for computing the ambiguity designed for this work are being developed in MATLAB and implemented the TMS320C6713 digital signal processor (DSP) unit. The implementation methodology is based on hardware/software algorithm co-design techniques, taking into consideration software and hardware characteristics such as memory cache overflows, twiddle or phase factor pre-computations, extended memory addressing schemes, stride permutation implementations, pipelining schemes, multiply-add DSP architectures, multiple concurrent memory accessing schemes, and overall latency response.