Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Approaches on Tissue Engineering Repair of Peripheral Nerve Gaps

Peripheral nerve research is highly dynamic and a current major focus is the development of cell based supportive therapies as well as bioengineered nerve conduits to overcome the challenges in reconstructing long peripheral nerve defects. Whenever primary nerve repair cannot be performed without regeneration impairing tension at the suture sites, autologous nerve grafting or nerve tubulization are standard surgical repair techniques. However, functional recovery after severe nerve lesions is generally partial and unsatisfactory. Furthermore, nerve grafting is accompanied with several disadvantages. Autologous nerve material is only of limited availability as it has to be withdrawn from a healthy sensory nerve during an extra surgical incision that commonly results in sensory residual deficits. Reconstruction of long nerve defects remains a challenge since the gold standard of autologous nerve grafting as well as transplantation of clinically approved artificial resorbable nerve conduits result in a success rate of approximately 69% for nerve defects not exceeding a length of 3 cm only. This chapter reviews basic science studies from several laboratories evaluating tissue engineering nerve repair strategies especially with regard to the cellular and molecular composition of artificial nerve grafts. The possibility to attach Schwann cells or Schwann cell-like cells to biodegradable nerve guides for cellular support of the regeneration processes or for ex vivo gene therapy is of similar interest as the opportunity to functionalize the biomaterial with bioactive molecules through physicochemical modification or to allow long term release of regeneration promoting molecules during biodegradation. Peripheral nerve * Corresponding author: Kirsten Haastert-Talini: Hannover Medical School, Institute of Neuroanatomy, D-30623 Hannover, Germany, Email: Haastert.kirsten@mh-hannover.de, Tel: 0049-511-532-2891; Fax: 0049-511-5322880 The exclusive license for this PDF is limited to personal website use only. No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted commercially in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services. Kirsten Haastert-Talini 210 tissue engineering holds promise to provide future support and orchestration of regeneration processes across long nerve gaps to a similar or even higher extend an autologous nerve graft does today.
A new measure of binge drinking: prevalence and correlates in a probability sample of undergraduates.

BACKGROUND A standard measure defines binge drinking as the consumption of 5 or more drinks in a row for men (4 or more drinks for women) on at least 1 occasion during the past 2 weeks. A revised operational definition of binge drinking was developed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2004 and incorporated the duration of the drinking episode in addition to the quantity of alcohol consumed. This study compares the standard and new binge measures for overall and subgroup prevalence rates; associations with gender, race/ethnicity, and age of drinking onset; and associations with negative drinking consequences. METHODS A probability sample of 4,580 randomly selected college students (50.3% female, M age=19.9, SD=2.0) at a large Midwestern university in the United States completed a Web-based survey of alcohol and other drug use. Participants reported on past 2-week binge drinking using the standard measure and past-year binge drinking using the new measure. RESULTS The longer past-year time frame of the new measure yielded a higher prevalence estimate of binge drinking (63.6%) compared with the 2-week standard measure (53.2%). Approximately 9.9% of those who were classified as binge drinkers using the 2-week standard measure were classified as non-binge drinkers using the new measure specification of a 2-hour duration for the drinking episode. The past-year new binge measure was positively associated with negative drinking consequences even when the 2-week measure was statistically controlled. CONCLUSIONS Using a longer time frame and incorporating the duration of the drinking episode, the new measure of binge drinking appears to capture an important element of risky alcohol involvement in college students that is not fully assessed by the standard measure.
Improved BM212 MmpL3 Inhibitor Analogue Shows Efficacy in Acute Murine Model of Tuberculosis Infection

1,5-Diphenyl pyrroles were previously identified as a class of compounds endowed with high in vitro efficacy against M. tuberculosis. To improve the physical chemical properties and drug-like parameters of this class of compounds, a medicinal chemistry effort was undertaken. By selecting the optimal substitution patterns for the phenyl rings at N1 and C5 and by replacing the thiomorpholine moiety with a morpholine one, a new series of compounds was produced. The replacement of the sulfur with oxygen gave compounds with lower lipophilicity and improved in vitro microsomal stability. Moreover, since the parent compound of this family has been shown to target MmpL3, mycobacterial mutants resistant to two compounds have been isolated and characterized by sequencing the mmpL3 gene; all the mutants showed point mutations in this gene. The best compound identified to date was progressed to dose-response studies in an acute murine TB infection model. The resulting ED99 of 49 mg/Kg is within the range of commonly employed tuberculosis drugs, demonstrating the potential of this chemical series. The in vitro and in vivo target validation evidence presented here adds further weight to MmpL3 as a druggable target of interest for anti-tubercular drug discovery.
Growth of African Economies: Productivity, Policy Syndromes and the Importance of Institutions

Recent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economies—the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium—suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in Sub-Saharan Africa during post-independence. The current article employs the unique data and insights generated by the Growth Project to further explore the importance of a ‘syndrome-free’ (SF) regime for growth in the region by examining: (i) the channels via which SF affects growth: total factor productivity versus factors of production and (ii) the role of institutions in mediating this impact, with special attention accorded to the efficacy of the restraint on the executive branch of government in mitigating the potentially adverse effect of ethnicity. Copyright 2013 , Oxford University Press.
Clinical use of monoclonal antibody HuJ591 therapy: targeting prostate specific membrane antigen.

PURPOSE Prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) is a cell surface peptidase highly expressed by malignant prostate epithelial cells and vascular endothelial cells of numerous solid tumor malignancies but not normal vascular endothelium in benign tissues or neoplastic epithelial cells of nonprostate malignancies. Monoclonal antibody (mAb) J591 recognizes the extracellular domain of PSMA. The current status of clinical trials using mAb J591 is reviewed. MATERIAL AND METHODS The mouse antibody was deimmunized by replacing murine immunoglobulin sequences with human immunoglobulin sequences, resulting in a nonimmunogenic antibody HuJ591. Results of completed and ongoing phase 1 and 2 clinical trials using mAb J591 are presented. RESULTS A phase I clinical trial with murine J591 indicated that it possesses high affinity for prostate cancer metastases in bone and soft tissue. A phase I clinical trial showed that HuJ591 was well tolerated, demonstrated excellent targeting to disseminated prostate cancer sites and did not result in a host immune response to the antibody. A phase II clinical trial was initiated to study the efficacy of combining HuJ591 with low dose interleukin-2. Two phase I studies in patients with prostate cancer are in progress using the beta-emitting radiometals 90yttrium and 177lutetium linked via a DOTA chelate to HuJ591. Preliminary results from an ongoing phase I trial of 111indium labeled mAb HuJ591 in patients with advanced solid tumors showed that HuJ591 specifically targets nonprostate cancers. CONCLUSIONS Early results of clinical studies indicate that mAb HuJ591 represents targeted therapy to PSMA and has therapeutic potential in prostate cancer and other urological and solid tumor malignancies.
Analysis of Information Management and Scheduling Technology in Hadoop

Development of big data computing has brought many changes to society and social life is constantly digitized. 'How to handle vast amounts of data' has become a more and more fashionable topic. Hadoop is a distributed computing software framework, which includes HDFS and MapReduce distributed computing method, make distributed processing huge amounts of data possible. Then job scheduler determines the efficiency of Hadoop clusters and user experience. Under the premise of familiar with the mechanism of Hadoop's running tasks, make a full analysis of the existing Hadoop task scheduling algorithm, such as FIFO-Scheduler, Capacity -Scheduler, FairShare-Scheduler and LATE-Scheduler, found that the existing scheduling algorithms do not perceive the performance of the computing node, so that it cannot assign different tasks depending on the machine performance in heterogeneous Hadoop cluster.
Osteogenic differentiation potential of mesenchymal stem cells cultured on nanofibrous scaffold improved in the presence of pulsed electromagnetic field

Nowadays, tissue engineering by using stem cells in combination with scaffolds and bioactive molecules has made significant contributions to the regeneration of damaged bone tissues. Since the usage of bioactive molecules including, growth factors to induce differentiation is safety limited in clinical applications, and it has also been previously observed that extremely low frequency pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF) can be effective in the enhancement of proliferation rate and osteogenic differentiation of stem cells, the aim of this study was investigating the osteoinductive potential of PEMF in combination with Poly(caprolactone) (PCL) nanofibrous scaffold. To achieve this aim, Adipose‐derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADSCs) isolated and characterized and then osteogenic differentiation of them was investigated after culturing on the surface of PCL scaffold under treatments of PEMF, PEMF plus osteogenic medium (OM) and OM. Analysis of common osteogenic markers such as Alizarin red staining, ALP activity, calcium content and four important bone‐related genes in days of 7, 14, and 21 confirmed that the effects of PEMF on the osteogenic differentiation of ADSCs are very similar to the effects of osteogenic medium. Thus, regarding the immunological concerns about the application of bioactive molecules for tissue engineering, PEMF could be a good alternative for osteogenic medium. Although, results were showed a synergetic effect for simultaneous application of PEMF and PCL scaffold in the osteogenesis process of ADSCs. Taking together, ADSCs‐seeded PCL nanofibrous scaffold in combination with PEMF could be a great option for use in bone tissue engineering applications.
Assessment of diastolic function: suggested methods and future considerations.

(2) Theconstantkis dimensionalandthereforeunsuitable for patient-to-patient comparisons, espe-cially when ventricular sizes are markedly different. (3) The expression P = Aekv does not allow for thepossibility ofa curve that passes through the origin P0.Thequestionthatmustnowbeaddressedis whetherdP/dV is an ideal parameter for comparing chamberstiffnesses between two different ventricles. Figure 1illustrates two
Regrasp Planning for Polygonal and Polyhedral Objects

When we look at our hands and think about what they can do, grasping is mostly in our imagination. We can easily grasp an object without calculating proper grasping positions according to the model of the object. But this ability of humans cannot be transferred to a machine at ease. In Robotics, grasping is an operation performed by a robot hand for secure holding an object. We know some practical outcomes such as parallel jaw grippers which usually applied for pick and place operation in factories. They can work properly because of certain industrial or factory settings. In such environments, we exactly know what kinds of objects there are, and their geometries are precisely known. The precise geometry of the robot arm is also known. Thus, a planner can precalculate fixed contact positions and controls of the robot arm’s joints to perform a task without uncertainty. Let us deeply consider the definition of grasping. A grasp achieves stability if and only if contact positions are strictly fixed even when any disturbance is exerted on the object. Object manipulations without impact between the contact of the fingers and the object, which can be applied in this situation, are limited to be rotating wrist, elbow, arm or other joints unrelated with the contact positions. These processes seem to be unnatural comparing with what a human does. Beyond these awkward operations, the capability of a human hand is not only limited for grasping. Dexterity of a hand can be exploited for many tasks in real applications. For example, we can rotate an assembly part using our fingers then assemble without releasing it. We can tie a shoelace by using a little times to practice. Interestingly, after nearly half a century of robotics research there is no robot that can efficiently perform any of these ordinary tasks. The operation discussed above that a hand changes grasping configuration, is formally called dexterous manipulation.
Dynamic Scalable Stochastic Petri Net: A Novel Model for Designing and Analysis of Resource Scheduling in Cloud Computing

Performance evaluation of cloud computing systems studies the relationships among system configuration, system load, and performance indicators. However, such evaluation is not feasible by dint of measurement methods or simulation methods, due to the properties of cloud computing, such as large scale, diversity, and dynamics. To overcome those challenges, we present a novel Dynamic Scalable Stochastic Petri Net (DSSPN) to model and analyze the performance of cloud computing systems. DSSPN can not only clearly depict system dynamic behaviors in an intuitive and efficient way but also easily discover performance deficiencies and bottlenecks of systems. In this study, we further elaborate some properties of DSSPN. In addition, we improve fair scheduling taking into consideration job diversity and resource heterogeneity. To validate the improved algorithm and the applicability of DSSPN, we conduct extensive experiments through Stochastic Petri Net Package (SPNP). The performance results show that the improved algorithm is better than fair scheduling in some key performance indicators, such as average throughput, response time, and average completion time.
Using Pivot Consistency to Decompose and Solve Functional CSPs

Many studies have been carried out in order to increase the search efficiency of constraint satisfaction problems; among them, some make use of structural properties of the constraint network; others take into account semantic properties of the constraints, generally assuming that all the constraints possess the given property. In this paper, we propose a new decomposition method benefiting from both semantic properties of functional constraints (not bijective constraints) and structural properties of the network; furthermore, not all the constraints need to be functional. We show that under some conditions, the existence of solutions can be guaranteed. We first characterize a particular subset of the variables, which we name a root set. We then introduce pivot consistency, a new local consistency which is a weak form of path consistency and can be achieved in O(n2d2 complexity (instead of O(n3d3) for path consistency), and we present associated properties; in particular, we show that any consistent instantiation of the root set can be linearly extended to a solution, which leads to the presentation of the aforementioned new method for solving by decomposing functional CSPs.
Fixation of an Anatomically Designed Cementless Stem in Total Hip Arthroplasty

Purpose. The Anatomic Fiber Metal plus stem (Zimmer) is one of the anatomically designed cementless stems to achieve stable fixation by metaphyseal fit. We studied outcomes of cementless total hip arthroplasty using this stem and possible effects of metaphyseal fit on outcomes. Methods. The cementless total hip arthroplasty using this stem was performed for 155 hips. One hundred and thirty-seven hips of 122 patients were followed for 5 to 16 (mean, 9.7) years and entered into the study. The metaphyseal fit was defined as good or poor in an anteroposterior radiograph after surgery. We studied the fixation of the stem and bone reaction on an anteroposterior radiograph at the final followup. Results. Twelve hips had revision, six acetabular components and six acetabular liners. No stem was revised. The biological fixation of the stem was bone ingrown fixation for 136 hips and unstable for one. The metaphyseal fit was good for 83 hips and poor for 54 hips. There were no differences for stem fixation and bone reaction between the two groups. Conclusions. The fixation of the stem was stable at a mean followup of 9.7 years independently from metaphyseal fit.
The Role of Nonenhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the Early Assessment of Acute Pancreatitis

BACKGROUND AND AIMS:Computed tomography (CT), especially contrast-enhanced CT (CECT), provides important information on the severity and prognosis of acute pancreatitis (AP). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a useful tool as an alternative to CT in the assessment of AP. The primary aim of our study was to determine the diagnostic value of nonenhanced MRI (NEMRI) to assess severity and predict outcome in patients with AP from the third to fifth day after admission. We also correlated MRI findings with CT and biochemical parameters.PATIENTS AND METHODS:The study included 101 patients (49 men, 52 women, median age 62 yr, range 20–82) with a diagnosis of AP admitted to our hospital between January 1, 2004 and June 31, 2005. The inclusion criteria consisted of a combination of clinical features, a typical case history, elevation of serum pancreatic enzymes, and diagnosis confirmed by imaging studies. Contrast-enhanced spiral CT exams were performed in all patients from the third to fifth day after admission, and Balthazar grade and CT severity index were calculated. All patients underwent NEMRI, and MR severity index (MRSI) was calculated. We also performed magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) in all patients to detect bile duct lithiasis.RESULTS:Significant correlation between CECT and NEMRI was found for Balthazar grade (P < 0.001) and the assessment of pancreatic necrosis (P < 0.001), as well as between the combined severity indices (ρ = 0.819, P < 0.001). MRSI correlated with Ranson score (ρ = 0.656, P < 0.01), C-reactive protein (CRP) levels 48 h after admission (ρ = 0.502, P < 0.01), appearance of systemic complications (ρ = 0.576, P < 0.01), and length of hospital stay (ρ = 0.484, P < 0.01). Considering the Atlanta criteria as the gold standard and the Ranson score, no difference in sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and accuracy of the two methods was observed. Comparing the group of patients with presumed acute pancreatic hemorrhage with the group of patients with severe AP, we found a significantly higher APACHE II score on the first day (P < 0.05), that the development of systemic complications was more frequent (P < 0.05), and that the hospital stay and ICU management of patients with MRI signs of pancreatic hemorrhage tended to be longer.CONCLUSION:NEMRI is comparable to CECT in the early assessment of the severity of AP, and both methods are equally efficient in predicting local and systemic complications of AP. MRI has a potential advantage over CT in detecting bile duct lithiasis and pancreatic hemorrhage.
Thalamo‐cortical processing of vibrissal information in the rat. I. Intracortical origins of surround but not centre‐receptive fields of layer IV neurones in the rat S1 barrel field cortex

The receptive fields of cells restricted to the D1 cortical barrel territory in the S1 cortex of the rat were examined before and after substantial lesions of the D2 barrel. We tested 131 cells (N = 62, unlesioned controls; N = 69, lesioned animals) for modal latency and response magnitude to standard vibrissal deflections of 1.14 degrees.
Prediction for Long Range Bursty Traffic

Fractional AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Averag (FARIMA) processes with alpha-stable innovation can capture non-Gaussian, namely heavy tailness that is the key factor of the long range burstiness of self-similar traffic. A FARIMA process can be regarded as ARMA process driven by fractional differencing (FD) process. ARMA processes with infinite variance can be simulated with recurrent neural network (RNN) instead of conventional Least Squares methods. We adopt three intelligent methods to train the weights of RNN in order to minimize the dispersion. The final predicted values are combined previous three predicted values. Prediction experimental results for the actual traffic trace show that the three FARIMA predictors are efficient, the compound predictors are more accurate.
Phytoestrogens and the Risk of Breast Cancer

Phytoestrogens are estrogen-like chemicals found in plant foods such as beans, seeds, and grains. Foods made from soybeans have some of the highest levels of phytoestrogens and have been studied the most. In spite of initial optimism, it is not clear whether eating foods rich in phytoestrogens decreases breast cancer risk. This is an active area of research with much work needed to resolve this issue. This fact sheet presents the most current information and indicates where more research would be helpful.
Plyometric training in female adolescent soccer players

Plyometric Training in Adolescent Female Soccer Players by Amaris Christine Vandyke Dr. Mack D. Rubley, Examination Committee Chair Professor of Kinesiology University o f Nevada, Las Vegas The purpose o f the study was to measure the effects o f low impact plyometric training on vertical jump and kicking distance in female adolescent soccer players. Comparisons at three separate time intervals: pre-test, 7 weeks, and 14 weeks were made between individuals completing normal soccer training and competition and those additionally completing once-weekly plyometric training. No significant difference in kicking distance was found between groups at pre-test (p= 0.5005) or 7 weeks (p= 0.1174). However, the plyometric training group had significantly longer kicking distance after 14 weeks (p= <0.0001). The control group displayed a significant decrease in kicking distance between 7 and 14 weeks (p= 0.0081). No significant difference in vertieal jump height was found between groups at pre-test (p= 0.8366) or 7 weeks (p= 0.1077); however, the plyometric group had a significantly higher vertical jump after 14 weeks (p= 0.0144). Once-weekly plyometric training may improve soccer performance.