Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment of Vascular Changes in Diabetic Macular Edema after Dexamethasone Implant Using Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography

The aim of this study was to investigate retinal and choriocapillaris vessel changes in diabetic macular edema (DME) after the intravitreal dexamethasone implant (IDI) using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA). Moreover, a comparison between morphological and functional parameters of DME and healthy patients was performed. Twenty-five eyes of 25 type 2 diabetic retinopathy patients complicated by macular edema (DME group) and 25 healthy subjects (control group) were enrolled. Superficial capillary plexus density (SCPD) and deep capillary plexus density (DCPD) in the foveal and parafoveal areas, choricapillary density (CCD) and optic disc vessel density (ODVD) were detected using OCTA at baseline and after 7, 30, 60, 90 and 120 days post injection. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), retinal sensitivity, and central retinal thickness (CMT) were also evaluated in both groups of patients. A statistically significant difference between the two groups (DME and controls) was found in terms of functional (MP, p < 0.001 and BCVA, p < 0.001) and morphological (CMT, p < 0.001; SCPD in the parafoveal area, p < 0.001; DCPD in the foveal area, p < 0.05 and parafoveal area, p < 0.001; CCD, p < 0.001) parameters. After the treatment, SCPD and DCPD in the foveal and parafoveal areas did not modify significantly during the follow up.
Predictors of Grandparental Investment Decisions in Contemporary Europe: Biological Relatedness and Beyond

Across human cultures, grandparents make a valued contribution to the health of their families and communities. Moreover, evidence is gathering that grandparents have a positive impact on the development of grandchildren in contemporary industrialized societies. A broad range of factors that influence the likelihood grandparents will invest in their grandchildren has been explored by disciplines as diverse as sociology, economics, psychology and evolutionary biology. To progress toward an encompassing framework, this study will include biological relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren, a factor central to some discipline's theoretical frameworks (e.g., evolutionary biology), next to a wide range of other factors in an analysis of grandparental investment in contemporary Europe. This study draws on data collected in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe from 11 European countries that included 22,967 grandparent–child dyads. Grandparents reported biological relatedness, and grandparental investment was measured as the frequency of informal childcare. Biological and non-biological grandparents differed significantly in a variety of individual, familial and area-level characteristics. Furthermore, many other economic, sociological, and psychological factors also influenced grandparental investment. When they were controlled, biological grandparents, relative to non-biological grandparents, were more likely to invest heavily, looking after their grandchildren almost daily or weekly. Paradoxically, however, they were also more likely to invest nothing at all. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of these findings across disciplines.
Brain maps 4.0—Structure of the rat brain: An open access atlas with global nervous system nomenclature ontology and flatmaps

The fourth edition (following editions in 1992, 1998, 2004) of Brain maps: structure of the rat brain is presented here as an open access internet resource for the neuroscience community. One new feature is a set of 10 hierarchical nomenclature tables that define and describe all parts of the rat nervous system within the framework of a strictly topographic system devised previously for the human nervous system. These tables constitute a global ontology for knowledge management systems dealing with neural circuitry. A second new feature is an aligned atlas of bilateral flatmaps illustrating rat nervous system development from the neural plate stage to the adult stage, where most gray matter regions, white matter tracts, ganglia, and nerves listed in the nomenclature tables are illustrated schematically. These flatmaps are convenient for future development of online applications analogous to “Google Maps” for systems neuroscience. The third new feature is a completely revised Atlas of the rat brain in spatially aligned transverse sections that can serve as a framework for 3‐D modeling. Atlas parcellation is little changed from the preceding edition, but the nomenclature for rat is now aligned with an emerging panmammalian neuroanatomical nomenclature. All figures are presented in Adobe Illustrator vector graphics format that can be manipulated, modified, and resized as desired, and freely used with a Creative Commons license.
Improving tRNAscan‐SE Annotation Results via Ensemble Classifiers

tRNAScan‐SE is a tRNA detection program that is widely used for tRNA annotation; however, the false positive rate of tRNAScan‐SE is unacceptable for large sequences. Here, we used a machine learning method to try to improve the tRNAScan‐SE results. A new predictor, tRNA‐Predict, was designed. We obtained real and pseudo‐tRNA sequences as training data sets using tRNAScan‐SE and constructed three different tRNA feature sets. We then set up an ensemble classifier, LibMutil, to predict tRNAs from the training data. The positive data set of 623 tRNA sequences was obtained from tRNAdb 2009 and the negative data set was the false positive tRNAs predicted by tRNAscan‐SE. Our in silico experiments revealed a prediction accuracy rate of 95.1 % for tRNA‐Predict using 10‐fold cross‐validation. tRNA‐Predict was developed to distinguish functional tRNAs from pseudo‐tRNAs rather than to predict tRNAs from a genome‐wide scan. However, tRNA‐Predict can work with the output of tRNAscan‐SE, which is a genome‐wide scanning method, to improve the tRNAscan‐SE annotation results. The tRNA‐Predict web server is accessible at http://datamining.xmu. edu.cn/∼gjs/tRNA‐Predict.
Outer Membrane Vesicles Facilitate Trafficking of the Hydrophobic Signaling Molecule CAI-1 between Vibrio harveyi Cells

Formation of membrane vesicles is ubiquitous among bacteria. These vesicles are involved in protein and DNA transfer and offer new approaches for vaccination. Gram-negative bacteria use hydrophobic signaling molecules, among others, for cell-cell communication; however, due to their hydrophobic character, it is unclear how these molecules are disseminated between bacterial cells. Here, we show that the marine pathogen Vibrio harveyi packages one of its QS molecules, the long-chain ketone CAI-1, into outer membrane vesicles (OMVs). Isolated CAI-1-containing vesicles trigger a QS phenotype in CAI-1 nonproducing V. harveyi and also in Vibrio cholerae cells. Packaging of CAI-1 into OMVs not only solubilizes, stabilizes, and concentrates this class of molecules, but facilitate their distribution between bacteria that live in aqueous environments. ABSTRACT Many bacteria use extracellular signaling molecules to coordinate group behavior, a process referred to as quorum sensing (QS). However, some QS molecules are hydrophobic in character and are probably unable to diffuse across the bacterial cell envelope. How these molecules are disseminated between bacterial cells within a population is not yet fully understood. Here, we show that the marine pathogen Vibrio harveyi packages the hydrophobic QS molecule CAI-1, a long-chain amino ketone, into outer membrane vesicles. Electron micrographs indicate that outer membrane vesicles of variable size are predominantly produced and released into the surroundings during the stationary phase of V. harveyi, which correlates with the timing of CAI-1-dependent signaling. The large vesicles (diameter, <55 nm) can trigger a QS phenotype in CAI-1-nonproducing V. harveyi and Vibrio cholerae cells. Packaging of CAI-1 into outer membrane vesicles might stabilize the molecule in aqueous environments and facilitate its distribution over distances. IMPORTANCE Formation of membrane vesicles is ubiquitous among bacteria. These vesicles are involved in protein and DNA transfer and offer new approaches for vaccination. Gram-negative bacteria use hydrophobic signaling molecules, among others, for cell-cell communication; however, due to their hydrophobic character, it is unclear how these molecules are disseminated between bacterial cells. Here, we show that the marine pathogen Vibrio harveyi packages one of its QS molecules, the long-chain ketone CAI-1, into outer membrane vesicles (OMVs). Isolated CAI-1-containing vesicles trigger a QS phenotype in CAI-1 nonproducing V. harveyi and also in Vibrio cholerae cells. Packaging of CAI-1 into OMVs not only solubilizes, stabilizes, and concentrates this class of molecules, but facilitate their distribution between bacteria that live in aqueous environments.
Change of an Injured Corticospinal Tract During 3 Weeks' Rehabilitation After Putaminal Hemorrhage.

A 51-yr-old, right-handed woman presented with right hemiplegia due to a putaminal hemorrhage in the left hemisphere (Fig. 1A). She underwent conservative management at the department of neurosurgery of a university hospital. The patient showed moderate weakness of the right limbs 2 wks after the in
EGFR and EGFRvIII Promote Angiogenesis and Cell Invasion in Glioblastoma: Combination Therapies for an Effective Treatment

Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the mutant EGFRvIII are major focal points in current concepts of targeted cancer therapy for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant primary brain tumor. The receptors participate in the key processes of tumor cell invasion and tumor-related angiogenesis and their upregulation correlates with the poor prognosis of glioma patients. Glioma cell invasion and increased angiogenesis share mechanisms of the degradation of the extracellular matrix (ECM) through upregulation of ECM-degrading proteases as well as the activation of aberrant signaling pathways. This review describes the role of EGFR and EGFRvIII in those mechanisms which might offer new combined therapeutic approaches targeting EGFR or EGFRvIII together with drug treatments against proteases of the ECM or downstream signaling to increase the inhibitory effects of mono-therapies.
BLOC-1 is required for selective membrane protein trafficking from endosomes to primary cilia

Primary cilia perceive the extracellular environment through receptors localized in the ciliary membrane, but mechanisms directing specific proteins to this domain are poorly understood. To address this question, we knocked down proteins potentially important for ciliary membrane targeting and determined how this affects the ciliary trafficking of fibrocystin, polycystin-2, and smoothened. Our analysis showed that fibrocystin and polycystin-2 are dependent on IFT20, GMAP210, and the exocyst complex, while smoothened delivery is largely independent of these components. In addition, we found that polycystin-2, but not smoothened or fibrocystin, requires the biogenesis of lysosome-related organelles complex-1 (BLOC-1) for ciliary delivery. Consistent with the role of BLOC-1 in sorting from the endosome, we find that disrupting the recycling endosome reduces ciliary polycystin-2 and causes its accumulation in the recycling endosome. This is the first demonstration of a role for BLOC-1 in ciliary assembly and highlights the complexity of pathways taken to the cilium.
Music Style Transfer: A Position Paper

Led by the success of neural style transfer on visual arts, there has been a rising trend very recently in the effort of music style transfer. However, "music style" is not yet a well-defined concept from a scientific point of view. The difficulty lies in the intrinsic multi-level and multi-modal character of music representation (which is very different from image representation). As a result, depending on their interpretation of "music style", current studies under the category of "music style transfer", are actually solving completely different problems that belong to a variety of sub-fields of Computer Music. Also, a vanilla end-to-end approach, which aims at dealing with all levels of music representation at once by directly adopting the method of image style transfer, leads to poor results. Thus, we see a vital necessity to re-define music style transfer more precisely and scientifically based on the uniqueness of music representation, as well as to connect different aspects of music style transfer with existing well-established sub-fields of computer music studies. Otherwise, an accumulated upcoming literature (all named after music style transfer) will lead to a great confusion of the underlying problems as well as negligence of the treasures in computer music before the age of deep learning. In addition, we discuss the current limitations of music style modeling and its future directions by drawing spirit from some deep generative models, especially the ones using unsupervised learning and disentanglement techniques.
Joint Transmitter–Receiver Spatial Modulation

We propose and investigate a joint transmitter–receiver spatial modulation (JSM) scheme, which transmits information by jointly exploiting the indices of transmit antenna patterns, the indices of receiver antennas, and amplitude–phase modulation. The proposed JSM is capable of simultaneously achieving transmit diversity, receive diversity, and multiplexing gain. In order to facilitate the implementation of the JSM with different reliability-complexity tradeoff, two types of detectors are introduced, which are the maximum-likelihood detection (MLD) and the proposed sub-optimal detection (SOD), including a two-stage SOD and a three-stage SOD. In order to gain insight into the characteristics of the JSM, we analyze the approximate and asymptotic average bit error probability of the JSM systems employing MLD, when regular-scale and large-scale JSM systems are, respectively, considered. Finally, the performance of the JSM systems is investigated with the aid of both simulation and numerical evaluation of our derived formulas. Our studies show that the JSM employs a high flexibility for implementation and online configuration, so as to adapt to the communications environments and to attain the best possible performance.
Cloud manufacturing: from concept to practice

The concept of cloud manufacturing is emerging as a new promising manufacturing paradigm, as well as a business model, which is reshaping the service-oriented, highly collaborative, knowledge-intensive and eco-efficient manufacturing industry. However, the basic concepts about cloud manufacturing are still in discussion. Both academia and industry will need to have a commonly accepted definition of cloud manufacturing, as well as further guidance and recommendations on how to develop and implement cloud manufacturing. In this paper, we review some of the research work and clarify some fundamental terminologies in this field. Further, we developed a cloud manufacturing systems which may serve as an application example. From a systematic and practical perspective, the key requirements of cloud manufacturing platforms are investigated, and then we propose a cloud manufacturing platform prototype, MfgCloud. Finally, a public cloud manufacturing system for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) is presented. This paper presents a new perspective for cloud manufacturing, as well as a cloud-to-ground solution. The integrated solution proposed in this paper, including the terminology, MfgCloud, and applications, can push forward this new paradigm from concept to practice.
Incremental and Decremental Affinity Propagation for Semisupervised Clustering in Multispectral Images

Clustering is used for land-cover identification in remote sensing images when training data are not available. However, in many applications, it is often possible to collect a small number of labeled samples. To effectively exploit this small number of labeled samples combined with a multitude of the unlabeled data, we present a novel semisupervised clustering technique [incremental and decremental affinity propagation (ID-AP)] that incorporates labeled exemplars into the AP algorithm. Unlike standard semisupervised clustering methods, the proposed technique improves the performance by using both the labeled samples to adjust the similarity matrix and an ID-learning principle for unlabeled data selection and useless labeled samples rejection, respectively. This avoids both learning-bias and stability-plasticity dilemma. In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed ID-AP technique, the experimental analysis was carried out on three different kinds of multispectral images including different percentages of labeled samples. In the analysis, we also studied the accuracy and the stability of two semisupervised clustering algorithms [i.e., constrained k-means and semisupervised AP (SAP)] and one incremental semisupervised clustering algorithm (i.e., incremental SAP). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ID-AP technique adequately captures and takes full advantage of the intrinsic relationship between the labeled samples and unlabeled data, and produces better performance than the other considered methods.
Sex differences and hormonal effects on gut microbiota composition in mice

ABSTRACT We previously reported quantitation of gut microbiota in a panel of 89 different inbred strains of mice, and we now examine the question of sex differences in microbiota composition. When the total population of 689 mice was examined together, several taxa exhibited significant differences in abundance between sexes but a larger number of differences were observed at the single strain level, suggesting that sex differences can be obscured by host genetics and environmental factors. We also examined a subset of mice on chow and high fat diets and observed sex-by-diet interactions. We further investigated the sex differences using gonadectomized and hormone treated mice from 3 different inbred strains. Principal coordinate analysis with unweighted UniFrac distances revealed very clear effects of gonadectomy and hormone replacement on microbiota composition in all 3 strains. Moreover, bile acid analyses showed gender-specific differences as well as effects of gonodectomy, providing one possible mechanism mediating sex differences in microbiota composition.
T1D Autoantibodies: room for improvement?

Purpose of review Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is now predictable by measuring major islet autoantibodies (IAbs) against insulin and other pancreatic &bgr; cells proteins including GAD65 (GADA), islet antigen 2 (IA-2A), and zinc transporter 8 (ZnT8A). The assay technology for IAbs has made great progress; however, several important aspects still need to be addressed and improved. Recent findings Currently a radio-binding assay has been well established as the ‘gold’ standard assay for all four IAbs. New generation of nonradioactive IAb assay with electrochemiluminescence technology has been shown to further improve sensitivity and disease specificity. Recently, multiplexed assays have opened the possibility of more efficient screening in large populations. Identification of potential new autoantibodies to neo-antigens or neo-epitopes posttranslational modification is a new important field to be explored. Summary Individuals having a single positive autoantibody are at low risk for progression to T1D, whereas individuals expressing two or more positive autoantibodies, especially on multiple tests over time, have nearly 100% risk of developing clinical T1D when followed for over two decades. More efficient and cost effective IAb assays will hopefully lead to point-of-care screening in the general population.
Sudden unexpected death caused by stroke: A nationwide study among children and young adults in Denmark

Background Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in young individuals globally. Data on the burden of sudden death by stroke are sparse in the young. Aims The aim of this study was to report mortality rates, cause of death, stroke subtype, and symptoms in children and young adults who suffered sudden death by stroke. Methods We conducted a retrospective, nationwide study including all deaths within Danish borders between 2000–2009 and 2007–2009 in persons aged 1–35 years and 36–49 years, respectively. Two physicians identified all sudden death cases through review of all death certificates. All available autopsy reports and records from hospitals and general practitioners were retrieved and a neurologist identified all sudden death by stroke cases. Results Of the 14,567 deaths in the 10-year period, there were 1,698 sudden death cases, of which 52 (3%) were sudden death by stroke. There was a male predominance (56%) and the median age was 33 years. The incidence of sudden death by stroke in individuals aged 1–49 years was 0.19 deaths per 100,000 person-years. Stroke was hemorrhagic in 94% of cases, whereof subarachnoid hemorrhage was the cause of death in 63% of cases. Seventeen (33%) cases contacted the healthcare system because of neurological symptoms, whereof one was suspected of having a stroke (6%). Conclusions Sudden death by stroke in children and young adults occurs primarily due to hemorrhagic stroke. We report a high frequency of neurological symptoms prior to sudden death by stroke. Increased awareness among healthcare professionals towards stroke symptoms in children and young adults may lead to earlier detection of stroke, and thereby potentially lowering the incidence of sudden death by stroke.
Combined Genetic and Telemetry Data Reveal High Rates of Gene Flow, Migration, and Long-Distance Dispersal Potential in Arctic Ringed Seals (Pusa hispida)

Ringed seals (Pusa hispida) are broadly distributed in seasonally ice covered seas, and their survival and reproductive success is intricately linked to sea ice and snow. Climatic warming is diminishing Arctic snow and sea ice and threatens to endanger ringed seals in the foreseeable future. We investigated the population structure and connectedness within and among three subspecies: Arctic (P. hispida hispida), Baltic (P. hispida botnica), and Lake Saimaa (P. hispida saimensis) ringed seals to assess their capacity to respond to rapid environmental changes. We consider (a) the geographical scale of migration, (b) use of sea ice, and (c) the amount of gene flow between subspecies. Seasonal movements and use of sea ice were determined for 27 seals tracked via satellite telemetry. Additionally, population genetic analyses were conducted using 354 seals representative of each subspecies and 11 breeding sites. Genetic analyses included sequences from two mitochondrial regions and genotypes of 9 microsatellite loci. We found that ringed seals disperse on a pan-Arctic scale and both males and females may migrate long distances during the summer months when sea ice extent is minimal. Gene flow among Arctic breeding sites and between the Arctic and the Baltic Sea subspecies was high; these two subspecies are interconnected as are breeding sites within the Arctic subspecies.