Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nanoparticulate Iron Oxide Contrast Agents for Untargeted and Targeted Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging

In cardiology and oncology, early disease detection produces better patient outcomes. Imaging approaches, particularly Mag- netic Resonance Imaging (MRI), are attractive for screening large, mostly disease-free populations because they are noninvasive and pro- duce high-resolution anatomical/morphological images from disease sites. Biochemically targeted nanoparticulate contrast agents (ul- trasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide particles called USPIOs, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles called SPIONs, cross-linked iron oxides called CLIOs, Gadolinium chelates, and other superparamagnetic or paramagnetic particles) can be administered parenterally to define lesional biochemical/cellular composition, in addition to giving excellent definition of morphological features. Such targeted contrast agents can be considered modular nanobiological devices containing, at minimum, a contrast module and a targeting moiety. Here we review synthesis, surface chemistry and physics of superparamagnetic iron oxide MRI contrast agents (USPIOs and SPIONs) and results to date from the use of biochemically targeted and untargeted iron oxide MRI contrast agents in vivo, in vitro and ex vivo in vascular disease, and to a lesser extent, in oncology applications. We discuss design parameters critical to in vivo use of targeted contrast particles, including parameters influencing particle biodistribution/pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity. We discuss the increasing so- phistication of theranostic contrast agents that provide other physiological services concurrent with their MRI function.
Novel Human Rhinoviruses and Exacerbation of Asthma in Children

To determine links between human rhinoviruses (HRV) and asthma, we used data from a case–control study, March 2003–February 2004, among children with asthma. Molecular characterization identified several likely new HRVs and showed that association with asthma exacerbations was largely driven by HRV-A and a phylogenetically distinct clade of 8 strains, genogroup C.
Actin-dependent cytoplasmic streaming in C. elegans oogenesis

Oocytes in the C. elegans gonad enlarge rapidly. During the stage of enlargement, they are transcriptionally quiescent, and it is not understood how they acquire large quantities of materials such as mRNA and protein. Enlarging oocytes are connected via cytoplasmic bridges to a large, younger population of transcriptionally active germ cells at various stages of mitosis and meiosis. We show here that there is a general streaming of gonad cytoplasm towards and into the enlarging oocytes, originating primarily from pachytene-stage germ cells. Because previous studies suggested that most or all of the pachytene germ cells have the potential to differentiate into oocytes, the pachytene cells appear to function transiently as nurse cells. Somatic gonadal cells that surround the germ cells do not appear essential for streaming. Instead, materials appear to be pulled into oocytes by forces generated either in, or adjacent to, the enlarging oocytes themselves. Streaming appears to be driven by the actomyosin cytoskeleton, although we show that populations of both microfilaments and microtubules are oriented in the direction of flow. Our study shows that oocyte enlargement in C. elegans differs significantly from that in Drosophila, where a small number of specialized nurse cells expel their contents into the enlarging oocyte.
Design Research in e-Government

This paper investigates if design research in e-government should be conducted in some special way compared with standard models for design research. It reviews literature in e-government and design research in order to generate an answer to this research question. The result is affirmative that the policy character of e-government should have consequences for the way that e-government design research is conducted. A tentative e-government design research model, consisting of different activities is formulated. This model consists of the activities: theorizing, policy analysis, workpractice analysis, co-design and co-evaluation of IT artefact and workpractice. One important result from this paper is the formulation of the concept of the policy-ingrained artefact as an important empirical result from e-government design research.
Chromosomal deletion unmasking a recessive disease: 22q13 deletion syndrome and metachromatic leukodystrophy

A deletion on one chromosome and a mutant allele on the other may cause an autosomal recessive disease. We report on two patients with mental retardation, dysmorphic features and low catalytic activity of arylsulfatase A. One patient had a pathogenic mutation in the arylsulfatase A gene (ARSA) and succumbed to metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). The other patient had a pseudoallele, which does not lead to MLD. The presenting clinical features and low arylsulfatase A activity were explained, in each patients, by a deletion of 22q13 and, thereby, of one allele of ARSA.
Electrophysiology and density of retinal neurons in mice with a mutation that includes the Pax2 locus.

PURPOSE The Krd mouse has a deletion in chromosome 19 that includes the Pax2 gene locus. The aim of this study was to characterize in detail how these retinas differ from normal. METHODS Both electroretinographic and anatomic methods were used to assess visual function. Full-field flash electroretinograms (ERGs) and planimetric densities were obtained from Krd and control animals. RESULTS Measurements of the ERG show that in the Krd mice, both a- and b-wave amplitudes are attenuated relative to control by amounts that vary from animal to animal. The b-wave of the ERG generally is affected more severely than the a-wave. However, there is little or no shift of the curves relating the b-wave and a-wave amplitude to the intensity of the stimulus. Also, no change in the response kinetics seems to be associated with the attenuated responses. Estimates of planimetric cell density in the outer nuclear, inner nuclear, and ganglion cell layers show significant cell losses in affected animals that are more pronounced proportionally in the inner layers. Comparisons between electrophysiological and histologic measurements made on each eye show good correlation between the reduction in the ERG components and the magnitude of cell losses. CONCLUSIONS These experiments show that the eyes of Krd mice have reduced ERGs and reduced cellular density. There is a loss of cells in all layers of the retina, but the inner layers are affected more severely. Consistent with this, the b-wave is reduced more than the a-wave. The normal functional dependency of the ERG on stimulus intensity and the normal response kinetics suggest the cellular losses are not associated with changes in cellular function.
Additional value of PET/CT over PET in assessment of locoregional lymph nodes in thoracic esophageal squamous cell cancer.

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to compare the value of reviewing combined 18F-FDG PET/CT images with that of reviewing side-by-side PET and CT images in the diagnosis of locoregional lymph node metastases in patients with esophageal squamous cell cancer. METHODS From November 2003 to December 2005, 45 patients with thoracic esophageal squamous cell cancer underwent 18F-FDG PET/CT before surgery. The results of reviewing combined PET/CT images and side-by-side PET and CT images for the diagnosis of locoregional lymph node metastases were compared prospectively in relation to pathologic findings. RESULTS All patients underwent successful surgery, and pathologic examination confirmed nodes positive for metastasis in 32 patients and 82 of 397 excised nodal groups. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of PET/CT were 93.90% (77/82 nodal groups), 92.06% (290/315), 92.44% (367/397), 75.49% (77/102), and 98.31% (290/295), respectively, whereas those of PET were 81.71% (67/82), 87.30% (275/315), 86.15% (342/397), 62.62% (67/107), and 94.83% (275/290), respectively. P values were 0.032, 0.067, 0.006, 0.063, and 0.037, respectively. The differences in sensitivity, accuracy, and negative predictive value between PET and PET/CT were statistically significant. CONCLUSION PET/CT improves the sensitivity, accuracy, and negative predictive value of 18F-FDG imaging in the assessment of locoregional lymph nodes in thoracic esophageal squamous cell cancer and provides data of diagnostic significance.
Electrophysiological evidence for facilitatory control of oxytocin neurones by oxytocin during suckling in the rat.

Antidromically identified paraventricular neurones were recorded simultaneously with intramammary pressure in urethane (1.2 g/kg) anaesthetized rats during suckling. The correlation of the firing pattern of these neurones with milk ejection enabled distinction between oxytocin and vasopressin neurones. Oxytocin neurones displayed a short (2‐6 s) characteristic high‐frequency burst of spikes. This activation probably occurred simultaneously in all oxytocin neurones 12‐18 s before milk ejection and was regular in both frequency and amplitude (total number of spikes). The role of neurohypophysial peptides and analogues in the control of these characteristics was studied. Injecting 10 pg, 100 pg and 1 ng of oxytocin into the 3rd ventricle increased background activity of slow‐firing oxytocin neurones (less than 3 spikes/s) and had a strong dose‐dependent facilitatory effect on the milk ejection reflex, increasing both the amplitude and frequency of neurosecretory bursts. No effect was observed on non‐neurosecretory neurones. Such injection also triggered the milk ejection reflex when it had not appeared an hour after suckling began. Oxytocin did not itself induce neurosecretory activation, which only appeared if the young rats were sucking. Injecting oxytocin into the lateral ventricle was less effective than into the 3rd ventricle. No effect was observed after injection into the venous blood or into the 4th ventricle, which suggested that oxytocin acts in the hypothalamus. Injecting mesotocin or isotocin into the 3rd ventricle had a facilitatory effect similar to that of oxytocin but vasopressin, vasotocin, MIF I (pro‐leu‐gly‐NH2, terminal triplet oxytocin) or bovine neurophysins I and II did not modify neurosecretory activation or the milk ejection pattern. Injecting an oxytocin antagonist, ([1(beta‐mercapto‐beta, beta cyclopentamethylene propionic acid), 8‐ornithine] vasotocin, d(CH2)5OVT) into the 3rd ventricle decreased milk ejection frequency and considerably delayed the reappearance of the first milk ejection. This resulted from a decrease in both frequency and amplitude of neurosecretory bursts, which were too small to induce detectable oxytocin release. Moreover, d(CH2)5OVT suppressed the facilitatory effect of exogenous oxytocin. Under normal conditions, endogenous oxytocin seemed to be involved in the control of neurosecretory activation. Injecting 1 ng oxytocin or 1 or 10 ng vasopressin into the 3rd ventricle did not modify the firing pattern of vasopressin neurones whether activated by hyperosmotic stimulation (1 ml NaCl, 9% solution (w/v) I.P.) or not. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Bioterrorism preparedness expenditures may compromise public health.

The exchange of letters in the March issue regarding Cohen and colleagues’ October 2004 article1 did not sufficiently quantify the national public health impact of misdirecting precious dollars to bioterrorism preparedness. For fiscal years 2002–2005 and 2006 (projected), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) terrorism preparedness funding has varied from $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion, averaging 22% of the CDC’s entire annual budget.2,3 The anthrax incident of 2001, which caused 5 deaths, prompted an ill-conceived smallpox vaccination campaign that was implicated in the deaths of 3 health workers4 and cost an additional $0.6 billion in 2002 and 2003.2 It is difficult to accept the efficacy of dual-use prevention given the tragic failures during Hurricane Katrina.5 Thousands of the most vulnerable and helpless were left to die in the streets from dehydration, exposure, and lack of medical attention.6 Still, for the sake of argument, suppose that dual use (which Cohen et al. strongly discount) might prevent all of the estimated 36000 influenza-related deaths that occur each year.7 Even in this most optimistic of scenarios, the expenditure per fatality prevented would amount to more than $40000. In comparison, the CDC’s Chronic Disease Control and Health Promotion branch has a budget of $0.9 billion3 with which to combat an array of extremely important diseases and public health matters, ranging from diabetes to heart disease, from tobacco use to physical inactivity. These problems adversely affect millions of people each year. The United States is currently facing one of the worst epidemics of its history—overweight and obesity, which now affects 2 of 3 adults and is responsible for an estimated 300000 premature deaths annually.8 The CDC currently funds only 5 states for basic implementation and 23 states for capacity-building to counter this rapidly mounting problem.9 The CDC’s 2005 budget for nutrition, physical activity, and obesity is $42 million,3 which equates to roughly $200 per death related to obesity or overweight or 20 cents per affected individual. There is something seriously amiss when the CDC dedicates orders of magnitude more funding to preparedness for emergency events with a low probability of occurrence than to preventing a condition that affects the majority of our population, causing hundreds of preventable deaths every day. Considering that obesity and overweight are only two of the numerous pressing health concerns in this country, it is clear that the current massive misfunding of terrorism preparedness over public health has real-world implications for mortality and morbidity.
Meat and milk intakes and toddler growth: a comparison feeding intervention of animal-source foods in rural Kenya

Abstract Objective To examine the effects of animal-source foods on toddler growth. Design A 5-month comparison feeding intervention study with one of three millet-based porridges randomized to eighteen feeding stations serving 303 children aged 11–40 months. Feeding stations served plain millet porridge (Plain group), porridge with milk (Milk group) or porridge with beef (Meat group). Anthropometry, morbidity and food intake were measured at baseline and regular intervals. Longitudinal mixed models were used to analyse growth. Setting Embu, Kenya. Subjects Two hundred and seventy-four children were included in final analyses. Results Linear growth was significantly greater for the Milk group than the Meat group (P = 0·0025). Slope of growth of mid-arm muscle area of the Plain group was significantly greater than in the Meat group (P = 0·0046), while the Milk group's mid-upper arm circumference growth rate was significantly greater than the Meat group's (P = 0·0418). The Milk and Plain groups’ measures did not differ. Conclusions Milk and meat porridges did not have a significantly greater effect on growth than plain porridge in this undernourished population. Linear growth was influenced by more than energy intakes, as the Plain group's total body weight-adjusted energy intakes were significantly greater than the Meat group's, although linear growth did not differ. Energy intakes may be more important for growth in arm muscle. The diverse age distribution in the study makes interpretation difficult. A longer study period, larger sample size and more focused age group would improve clarity of the results.
Learning and Recognizing The Hierarchical and Sequential Structure of Human Activities

The mission of the research presented in this thesis is to give computers the power to sense and react to human activities. Without the ability to sense the surroundings and understand what humans are doing, computers will not be able to provide active, timely, appropriate, and considerate services to the humans. To accomplish this mission, the work stands on the shoulders of two giants: Machine learning and ubiquitous computing. Because of the ubiquity of sensor-enabled mobile and wearable devices, there has been an emerging opportunity to sense, learn, and infer human activities from the sensor data by leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. While having shown promising results in human activity recognition, most existing approaches using supervised or semi-supervised learning have two fundamental problems. Firstly, most existing approaches require a large set of labeled sensor data for every target class, which requires a costly effort from human annotators. Secondly, an unseen new activity cannot be recognized if no training samples of that activity are available in the dataset. In light of these problems, a new approach in this area is proposed in our research. This thesis presents our novel approach to address the problem of human activity recognition when few or no training samples of the target activities are available. The main hypothesis is that the problem can be solved by the proposed NuActiv activity recognition framework, which consists of modeling the hierarchical and sequential structure of human activities, as well as bringing humans in the loop of model training. By injecting human knowledge about the hierarchical nature of human activities, a semantic attribute representation and a two-layer attribute-based learning approach are designed. To model the sequential structure, a probabilistic graphical model is further proposed to take into account the temporal dependency of activities and attributes. Finally, an active learning algorithm is developed to reinforce the recognition accuracy using minimal user feedback. The hypothesis and approaches presented in this thesis are validated by two case studies and real-world experiments on exercise activities and daily life activities. Experimental results show that the NuActiv framework can effectively recognize unseen new activities even without any training data, with up to 70-80% precision and recall rate. It also outperforms supervised learning with limited labeled data for the new classes. The results significantly advance the state of the art in human activity recognition, and represent a promising step towards bridging the gap between computers and humans.
Effects of Hydrogen on Electrochemical Behaviors of X80 Steel in Simulated Soil Solution

X80 pipeline steel specimens were treated by electrochemical hydrogen charging under various current density and charging time. The polarization resistance and corrosion rate of X80 steel were analyzed in Yingtan simulated soil solution under the different hydrogen charging conditions. The results showed that hydrogen accelerated anodic dissolution and enhanced corrosion sensitivity. With hydrogen in the steel, the charge transfer resistance and polarization resistance decreased, double electric layer capacitor and corrosion current increased. The effects were enhanced with the increase of hydrogen charging time and current density.
Infrared study of goethites of varying crystallinity and particle size: I. Interpretation of OH and lattice vibration frequencies

Abstract A detailed study of the IR spectrum of goethite is given with the aim of relating variations to crystalline order and particle size. The OH stretching vibrations are split into two active components at high frequency, plus two inactive ones at low frequency. Two different bending modes exist from site group splitting. Their active modes from factor group splitting are at lower frequencies than the uncoupled ones. The lattice bands at 630 and 400 cm−1 correspond to Fe-O or Fe-OH stretching, approximately parallel to a and c, and thus respectively sensitive and not sensitive to the particle shape, as long as it remains elongated along c.
Cross-Species Comparison of the Burkholderia pseudomallei, Burkholderia thailandensis, and Burkholderia mallei Quorum-Sensing Regulons

ABSTRACT Burkholderia pseudomallei, Burkholderia thailandensis, and Burkholderia mallei (the Bptm group) are close relatives with very different lifestyles: B. pseudomallei is an opportunistic pathogen, B. thailandensis is a nonpathogenic saprophyte, and B. mallei is a host-restricted pathogen. The acyl-homoserine lactone quorum-sensing (QS) systems of these three species show a high level of conservation. We used transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) to define the quorum-sensing regulon in each species, and we performed a cross-species analysis of the QS-controlled orthologs. Our analysis revealed a core set of QS-regulated genes in all three species, as well as QS-controlled factors shared by only two species or unique to a given species. This global survey of the QS regulons of B. pseudomallei, B. thailandensis, and B. mallei serves as a platform for predicting which QS-controlled processes might be important in different bacterial niches and contribute to the pathogenesis of B. pseudomallei and B. mallei.
Push-Pull Gossiping for Information Sharing in Peer-to-Peer Communities

We expand the scope of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems to include the concept of “communities”. Communities are analogous to interest groups and can overlap. We use communities as a more natural arrangement of distributed systems. This paper focuses on a novel, pushpull gossiping technique to improve decentralized information dissemination and search within a P2P community. To facilitate an efficient gossiping operation, a distributed discovery algorithm first identifies highly influential peers (called seers) in a community. Then, the push phase multicasts information to these seers so that peers can easily and quickly retrieve this information via a pull phase. Our experiments show that pushing gossip information to only a small number of seers allows a large percentage of peer members to obtain (pull) the information within just two hops.
Avaliação das propriedades mecânicas de espumas híbridas de vidro bioativo/álcool polivinílico para aplicação em engenharia de tecidos

Bioactive glass/ polymer hybrids are materials of high interest for biomedicals applications because their assets, they combine the bioactivity of ceramics, with the flexibility of the polymers. In bone regenerations, mechanicals properties of the scaffold are criticisms and they must be similar to the bone properties. In previous works, hybrid foams with 80% bioactive glass and 20% polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were prepared by sol-gel process to application as scaffold for bone tissue engineering. In this work, the PVA fraction of the hybrids was increase for to improve their mechanicals properties. The hybrids were prepared with composition inorganic of 70%SiO2-30%CaO and PVA fractions of 20 to 60% by sol-gel method. The drying of the foams was a criticism stage, occurring ample contraction from the gel. The samples were drying for two routes: (1) pre-drying at 40oC for 7 days and drying at vacuum for 48 hours; (2) pre-drying with air circulation at 40oC for 7 days and drying at high vacuum for 48 hours. The drying route 2 had the most lost of water and the least contraction of samples. Five specimens of hybrids samples with dimensions 10x10x10mm were compressed at 0,5mm/min-1. The increase of PVA fraction in the hybrids improves their mechanicals properties.