Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of diaspirin cross-linked hemoglobin on normal and postischemic microcirculation of the rat pancreas.

Microcirculatory alterations with reduced nutritive supply to the pancreas could be the cause of hyperamylasemia, which occurs in some patients receiving the vasoactive oxygen carrier diaspirin cross-linked hemoglobin (DCLHb) in clinical studies. Therefore, the effects of DCLHb on rat pancreas microcirculation were evaluated. Anesthetized Sprague-Dawley rats received one of the following treatments during baseline conditions ( n = 7 rats/group): 10% hydroxyethyl starch (HAES) (0.4 ml/kg), DCLHb (400 mg/kg), or DCLHb (1,400 mg/kg). After 1 h of complete, reversible pancreatic ischemia, other animals received 10% HAES (0.4 ml/kg) or DCLHb (400 mg/kg) during the onset of reperfusion. The number of red blood cell-perfused capillaries (functional capillary density, FCD) and the level of leukocyte adherence in postcapillary venules in the pancreas were assessed by means of intravital microscopy during 2 h after treatment. In the nonischemic groups, FCD was 18% greater after DCLHb (1,400 mg/kg) than after 10% HAES treatment without any increase in leukocyte adherence. In the inschemia-reperfusion (I/R) 10% HAES group, FCD was significantly ( P < 0.05) lowered, leukocyte adherence enhanced, and mean arterial pressure (MAP) reduced by 31% compared with nonischemic animals. DCLHb treatment in the I/R group resulted in a slight increase in FCD, a significant ( P < 0.05) reduction of leukocyte adherence, and a complete restoration of MAP compared with the animals of the I/R control group. Thus our data provide no evidence for a detrimental effect on the pancreatic microcirculation or an enhanced risk of postischemic pancreatitis by DCLHb.
ENHANCING FUNCTIONAL NEUROIMAGES: WAVELET DENOISING AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GAUSSIAN SMOOTHING

We present a general wavelet-based denoising scheme for functional neuroimages and compare it to Gaussian smoothing, the standard method in functional neuroimaging. We adapted WaveLab thresholding routines to 2D data, and tested their effect on the signal-to-noise ratio of noisy images. In a simulated time series test, we also investigated the shapes of detected activations after denoising.
Native KCC2 interactome reveals PACSIN1 as a critical regulator of synaptic inhibition

KCC2 is a neuron-specific K+-Cl− cotransporter essential for establishing the Cl− gradient required for hyperpolarizing inhibition. KCC2 is highly localized to excitatory synapses where it regulates spine morphogenesis and AMPA receptor confinement. Aberrant KCC2 function contributes to numerous human neurological disorders including epilepsy and neuropathic pain. Using unbiased functional proteomics, we identified the KCC2-interactome in the mouse brain to determine KCC2-protein interactions that regulate KCC2 function. Our analysis revealed that KCC2 interacts with a diverse set of proteins, and its most predominant interactors play important roles in postsynaptic receptor recycling. The most abundant KCC2 interactor is a neuronal endocytic regulatory protein termed PACSIN1 (SYNDAPIN1). We verified the PACSIN1-KCC2 interaction biochemically and demonstrated that shRNA knockdown of PACSIN1 in hippocampal neurons significantly increases KCC2 expression and hyperpolarizes the reversal potential for Cl−. Overall, our global native-KCC2 interactome and subsequent characterization revealed PACSIN1 as a novel and potent negative regulator of KCC2.
A Randomized Clinical Trial of Behavioral Couples Therapy Versus Individually-Based Treatment for Drug-Abusing Women

Objective: Behavioral couples therapy (BCT) is more efficacious than individually-based therapy (IBT) for substance and relationship outcomes among substance use disorder patients. This study compared BCT with IBT for drug-abusing women. Method: Sixty-one women, mostly White, late 30s, with primary substance use disorder other than alcohol (74% opioid), and male partners were randomized to 26 sessions over 13 weeks of BCT plus 12-step-oriented IBT (i.e., BCT + IBT) or IBT. Substance-related outcomes were percentage days abstinent (PDA), percentage days drug use (PDDU), Inventory of Drug Use Consequences. Relationship outcomes were Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS), days separated. Data were collected at baseline, posttreatment, and quarterly for 1-year follow-up. Results: On PDA, PDDU, and substance-related problems, both BCT + IBT and IBT patients showed significant (p < .01) large effect size improvements throughout 1-year follow-up (d > .8 for most time periods). BCT + IBT showed a significant (p < .001) large effect size (d = −.85) advantage versus IBT on fewer substance-related problems, while BCT + IBT and IBT did not differ on PDA or PDDU (ps > .47). On relationship outcomes, compared to IBT, BCT + IBT had significantly higher male-reported Dyadic Adjustment Scale (p < .001, d = .57) and fewer days separated (p = .01, d = −.47) throughout 1-year follow-up. Conclusion: BCT + IBT for drug-abusing women was more efficacious than IBT in improving relationship satisfaction and preventing relationship breakup. On substance use and substance-related problems, women receiving both treatments substantially improved, and women receiving BCT + IBT had fewer substance-related problems than IBT.
Acquisition of transparent refractive media

Transparent refractive media are invisible but for the distortions they impart upon a background scene. Computerised acquisition of such media can therefore often not be performed via traditional scanning methods. By capturing refracted backgrounds rather than reflections off the target media itself, we develop techniques for reconstructing the intervening refractive index distribution for both static and time-varying media. The approach is based on tracking optical distortions and then performing tomographic reconstruction. For multi-view tomography we first require a suitably calibrated camera array. To this end we show how to temporally synchronise and geometrically calibrate an array of consumer-grade video cameras that can scale to larger sizes, and at lower cost, than a comparative array of machine vision cameras. For media of low dynamic refractive index range, such as mixing gases, we show how to acquire data and formulate a linear least-squares problem to solve for the refractive index distribution. Unlike traditional methods of fluid flow measurement, ours is non-invasive and fully volumetric. For materials of higher dynamic refractive index range, we develop an alternative acquisition method based on temporally-encoded structured light patterns. Media causing significant distortion of light rays give rise to a large, nonlinear inverse problem. Results indicate that grid resolution relative to the minimum refractive feature size is a key factor limiting the accuracy of reconstructions.
Effects of a randomized trial comparing standard and enhanced counseling for men at high risk of prostate cancer as a function of race and monitoring style

Despite conflicting guidelines, a significant subset of high-risk men decide to undergo routine prostate cancer screening. Yet, there is a scarcity of available programs, and no studies evaluating interventions to support men in dealing with the psychosocial impact of screening. In this study, one of the first to explore the responses of high-risk men enrolling in a Prostate Cancer Risk Assessment Program (N = 128), patients underwent a prostate cancer risk counseling visit immediately followed by either a cognitive–affective preparation session designed to help them process the information they received or a general health education session. All men in this self-selected sample chose to participate in prostate cancer screening. Men were assessed 3 weeks and 6 months post-counseling. The impact of the enhanced counseling condition on knowledge, perceived risk, expectancies, and intrusive ideation was a function of racial and coping style group. Implications for tailored interventions to maximize preparedness for risk and screening counseling are discussed.
The Inter-Association Task Force Document on Emergency Health and Safety: Best-Practice Recommendations for Youth Sports Leagues.

This document is intended to serve as a call to action for all youth sport NGBs to provide support systems for member organizations through the education of league leaders and their members on the current policy and procedure best practices regarding EAPs, SCA, brain and neck injury, EHS, and other potentially threatening medical conditions (Appendix B). This document also discusses preexisting medical conditions, environmental conditions, and emergency medical care, such as athletic training services. The Task Force recognizes that each organization is unique and, therefore, will need to address policy and procedure recommendations differently to ensure the implementation of best practices. Furthermore, the Task Force recognizes that all best-practice policy and procedure recommendations may not be necessary for each sport (eg, lightning policy for indoor sports). Many of the deaths in youth sports are preventable, and it is the goal of the Task Force to support youth sport NGBs in this mission of prevention.
PREPARATION AND EVALUATION OF ORNIDAZOLE IN SITU GELLING SYSTEM FOR GASTRORETENTIVE DRUG DELIVERY

The main objective of this study was to develop floating in situ gelling system of ornidazole using sodium alginate gelling polymer and calcium chloride as cross-linking agent for potentially treating gastric ulcer, associated with helicobacter pylori. Alginate based ornidazole floating in situ gelling system were prepared by dissolving varying concentration of sodium alginate in deionized water containing calcium carbonate, to which drug was added and dissolved by stirring. The formulation variable like concentration of sodium alginate significantly affected the invitro drug release from the prepared formulations. It was concluded that prolonged gastrointestinal residence time and enhanced ornidazole stability resulting from the floating in situ gel of ornidazole might contribute better for complete eradification of H. pylori.
Heme Oxygenase 1 as a Therapeutic Target in Acute Kidney Injury.

A common clinical condition, acute kidney injury (AKI) significantly influences morbidity and mortality, particularly in critically ill patients. The pathophysiology of AKI is complex and involves multiple pathways, including inflammation, autophagy, cell-cycle progression, and oxidative stress. Recent evidence suggests that a single insult to the kidney significantly enhances the propensity to develop chronic kidney disease. Therefore, the generation of effective therapies against AKI is timely. In this context, the cytoprotective effects of heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1) in animal models of AKI are well documented. HO-1 modulates oxidative stress, autophagy, and inflammation and regulates the progression of cell cycle via direct and indirect mechanisms. These beneficial effects of HO-1 induction during AKI are mediated in part by the by-products of the HO reaction (iron, carbon monoxide, and bile pigments). This review highlights recent advances in the molecular mechanisms of HO-1-mediated cytoprotection and discusses the translational potential of HO-1 induction in AKI.
Robust and Efficient Relative Pose with a Multi-camera System for Autonomous Vehicle in Highly Dynamic Environments

This paper studies the relative pose problem for autonomous vehicle driving in highly dynamic and possibly cluttered environments. This is a challenging scenario due to the existence of multiple, large, and independently moving objects in the environment, which often leads to excessive portion of outliers and results in erroneous motion estimation. Existing algorithms cannot cope with such situations well. This paper proposes a new algorithm for relative pose using a multi-camera system with multiple non-overlapping individual cameras. The method works robustly even when the numbers of outliers are overwhelming. By exploiting specific prior knowledge of driving scene we have developed an efficient 4-point algorithm for multi-camera relative pose, which admits analytic solutions by solving a polynomial root-finding equation, and runs extremely fast (at about 0.5$u$s per root). When the solver is used in combination with RANSAC, we are able to quickly prune unpromising hypotheses, significantly improve the chance of finding inliers. Experiments on synthetic data have validated the performance of the proposed algorithm. Tests on real data further confirm the method's practical relevance.
Synchronous Versus Asynchronous CMC and Transfer to Japanese Oral Performance

This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC on the development of linguistic features of learners’ speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral proficiency among learners of Japanese? and (b) Are there any relationships between language use in CMC and the development of oral skills? The participants were divided into three groups: two CMC groups (synchronous and asynchronous) and one face-to-face group. They engaged in weekly discussions over the course of a semester, and the gain scores in terms of language output, linguistic complexity, accuracy, and cohesive devices between the pretest and the post-test were compared. In addition, the relationship between language use in both types of CMC and the gain scores on the oral tests was examined, using Pearson correlation coefficients. The present study did not find any significant differences among gains in the linguistic indices. However, it found that CMC language use was correlated positively with the gain scores in several indices, and a relationship between CMC language use and the development of oral proficiency was observed.
Accurate reconstruction in measurement of microstructures using digital holographic microscopy

Due to the limitation of traditional interferometry, digital holographic microscopy has attracted intensive attention for its capability of measuring complex shapes. However, speckles are inevitable in the recorded interferometric patterns, thereby polluting the reconstructed surface topographies. In this paper, a phase-shifting interferometer is built to realize the in-axis digital holographic microscopy. The anti-aliasing shift-invariant contourlet transform (ASCT) is used for reconstructing the measured surfaces. By avoiding subsampling in the scale and directional filtering schemes, the problems of frequency aliasing and phase distortion can be effectively solved. Practical experiments show that speckles can be recognized and removed straightforwardly. Therefore the proposed method has excellent performance for reconstructing structured surfaces.
Relationship between CD4 Regulatory T Cells and Anergy In Vivo

Selective suppression of effector CD4+ T cell functions is necessary to prevent immune cell–mediated damage to healthy tissues. This appears especially true during pregnancy or in individuals predisposed to autoimmunity. Foxp3+ regulatory T (Treg) cells and induction of anergy, an acquired state of T cell functional unresponsiveness in Foxp3− cells, have both been implicated as mechanisms to suppress dangerous immune responses to tissue-restricted self-Ags. Anergic CD4+ T cells and Treg cells share a number of phenotypic and mechanistic traits—including the expression of CD73 and folate receptor 4, and the epigenetic modification of Treg cell signature genes—and an interesting relationship between these two subsets has recently emerged. In this review, we will compare and contrast these two subsets, as well as explore the role of anergy in the generation of peripheral Treg cells.
Tag localization with spatial correlations and joint group sparsity

Nowadays numerous social images have been emerging on the Web. How to precisely label these images is critical to image retrieval. However, traditional image-level tagging methods may become less effective because global image matching approaches can hardly cope with the diversity and arbitrariness of Web image content. This raises an urgent need for the fine-grained tagging schemes. In this work, we study how to establish mapping between tags and image regions, i.e. localize tags to image regions, so as to better depict and index the content of images. We propose the spatial group sparse coding (SGSC) by extending the robust encoding ability of group sparse coding with spatial correlations among training regions. We present spatial correlations in a two-dimensional image space and design group-specific spatial kernels to produce a more interpretable regularizer. Further we propose a joint version of the SGSC model which is able to simultaneously encode a group of intrinsically related regions within a test image. An effective algorithm is developed to optimize the objective function of the Joint SGSC. The tag localization task is conducted by propagating tags from sparsely selected groups of regions to the target regions according to the reconstruction coefficients. Extensive experiments on three public image datasets illustrate that our proposed models achieve great performance improvements over the state-of-the-art method in the tag localization task.
Social and Financial Outcomes of Living Liver Donation: A Prospective Investigation Within the Adult‐to‐Adult Living Donor Liver Transplantation Cohort Study 2 (A2ALL‐2)

Because results from single‐center (mostly kidney) donor studies demonstrate interpersonal relationship and financial strains for some donors, we conducted a liver donor study involving nine centers within the Adult‐to‐Adult Living Donor Liver Transplantation Cohort Study 2 (A2ALL‐2) consortium. Among other initiatives, A2ALL‐2 examined the nature of these outcomes following donation. Using validated measures, donors were prospectively surveyed before donation and at 3, 6, 12, and 24 mo after donation. Repeated‐measures regression models were used to examine social relationship and financial outcomes over time and to identify relevant predictors. Of 297 eligible donors, 271 (91%) consented and were interviewed at least once. Relationship changes were positive overall across postdonation time points, with nearly one‐third reporting improved donor family and spousal or partner relationships and >50% reporting improved recipient relationships. The majority of donors, however, reported cumulative out‐of‐pocket medical and nonmedical expenses, which were judged burdensome by 44% of donors. Lower income predicted burdensome donation costs. Those who anticipated financial concerns and who held nonprofessional positions before donation were more likely to experience adverse financial outcomes. These data support the need for initiatives to reduce financial burden.
Alk2/ACVR1 and Alk3/BMPR1A Provide Essential Function for Bone Morphogenetic Protein–Induced Retinal Angiogenesis

Objective— Increasing evidence suggests that bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling regulates angiogenesis. Here, we aimed to define the function of BMP receptors in regulating early postnatal angiogenesis by analysis of inducible, endothelial-specific deletion of the BMP receptor components Bmpr2 (BMP type 2 receptor), Alk1 (activin receptor-like kinase 1), Alk2, and Alk3 in mouse retinal vessels. Approach and Results— Expression analysis of several BMP ligands showed that proangiogenic BMP ligands are highly expressed in postnatal retinas. Consistently, BMP receptors are also strongly expressed in retina with a distinct pattern. To assess the function of BMP signaling in retinal angiogenesis, we first generated mice carrying an endothelial-specific inducible deletion of Bmpr2. Postnatal deletion of Bmpr2 in endothelial cells substantially decreased the number of angiogenic sprouts at the vascular front and branch points behind the front, leading to attenuated radial expansion. To identify critical BMPR1s (BMP type 1 receptors) associated with BMPR2 in retinal angiogenesis, we generated endothelial-specific inducible deletion of 3 BMPR1s abundantly expressed in endothelial cells and analyzed the respective phenotypes. Among these, endothelial-specific deletion of either Alk2/acvr1 or Alk3/Bmpr1a caused a delay in radial expansion, reminiscent of vascular defects associated with postnatal endothelial-specific deletion of BMPR2, suggesting that ALK2/ACVR1 and ALK3/BMPR1A are likely to be the critical BMPR1s necessary for proangiogenic BMP signaling in retinal vessels. Conclusions— Our data identify BMP signaling mediated by coordination of ALK2/ACVR1, ALK3/BMPR1A, and BMPR2 as an essential proangiogenic cue for retinal vessels.
A Sentiment-and-Semantics-Based Approach for Emotion Detection in Textual Conversations

Emotions are physiological states generated in humans in reaction to internal or external events. They are complex and studied across numerous fields including computer science. As humans, on reading "Why don't you ever text me! " we can either interpret it as a sad or angry emotion and the same ambiguity exists for machines. Lack of facial expressions and voice modulations make detecting emotions from text a challenging problem. However, as humans increasingly communicate using text messaging applications, and digital agents gain popularity in our society, it is essential that these digital agents are emotion aware, and respond accordingly. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect emotions like happy, sad or angry in textual conversations using an LSTM based Deep Learning model. Our approach consists of semi-automated techniques to gather training data for our model. We exploit advantages of semantic and sentiment based embeddings and propose a solution combining both. Our work is evaluated on real-world conversations and significantly outperforms traditional Machine Learning baselines as well as other off-the-shelf Deep Learning models.
Cognitive Discrepancy Models for Specific Learning Disabilities Identification: Simulations of Psychometric Limitations

Few studies have investigated specific learning disabilities (SLD) identification methods based on the identification of patterns of processing strengths and weaknesses (PSW). We investigated the reliability of SLD identification decisions emanating from different achievement test batteries for 1 method to operationalize the PSW approach: the concordance/discordance model (C/DM; Hale & Fiorello, 2004). Two studies examined the level of agreement for SLD identification decisions between 2 different simulated, highly correlated achievement test batteries. Study 1 simulated achievement and cognitive data across a wide range of potential latent correlations between an achievement deficit, a cognitive strength and a cognitive weakness. Latent correlations permitted simulation of case-level data at specified reliabilities for cognitive abilities and 2 achievement observations. C/DM criteria were applied and resulting SLD classifications from the 2 achievement test batteries were compared for agreement. Overall agreement and negative agreement were high, but positive agreement was low (0.33–0.59) across all conditions. Study 2 isolated the effects of reduced test reliability on agreement for SLD identification decisions resulting from different test batteries. Reductions in reliability of the 2 achievement tests resulted in average decreases in positive agreement of 0.13. Conversely, reductions in reliability of cognitive measures resulted in small average increases in positive agreement (0.0–0.06). Findings from both studies are consistent with prior research demonstrating the inherent instability of classifications based on C/DM criteria. Within complex ipsative SLD identification models like the C/DM, small variations in test selection can have deleterious effects on classification reliability.