Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategy for Improving Patient Safety

Surgical care is an essential part of every modern health care system. Globally, some 234 million operations are performed annually. Surprisingly, the risks of surgical complications have not been scrutinized by the academic community, but there are studies from some industrialized countries that have shown that 3–17% of all surgical patients are subject to major complications and that the mortality rate during the perioperative period is 0.4–0.8%. Clearly, complications related to surgery are a heavy burden to the health care system. No wonder that the topic has recently gained attention from the public health community worldwide. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health of Finland arranged the first national meeting on patient safety in January, 2009 in Helsinki. At the meeting, the very first strategy paper on Finnish patient safety was launched. Much emphasis is wisely put on foreseeing and prevention of safety risks. The strategy wants to see that the patient is actively involved in improving his own safety, that safety is managed proactively and through learning, that safety incidents are reported and that feed back and experience are used to improve patient safety. Patient safety needs to be put into the focus of health care research and teaching, and it is worth systematical promotion and allocation of adequate resources. The forthcoming law of public health care service, will require hospital districts to design plans to promote patient safety and quality control. In this issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Surgery, Stawicki et al. review one of the surgeon’s nightmares: retained surgical foreign bodies. The review article is very timely indeed and all readers are urged to pay attention to it. In the New England Journal of Medicine there is also a timely article by Haynes et al. (1), who show a marked benefit of using a simple checklist to reduce surgical complications, something that we could very well evaluate by pilot studies in Finland, as well. On a more personal note, please note that the job as Editor-in-Chief of this Journal will not be chaired by Ari Leppänemi for the next two years. Since he was elected Chairman of the Finnish Surgical Society, he, in fact, is a representative of the publisher of the Journal and for the coming two-year period I will be the acting Editor-in-Chief of the Journal. I greatly appreciate the assistance of the Co-editors, Hannu Aro, Hannu Kuokkanen and Pauli Puolakkainen. The publishing policy of the journal will not be affected by this reposting. The goal is the same – to provide scientifically and clinically high quality and interesting reading material to our subscribers to the benefit of our patients and of learning.
Learnability in information design

Design of information used for technical communication of complex products should consider how learnable that information is, and strive to deliver materials that are inherently learnable.The speed of information interchange and the demands of the workplace and school curricula require increasingly minimalist approaches to the material that is made available. People are frustrated by long learning times, and new users of software tools demand rapid absorption of tool capabilities. In addition, many readers of technical information are people for whom English is not their native language.Methods and practices that worked in the period when people were willing to commit to hours of study to understand a topic, or days of practice to master a tool, no longer work in a world based on ? internet time. To assist our understanding of these trends in learning, this paper addresses three key areas related to learnability: proposing a definition of learnability, showing where learnability and usability intersect, and providing a basis for learnability based on some attributes of human beings.
The +838 C/G MT2A Polymorphism, Metals, and the Inflammatory/Immune Response in Carotid Artery Stenosis in Elderly People

Carotid artery stenosis (CS) is a well-established risk factor for stroke. Increased proinflammatory chemokines, enhanced metallothionein (MT), and altered metal homeostasis may play roles in atherosclerosis progression and plaque destabilization. MT may sequester zinc during chronic inflammation, provoke zinc deficiency, and modulate NK cell cytotoxicity. A recent investigation of older patients with diabetes and atherosclerosis showed an association between the −209 A/G MT2A polymorphism, CS, and zinc status. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between two MT2A polymorphisms (−209 and + 838 locus), metal status, and inflammatory/immune response in older patients with CS only (the CS1 group) or with CS and previous cerebrovascular episodes (transient ischemic attack or stroke) (the CS2 group). A total of 506 individuals (188 CS1, 100 CS2, and 218 healthy controls) were studied. Atherosclerotic patients (CS1 and CS2) showed increased levels of MT, MCP-1, and RANTES, reduced NK cell cytotoxicity, and altered trace element concentrations (zinc, copper, magnesium, iron). The +838 C/G MT2A polymorphism was differently distributed in CS1 and CS2 patients, who displayed the GG genotype (C−) with significantly higher frequency than elderly controls. C− carriers showed increased MCP-1 and decreased NK cell cytotoxicity, CD56+ cells, and intracellular zinc availability along with decreased zinc, copper, and magnesium content in erythrocytes and increased iron in plasma. C− carriers also showed a major incidence of soft carotid plaques. In conclusion, the +838 C/G MT2A polymorphism seems to influence inflammatory markers, zinc availability, NK cell cytotoxicity, and trace element status, all of which may promote CS development.
Molecular Biomarkers for Diagnosis & Therapies of Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been discovered before the century but scientists still have not found the way to cure the disease. The basic requirement for successful cure requires the early diagnosis of the disease. Presence of Aβ 42 , total tau protein and phosphorylated tau have been used in the earlier days but these diagnostic markers fail the detection in the initial stages. Hence the need of the hour is to identify the various biomarkers which can be detected in the earlier stages of AD. Impaired cellular signaling is common in all the diseases and identification of particular signaling pathway helps in the identification of biomarker. Important signaling pathways such as Akt, FAS/NO, MAPK, Ca 2+ are found to be altered in the AD brain. Protein molecules upstream or downstream to these signaling molecules can be potential molecular markers in the diagnosis of AD. This review comprises molecular markers which are crucial in the AD and play a significant role by altering the signaling pathways. These biomarkers will not only help in the understanding of pathobiology of AD but also provide an insight for the researchers working in the direction of AD biomarker discovery and drug discovery.
Green Small-Cell Networks

The exponentially increasing demand for wireless data services requires a massive network densification that is neither economically nor ecologically viable with the current cellular system architectures. A promising solution to this problem is the concept of small-cell networks (SCNs), which is founded by the idea of a very dense deployment of self-organizing, low-cost, low-power, base stations (BSs). Although SCNs have the potential to significantly increase the capacity of cellular networks while reducing their energy consumption, they pose many new challenges to the optimal system design. We show in this article how a large system analysis based on random matrix theory (RMT) can provide tight and tractable approximations of key performance measures of SCNs.
Multiple splicing variants of two new human ATP-binding cassette transporters, ABCC11 and ABCC12.

Two new human ABC transporters, ABCC11 and ABCC12, were cloned from a cDNA library of human adult liver. ABCC11 and ABCC12 genes consist of 30 and 29 exons, respectively, and they are tandemly located in a tail-to-head orientation on human chromosome 16q12.1. The predicted amino acid sequences of both gene products show a high similarity with ABCC5. The transcripts of ABCC11 and ABCC12 genes were detected by PCR in various adult human tissues, including liver, lung, and kidney, and also in several fetal tissues. By searching cDNA libraries from various human tissues, we have identified alternative splicing variants of ABCC11 and ABCC12 genes at significantly high frequencies. One splice variant lacking the exon 28 corresponded to about 25% of total ABCC11 gene transcripts. Furthermore, four splicing variants encoding putatively short peptides were predominant in ABCC12 gene transcripts. Those splicing variants may represent diverse biological functions of these ABC transporter genes.
Residual ridge dimensions at edentulous maxillary first molar sites and periodontal bone loss among two ethnic cohorts seeking tooth replacement.

OBJECTIVES To study residual ridge dimensions at edentulous first molar sites in relation to periodontal bone loss among cohorts of partially edentulous Asian Indian and Hong Kong Chinese subjects seeking tooth replacement. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 628 edentulous maxillary first molar sites were analyzed on Cone Beam Computed Tomography scans of 225 Asian Indian (I) and 232 Hong Kong Chinese (C) partially edentulous adults seeking tooth replacement. Age, ethnicity, gender, total tooth loss, the presence or absence of adjacent teeth, categories of periodontal status defined according to radiographic alveolar bone loss (P0: periodontal health, P1: incipient to moderate disease, P2: severe periodontal disease) and sinus membrane abnormalities were noted. Alveolar ridge height (RH), widths at 1 and 3 mm from crest (RW1; RW3), and relative position of the bone crest (RR) were measured. RESULTS Prevalence of P2 status was most frequent in both cohorts(C: 50.4% I: 49.2%). P2 had lowest ridge heights; 13.1% C P2 and 14%I P2 had RH < 2 mm. Sites with both RH <8 mm and RW1 < 6 mm occurred at 59%C P2 and 68%I P2. Sinus membrane abnormalities were most frequent in P2. Periodontal status and sinus membrane abnormality increased the odds of RH <5 mm and RH <8 mm more than 2-fold; additionally, gender and ethnicity significantly impacted RH <8 mm. Gender and adjacent tooth status significantly affected RW1. CONCLUSION Incident advanced periodontal disease was common among Asian Indian and Hong Kong Chinese subjects seeking tooth replacement and associated with lower available bone heights. Ethnicity, gender, sinus membrane thickening affected available bone height in the subsinus region, while the presence of adjacent teeth- and age-affected residual ridge width.
Sampling lower bounds via information theory

We present a novel technique, based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence from information theory, to prove lower bounds on the query complexity of sampling algorithms that approximate functions over arbitrary domain and range. Unlike previous methods, our technique does not use a reduction from a decision promise problem. As a result, it gives stronger bounds for functions that possess a large set of inputs, each two of which exhibit a gap in the function value.We demonstrate the technique with new query complexity lower bounds for three fundamental problems: (1) the "election problem", for which we obtain a quadratic improvement over previous bounds, (2) low rank matrix approximation, for which we prove the first lower bounds, showing that the algorithms given for this problem are almost optimal, and (3) matrix reconstruction.In addition, we introduce a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected query complexity of functions, using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We demonstrate its use by a simple query complexity lower bound for the mean.
A Macroscopic Analytical Model of Collaboration in Distributed Robotic Systems

In this article, we present a macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in a group of reactive robots. The model consists of a series of coupled differential equations that describe the dynamics of group behavior. After presenting the general model, we analyze in detail a case study of collaboration, the stick-pulling experiment, studied experimentally and in simulation by Ijspeert et al. [Autonomous Robots, 11, 149171]. The robots' task is to pull sticks out of their holes, and it can be successfully achieved only through the collaboration of two robots. There is no explicit communication or coordination between the robots. Unlike microscopic simulations (sensor-based or using a probabilistic numerical model), in which computational time scales with the robot group size, the macroscopic model is computationally efficient, because its solutions are independent of robot group size. Analysis reproduces several qualitative conclusions of Ijspeert et al.: namely, the different dynamical regimes for different values of the ratio of robots to sticks, the existence of optimal control parameters that maximize system performance as a function of group size, and the transition from superlinear to sublinear performance as the number of robots is increased.
Analysis and Design of a Non-Isolated Bidirectional ZVS-PWM Active Clamped DC-DC Converter

A new soft-switched bidirectional dc-dc converter is proposed in the paper. The proposed converter can operate with soft-switching, a continuous inductor current, fixed switching frequency, and the switch stresses of a conventional PWM converter regardless of the direction of power flow. These features are due to a very simple auxiliary circuit that is operational regardless of the direction of power flow. In the paper, the operation and design of the converter are discussed and its feasibility is confirmed with experimental results obtained from a prototype.
Respiratory effects of air pollution in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a three month prospective study.

BACKGROUND: A study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between air pollution levels and respiratory symptoms and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) in subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) living in Christchurch, New Zealand. METHODS: Forty subjects aged over 55 years with COPD completed twice daily diaries for three months during the winter of 1994. Subjects recorded respiratory symptoms, PEFR, outdoor activity, visits to doctor or hospital, and medication use. All were resident within a 5 km radius of the regional council's air pollution monitoring site. Daily and hourly mean pollutant levels (particulates (PM10, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon monoxide (CO)) were measured at the monitoring site. RESULTS: Pollution levels were generally low relative to those recorded in previous years. The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment guidelines for PM10 were exceeded on five occasions, and for CO six times. No association was found between PEFR and any of the pollution variables. A rise in the PM10 concentration equivalent to the interquartile range was associated with an increase in night time chest symptoms (relative risk 1.38, 95% CI 1.07 to 1.78). A rise in NO2 concentrations equivalent to the interquartile range was associated with increased reliever inhaler use (relative risk 1.42, 95% CI 1.13 to 1.79) and for 24 hour lag analysis with increased nebuliser use (relative risk 2.81, 95% CI 1.81 to 4.39). There was no increase in the relative risk of other symptoms in relation to pollution levels. CONCLUSIONS: These effects, demonstrated in a small susceptible group of subjects with COPD, indicate that adverse outcomes can be measured in response to pollution levels that are within current guidelines.
Organizational Legitimacy

Organizations seek to establish congruence between the social values associated with or implied by their activities and the norms of acceptable behavior in the larger social system of which they are a part. Insofar as these two value systems are congruent we can speak of organizational legitimacy. When an actual or potential disparity exists between the two value systems, there will exist a threat to organizational legitimacy. These threats take the form of legal, economic, and other social sanctions. In this paper, it is argued that an empirical focus on organizational efforts to become legitimate can aid in explaining and analyzing many organizational behaviors taken with respect to the environment, and further, can generate hypotheses and a conceptual perspective that can direct additional attention to the issue of organizational legitimacy. This paper provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of organizational legitimacy and the process of legitimation through which organizations act to increase their perceived legitimacy. It presents a number of examples including a discussion of the American Institute for Foreign Study as a demonstration of these ideas in action. Both the particular circumstances which can lead to problems of organizational legitimacy and some of the actions that can be taken to legitimate an organization are illustrated.
Surface expression of an immunodominant malaria protein B cell epitope by yellow fever virus.

The yellow fever 17D virus (YF17D) has several characteristics that are desirable for the development of new, live attenuated vaccines. We approached its development as a vector for heterologous antigens by studying the expression of a humoral epitope at the surface of the E protein based on the results of modelling its three-dimensional structure. This model indicated that the most promising insertion site is between beta-strands f and g, a site that is exposed at the external surface of the virus. The large deletion of six residues from the fg loop of the E protein from yellow fever virus, compared to tick-born encephalitis virus, leaves space at the dimer interface for a large insertion without creating steric hindrance. We have tested this hypothesis by inserting a model humoral epitope from the circumsporozoite protein of Plasmodium falciparum consisting of triple NANP repeats. Recombinant virus (17D/8) expressing this insertion flanked by two glycine residues at each end, is specifically neutralized by a monoclonal antibody to the model epitope. Furthermore, mouse antibodies raised to the recombinant virus recognize the parasite protein in an ELISA assay. Serial passage analysis confirmed the genetic stability of the insertion made in the viral genome and the resulting 17D/8 virus is significantly more attenuated in mouse neurovirulence tests than the 17DD vaccine. The fg loop belongs to the dimerization domain of the E protein and lies at the interface between monomers. This domain undergoes a low pH transition, which is related to the fusion of the viral envelope to the endosome membrane. It is conceivable that a slower rate of fusion, resulting from the insertion close to the dimer interface, may delay the onset of virus production and thereby lead to a milder infection of the host. This would account for the more attenuated phenotype of the recombinant virus in the mouse model and lower extent of replication in cultured cells. The vectorial capacity of the yellow fever virus is being further explored for the expression and presentation of other epitopes, including those mediating T-cell responses.
An Agent-Based System to Minimize Earthquake-Induced Damages

Over 2000 earthquakes happen every year in Japan, so that this country is often called earthquake-ridden (Government of Japan, 2006). There exists a serious problem to prevent the occurrence of earthquake-induced disasters, such as fire, short-circuits, gas leakage, etc. With the recent advent of nation-wide telecommunication networks, real-time earthquake information can be received at every household, and it can thus be utilized to control consumer electronics and reduce the risk of these earthquake-provoked disasters (Kueppers, 2002). Real-time information about the seismic activity in Japan is provided by the national earthquake early warning system operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency, JMA (Doi, 2002). By sensing primary waves, this system can notify people (e.g. via radio and TV channels, a mobile phone subscription service, etc.) several seconds before the earthquake devastating secondary waves hit a specific area. The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) has recently introduced an automatic consumer electronics control system (JEITA, 2005). When an earthquake early warning is received, this system provides services, such as activating alarms, stopping gas, opening doors, and the like. This system cannot, however, comply with the specific situation at each particular household, as circumstantial information about who live/stay in, where they are, what they currently do, etc. is not utilized by the system. In the presented study, we propose an agent-based system for the earthquake-induced disaster prevention. The system uses household-specific knowledge and can provide for generally a higher level of safety for the inhabitants than existing systems with similar goals do. The proposed system realizes a distributed architecture – a design solution making it quite reliable in (post-)earthquake conditions. There are specialized agents installed in different places (e.g. of a house or a public facility) and called “room agents,” which are autonomous, monitor various appliances and people in the rooms, and can control the equipment and electronics, and guide evacuation when an earthquake happens. For the control, countermeasure agents processing different types of rules are set up. During an earthquake, a countermeasure agent receives earthquake data and selects appropriate constraints, which are to be used by the room agents. As there can often be conflicts when
Alcohol and Other Factors Affecting Osteoporosis Risk in Women

By about age 35, people reach their peak bone mass. Women lose bone mass slowly after that point until a few years after menopause, when bone mass is lost very rapidly. For middle-aged and older women, healthy bones depend on the development, during younger years, of a strong bone structure and an adequate peak bone mass. There is tenuous evidence that moderate alcohol consumption may protect bone. But human and animal studies clearly indicate that chronic heavy drinking, particularly during adolescence and the young adult years, can dramatically compromise bone quality and may increase osteoporosis risk. Further, research indicates that the effects of heavy alcohol use on bone cannot be reversed, even if alcohol consumption is terminated. Research suggests that in addition to alcohol, other lifestyle factors—such as tobacco use, nutrition, weight-bearing exercise, increased body weight, and hormone replacement therapy—affect bone development and osteoporosis risk in women. However, there has been little examination of how alcohol interacts with these factors to influence bone health.