Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The trigeminovascular system and migraine: Studies characterizing cerebrovascular and neuropeptide changes seen in humans and cats

Both clinical and physiological consideration of migraine suggests that the pathophysiology of the syndrome is intimately linked to the trigeminal innervation of the cranial vessels, the trigeminovascular system. Studies were conducted on cats and humans to examine the interaction of these systems with the effective acute antimigraine drugs dihydroergotamine and sumatriptan. In the animal studies cats were anesthetized and prepared for routine physiological monitoring as well as for blood sampling from the external jugular veins. Cerebral blood flow was monitored continuously using laser Doppler flowmetry and the effect of trigeminal ganglion stimulation on both cerebral blood flow and jugular vein peptide levels determined prior to and after administration of either sumatriptan or dihydroergotamine. Stimulation of the trigeminal ganglion led to a frequency‐dependent increase in cerebral blood flow, with a mean maximum of 43 ± 9% at a stimulus frequency of 20 per second. There was a marked reduction in these responses by some 50% after administration of either sumatriptan or dihydroergotamine. Trigeminal ganglion stimulation at a frequency of 5 per second also led to a release into the cranial circulation of calcitonin gene–related peptide (CGRP), with the level rising from 67 ± 3 to 82 ± 5 pmol/liter on the side of stimulation. These increases were also markedly antagonized by both sumatriptan and dihydroergotamine. Human studies were conducted as part of the overall evaluation of sumatriptan for the treatment of acute migraine. In 7 of 8 patients responding to subcutaneous sumatriptan administration, elevated CGRP levels (60 ± 8 pmol/liter) were normalized, with the headache being relieved (40 ± 8 pmol/liter). These data characterize some aspects of the cerebrovascular physiology of the trigeminovascular system and demonstrate important interactions between this system and the effective antimigraine agents sumatriptan and dihydroergotamine and that such interactions can be represented in animal models.
The clinical and cost effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic service

Objectives To assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic (VFC) model, and supplement the literature regarding this service as recommended by The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the British Orthopaedic Association (BOA). Methods This was a retrospective study including all patients (17 116) referred to fracture clinics in a London District General Hospital from May 2013 to April 2016, using hospital-level data. We used interrupted time series analysis with segmented regression, and direct before-and-after comparison, to study the impact of VFCs introduced in December 2014 on six clinical parameters and on local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) spend. Student’s t-tests were used for direct comparison, whilst segmented regression was employed for projection analysis. Results There were statistically significant reductions in numbers of new patients seen face-to-face (140.4, sd 39.6 versus 461.6, sd 61.63, p < 0.0001), days to first orthopaedic review (5.2, sd 0.66 versus 10.9, sd 1.5, p < 0.0001), discharges (33.5, sd 3.66 versus 129.2, sd 7.36, p < 0.0001) and non-attendees (14.82, sd 1.48 versus 60.47, sd 2.68, p < 0.0001), in addition to a statistically significant increase in number of patients seen within 72-hours (46.4% 3873 of 8345 versus 5.1% 447 of 8771, p < 0.0001). There was a non-significant increase in consultation time of 1 minute 9 seconds (14 minutes 53 seconds sd 106 seconds versus 13 minutes 44 seconds sd 128 seconds, p = 0.0878). VFC saved the local CCG £67 385.67 in the first year and is set to save £129 885.67 annually thereafter. Conclusions We have shown VFCs are clinically and cost-effective, with improvement across several clinical performance parameters and substantial financial savings for CCGs. To our knowledge this is the largest study addressing clinical practice implications of VFCs in England, using robust methodology to adjust for pre-existing trends. Further studies are required to appreciate whether our results are reproducible with local variations in the VFC model and payment tariffs. Cite this article: A. McKirdy, A. M. Imbuldeniya. The clinical and cost effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic service: An interrupted time series analysis and before-and-after comparison. Bone Joint Res 2017;6:–269. DOI: 10.1302/2046-3758.65. BJR-2017-0330.R1.
Nonlinear Lyapunov-based boundary control of distributed heat transfer mechanisms in membrane distillation plant

This paper presents a nonlinear Lyapunov-based boundary control for the temperature difference of a membrane distillation boundary layers. The heat transfer mechanisms inside the process are modeled with a 2D advection-diffusion equation. The model is semi-descretized in space, and a nonlinear state-space representation is provided. The control is designed to force the temperature difference along the membrane sides to track a desired reference asymptotically, and hence a desired flux would be generated. Certain constraints are put on the control law inputs to be within an economic range of energy supplies. The effect of the controller gain is discussed. Simulations with real process parameters for the model, and the controller are provided.
A systematic approach for the analysis of the economic viability of investment projects

This paper aims to present a systematic for the analysis of the economic viability of investment projects (SAEVIP) in fixed assets. In the literature, it is possible to identify the fundamental elements to evaluate the merit of the investment project (IP). To assess the dimension 'return', indicators are analysed: net present value (NPV), NPV annualised (NPVA), index benefit/cost (IBC), return on investment annualised (ROIA), index ROIA/minimum rate of attractiveness (MRA) and return on investment (ROI). An indicator analysis for dimension 'risk' is performed by internal rate of return (IRR), Payback, index MRA/IRR, index Payback/N and Fisher point. In addition, a joint assessment of indicator of risk and return is performed. A sensitivity study is promoted on the main variables involved in economic performance of the IP (MRA, costs and revenues). To validate the SAEVIP proposal, a case study shows the wealth of information generated by the application of this systematic.
Evolution of Renal Hyper fi ltration and Arterial Stiffness FromAdolescence Into Early Adulthood in Type 1 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE—To determine, in a small but carefully physiologically characterized cohort of subjects with uncomplicated type 1 diabetes, the changes in renal hemodynamic function and arterial stiffness that occur over time as the participants transitioned from adolescence into early adulthood. The classical paradigm for type 1 diabetes suggests that glomerular filtration rate (GFR) declines in patients with renal hyperfiltration, but the natural history of peripheral vascular function abnormalities in uncomplicated type 1 diabetes is less well understood, particularly as patients transition from adolescence to early adulthood.
Cardiac Troponin Levels in Heart Failure

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a major cardiovascular disorder that is increasing in incidence, prevalence, and lethality. The prognostic significance of cardiac troponin levels among symptomatic and asymptomatic CHF has attracted recent interest. We sought to assess the significance of cardiac troponins in heart failure. These cardiac markers are associated with decreased left ventricular ejection fraction and poor prognosis in patients with CHF and are related to the severity of heart failure. The mechanism for the release of these markers seems to be from ventricular remodeling, ongoing myocyte degeneration, the presence of coronary artery disease, and reduced coronary reserve. In addition to B-type (brain) natriuretic peptide (BNP), cardiac troponin levels measured in patients admitted to the hospital could help risk-stratify patients and manage them effectively. BNP and cardiac troponins are easy to measure and can be repeated many times to follow patients, without interobserver variability. Theoretically, BNP is a marker of heart failure status and cardiac troponin is a marker of myocyte injury. The first therapeutic goal could be relief of circulatory congestion and lowering of BNP. The second goal could be attenuation of myocyte injury and lowering of cardiac troponins. Measuring and monitoring the levels of both could be highly effective means to reliably stratify the patients into low-, intermediate-, and high-risk groups for cardiac events and progression of heart failure. Furthermore, large-scale trials are necessary to establish them as noninvasive monitoring markers of heart failure and effectiveness of treatment.
Design of multi-threaded real time embedded video acquisition system from IP cameras

IP cameras have become the de facto imaging sensor used for video acquisition in surveillance systems because of its advantages over traditional analog cameras. Video Compression schemes are adopted for efficient transmission and bandwidth preservation of the link. Currently H.264 is the compression standard adopted for video compression in these devices. Logging of the videos from the imaging sensors is the fundamental responsibility of these surveillance systems. This paper presents an efficient method for the multi threaded acquisition of H.264 encoded video stream from these imaging sensors. An embedded implementation of the proposed method have also been carried out on an ARM Cortex A8 target. The embedded system developed possesses the capability of acquiring compressed video streams concurrently from 4 IP Cameras while handling the real time processing constraints.
Towards a Provisioning Algorithm for Dynamic Workflows in the Cloud

Workflow applications are an enabling technology for coordinating the activities of an enterprise. The resources provisioning for these applications is one of the most difficult challenges in the cloud. It consists in making an appropriate decision when mapping tasks to resources while satisfying QoS requirements. Current resources provisioning approaches in the cloud consider only static workflows and ignore the need to change workflow instances at runtime. This functionality is an essential requirement to deal with unusual situations and evolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel resources provisioning approach which considers the dynamic changes of workflows. The proposed approach introduces an algorithm which determines the assignment of tasks to the appropriate cloud resources. After that, we extend it in order to support the dynamic changes of workflows. Our algorithm is evaluated using CloudSim simulator. The experimental results which we present illustrate the efficiency of our approach in term of financial execution cost.
Influence of CYP3A5 polymorphism on tacrolimus maintenance doses and serum levels after renal transplantation: Age dependency and pharmacological interaction with steroids

Ferraris JR, Argibay PF, Costa L, Jimenez G, Coccia PA, Ghezzi LFR, Ferraris V, Belloso WH, Redal MA, Larriba JM. Influence of CYP3A5 polymorphism on tacrolimus maintenance doses and serum levels after renal transplantation: Age dependency and pharmacological interaction with steroids. Pediatr Transplantation 2011: 15: 525–532. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S.
Homeowners and Neighborhood Reinvestment

This book investigates the efforts of homeowners to maintain and improve their dwellings. Their behavior, it has found, depends on economic variables as well as the sociological structure of their neighborhoods. Residential satisfaction, expectations of the neighborhood, and mobility plans were taken into account. Multivariate statistical analyses of models were conducted using household data from Minneapolis and Wooster, Ohio. Three important findings emerged. First, homeowners' sense of solidarity with their neighbors is as significant in determining their efforts at home upkeep as are their income or age. Second, the optimism of homeowners toward increases in property values results in behavior opposite to that produced by optimism about neighborhood quality of life. This implies that different kinds of predictable gaming behavior occur among homeowners, depending on the neighborhoods in which they live. Third, both short-term and extremely long-term plans to move prove damaging to home upkeep. The results of this study form the basis for a better understanding of such residential phenomena as class succession, racial transition, and gentrification. Galster's findings will also be valuable for analyzing policies that attempt to encourage neighborhood reinvestment.
On Some Effects of International Fragmentation of Production on Comparative Advantages, Trade Flows and the Income of Countries

In traditional trade models, whether based on technological differences or on relative factor endowments, merchandise composition and directions of trade are derived from closed-economy conditions. But nowadays one of the basic assumptions of traditional trade models, i.e. that production processes are integrated within just one country, is being increasingly violated as previously integrated productive activities are segmented and spread over an international network of production sites: as a result, an increasingly large share of trade flows is made up of intermediate and unfinished goods being transferred from one country to another in order to be processed. In this paper we submit that such new configuration of production processes has important effects on at least three dimensions of economic research. First, we show that international disintegration of production processes leads to a lessening of the power of comparative advantages when it comes to explaining both merchandise composition and directions of trade, while it is the concept of absolute advantage to become increasingly relevant; second, we show that empirical measures of revealed comparative advantages are inherently misleading if they do not account for differences in the stage-of-processing of traded goods; third, we estimate a simple model of aggregate demand accounting for international trade in intermediates: results of estimation lend support to our prior that participation of a country in the process of international fragmentation of production plays a specific and significant role in determining its year-over-year change in GDP.
Differential analysis of Round-Reduced AES faulty ciphertexts

This paper describes new Round Reduction analysis attacks on an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementation by laser fault injection. The previous round reduction attacks require both of spatial and temporal accuracies in order to execute only one, two or nine rounds. We present new attacks by more flexible fault injection conditions. Our experiments are carried out on an 8-bit microcontroller which embeds a software AES with pre-calculated round keys. Faults are injected either into the round counter itself or into the reference of its total round number. The attacks may result to the use of a faulty round key at the last one or two executed rounds. The cryptanalysis of the obtained round-reduced faulty ciphertexts resorts to the differentiation techniques used by Differential Fault Analysis.
Feasibility and efficacy of the 2.5 L and 3.8 L impella percutaneous left ventricular support device during high‐risk, percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with severe aortic stenosis

Assessment of the feasibility and outcomes of the 2.5 L and 3.8 L Impella cardiac pump in patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS) and left ventricular impairment undergoing percutaneous revascularization (PCI) with or without balloon aortic valvuloplasty (BAV).
Valuating Cash Flows in an Inflationary Environment: The Case of World Bank

When valuating cash flows they should be based on estimates of free cash flows at nominal prices. In particular, we show that results from the valuation of cash flows with the constant and real price methods are biased upwards and there is a risk that in practice, bad projects will be accepted as good projects or that the valuation of free cash flows for valuing firms is overstated. Generally speaking, inflation has a negative impact on the Net Present Value of a project. When expected inflation rates over the cash flow horizon are high, which is a typically case in emerging and transitional markets, the use of the real and constant prices methodology could lead to serious mistakes in valuation. Financial statements at constant or real prices will be of no use when the project is implemented because what occurs in reality (that is what we are interested in) is very different from what is written in the final report of a project evaluation. Some items are deflated while others (say depreciation charges and interest payments) are in nominal prices. For managerial purposes, it is useless to have this mixed information in the financial statements. We present some examples where we show that the value of a cash flow should be based on estimates of free cash flows at nominal prices. It is an accepted practice to evaluate projects at constant or real prices. In particular, we present an example where the results from the constant and real price methodologies are biased upwards and there is a risk that in practice, bad projects will be accepted as good projects. It is a third party and near real life example (an example presented in the training material on economic regulation of public utilities developed by the World Bank Institute) we compare the results of the constant prices methodology with results of the nominal prices methodology. World Bank has played a crucial role in the development of the economies of the world, especially in the emerging countries. We recognize the leadership it has shown and the intellectual authority it has on planning offices, practitioners and consultants. For this reason it is critical whatever improvements made in the methodologies it uses in assessing the feasibility of infrastructure projects. This influence affects private practice in valuation and project appraisal as well. We show how in the case based on the example from WB where they use some current practices several improvements to some areas of the model can be made, such as valuation at constant prices, mixing deflated and non-deflated items in a financial statements, using constant leverage when in the forecasted financial statements it is not constant, inconsistency in the cash flow and value calculations and some other irregularities that will be described in the body of the chapter. This analysis shows an overvaluation of more than 21% when the constant prices methodology is compared with the current prices methodology and using market values to calculate the WACC. This is a dramatic number.
Identification of tumor-associated, MHC class II-restricted phosphopeptides as targets for immunotherapy

The activation and recruitment of CD4+ T cells are critical for the development of efficient antitumor immunity and may allow for the optimization of current cancer immunotherapy strategies. Searching for more optimal and selective targets for CD4+ T cells, we have investigated phosphopeptides, a new category of tumor-derived epitopes linked to proteins with vital cellular functions. Although MHC I-restricted phosphopeptides have been identified, it was previously unknown whether human MHC II molecules present phosphopeptides for specific CD4+ T cell recognition. We first demonstrated the fine specificity of human CD4+ T cells to discriminate a phosphoresidue by using cells raised against the candidate melanoma antigen mutant B-Raf or its phosphorylated counterpart. Then, we assessed the presence and complexity of human MHC II-associated phosphopeptides by analyzing 2 autologous pairs of melanoma and EBV-transformed B lymphoblastoid lines. By using sequential affinity isolation, biochemical enrichment, mass spectrometric sequencing, and comparative analysis, a total of 175 HLA-DR-associated phosphopeptides were characterized. Many were derived from source proteins that may have roles in cancer development, growth, and metastasis. Most were expressed exclusively by either melanomas or transformed B cells, suggesting the potential to define cell type-specific phosphatome “fingerprints. ” We then generated HLA-DRβ1*0101-restricted CD4+ T cells specific for a phospho-MART-1 peptide identified in both melanoma cell lines. These T cells showed specificity for phosphopeptide-pulsed antigen-presenting cells as well as for intact melanoma cells. This previously undescribed demonstration of MHC II-restricted phosphopeptides recognizable by human CD4+ T cells provides potential new targets for cancer immunotherapy.
Visual response properties in the tectorecipient zone of the cat's lateral posterior-pulvinar complex: a comparison with the superior colliculus

The medial portion of the cat's lateral posterior-pulvinar complex (LPm) receives a prominent ascending projection from the superficial layers of the superior colliculus. This region of the thalamus has been suggested to serve as a relay by which visual information from the midbrain could be conveyed to extrastriate cortex. In order to determine how the functional organization within the LPm compares with that of the superior colliculus, visual response properties of LPm and superior collicular neurons were examined under identical experimental conditions. The majority of neurons in the LPm, as in the superior colliculus, respond vigorously to moving stimuli, and a substantial proportion of these cells also exhibit a preference for movements in a particular direction. Furthermore, most cells in the LPm, in common with those of the tectum, respond only in a phasic manner to flashed stimuli, have homogeneous receptive field organization, and show response suppression to stimuli larger than the activating region of the receptive field. As in the colliculus, the ipsilateral visual field is represented in the LPm. In spite of these similarities, there are also some striking differences between the visual responses of LPm and collicular neurons. First, the average size of receptive fields of neurons within the LPm is at least twice that of units in the superficial gray layers of the tectum. Second, more cells in the colliculus are directionally selective than those in the LPm, and the distribution of preferred directions is different in the two regions. Third, an appreciable proportion (27%) of the cells in the LPm are orientation selective, whereas this response property is only rarely encountered in the cat's tectum. Fourth, many LPm neurons can only be activated by binocular stimulation, whereas most collicular units respond equally well to stimulation of either eye. Collectively, these findings indicate that there is a substantial transformation in the lateral posterior-pulvinar complex of the ascending visual influx provided by the superior colliculus.
Mcm10 functions to isomerize CMG-DNA for replisome bypass of DNA blocks

Replicative helicases of all cell types are rings that unwind DNA by steric exclusion in which the helicase ring only encircles the tracking strand, excluding the other strand outside the ring. Steric exclusion mediated unwinding enables helicase rings to bypass blocks on the strand that is excluded from the central channel. Unlike other replicative helicases, eukaryotic CMG encircles duplex DNA at a forked junction and is stopped by a block on the non-tracking (lagging) strand. This report demonstrates that Mcm10, an essential replication protein unique to eukaryotes, binds CMG and enables the replisome to bypass blocks on the non-tracking strand, implying that Mcm10 isomerizes the CMG-DNA complex to position only one strand through the central channel. A similar CMG-DNA isomerization is needed at the origin for head-to-head CMGs to bypass one another during formation of bidirectional replication forks.