Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimation of kidney function in cancer patients.

INTRODUCTION The Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) formula has not been validated in patients with cancer. The present investigation was undertaken in order to study how well estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) using the new CKD-EPI equation correlates with measured GFR (mGFR) by (51)chrome ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid ((51)Cr-EDTA) clearance in a group of patients with cancer not known as having cancer. MATERIAL AND METHODS We investigated 185 patients with cancer who were referred for isotope measurement of GFR with (51)Cr-EDTA before initiating chemotherapy treatment. The agreement between CKD-EPI and (51)Cr-EDTA was assessed using a Bland-Altman plot. Test performance was analysed in a contingency table and bias, precision and the percentage of estimates within 30% of the mGFR (P30) were assessed. RESULTS Bland-Altman plot analysis showed a limit of agreement in the range from -25.59 to 27.92 ml/min./1.73 m(2). This formula was therefore not interchangeable with (51)Cr-EDTA, as the above differences are of clinical importance. Bias was low: 1.16 ml/min./1.73 m(2); P30 was high: 89.73%; and precision was 13.37 ml/min./1.73 m(2). As a screening test, the CKD-EPI had a high specificity of 98% (95% confidence interval (CI): 96 to 100%) and a high negative predictive value 97% (95% CI: 95 to 100%). The accuracy of the validation test was 96% (95% CI: 93 to 99%). CONCLUSION The CKD-EPI may be used as a screening tool for CKD in the general population, but cannot replace isotope tests when a high GFR measurement accuracy is needed.
Population-dependent effects of ocean acidification

Elevated carbon dioxide levels and the resultant ocean acidification (OA) are changing the abiotic conditions of the oceans at a greater rate than ever before and placing pressure on marine species. Understanding the response of marine fauna to this change is critical for understanding the effects of OA. Population-level variation in OA tolerance is highly relevant and important in the determination of ecosystem resilience and persistence, but has received little focus to date. In this study, whether OA has the same biological consequences in high-salinity-acclimated population versus a low-salinity-acclimated population of the same species was investigated in the marine isopod Idotea balthica. The populations were found to have physiologically different responses to OA. While survival rate was similar between the two study populations at a future CO2 level of 1000 ppm, and both populations showed increased oxidative stress, the metabolic rate and osmoregulatory activity differed significantly between the two populations. The results of this study demonstrate that the physiological response to OA of populations from different salinities can vary. Population-level variation and the environment provenance of individuals used in OA experiments should be taken into account for the evaluation and prediction of climate change effects.
Ductal carcinoma involving the lobule of the breast: A source of confusion with lobular carcinoma in situ

A review of 205 consecutive breast carcinomas of ductal type disclosed that 45 concomitantly involved the terminal ducts of the lobule. Carcinoma presumably invaded the lobule by intraluminal extension from lactiferous ducts. The presence of this type of lobular involvement may be mistaken for lobular carcinoma in situ and is especially confusing when found in the breast remote from the grossly detectable ductal neoplasm. The diagnosis of lobular carcinoma has important therapeutic implications for the second breast because of the high frequency of bilaterality in that disease compared with ductal carcinoma. In our group of ductal carcinomas with lobular invasion, short term follow‐up and examination of tissue from the opposite breast in 10 patients indicates that the frequency of bilaterality for lobular carcinoma is not attained. Therefore, it is important to sharply separate lobular carcinoma in situ from lobular invasion by ductal carcinoma. Carcinoma in a lobule is not necessarily lobular carcinoma.
Nuclear medicine dosimetry

A brief overview is provided of the history of the development of internal dose methods for use in nuclear medicine. Basic methods of internal dosimetry and the systems that have been developed for use in nuclear medicine are described. The development of the MIRD system and the International Radiopharmaceutical Dosimetry Symposium series is outlined. The evolution of models and tools for calculating dose estimates is reviewed. Current efforts in developing more patient-specific methods, particularly for use in therapy calculations, development of small scale and microdosimetry techniques, and of relating internal radiation doses to observed biological effects are described and evaluated.
The Local Space-Time Lorentz Transformation: a New Formulation of Special Relativity Compatible with Translational Invariance

The apparent times and positions of moving clocks as predicted by both `non-local' and `local' Lorentz Transformations are considered. Only local transformations respect translational invariance. Such transformations change temporal but not spatial intervals, so breaking space-time exchange symmetry and forbidding relativity of simultaneity and length contraction. Two satellite-borne experiments to test these predictions are proposed.
A direct RF signal sampling integrated receiver for IoT applications

A low power Software-Defined radio receiver operating between 400 MHz and 1.5 GHz is presented in this paper. The receiver is based on differential switched 4-path passive mixer architecture. The sampling frequency fixes the carrier frequency of the received signal and a simple RC time constant determines the receiver bandwidth. The mixer structure permits to implement flexible high-Q band-pass filters at the RF side. This receiver has improved linearity and is robust to strong out-of-band blockers and adjacent channel interferences. A wide-band 15 dB gain LNA permits to achieve a noise figure less than 4 dB between 400 MHz and 1.5 GHz. The measured sensitivity is -83 dBm with an overall gain of 55 dB over the chain. The IIP3 of the receiver is -22.7 dBm and the power consumption is 45.7 mW under a 1.2V power supply voltage. The IC receiver has been designed in a 130nm CMOS process. The receiver is suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Document capture using stereo vision

Capturing images of documents using handheld digital cameras has a variety of applications in academia, research, knowledge management, retail, and office settings. The ultimate goal of such systems is to achieve image quality comparable to that currently achieved with flatbed scanners even for curved, warped, or curled pages. This can be achieved by high-accuracy 3D modeling of the page surface, followed by a "flattening" of the surface. A number of previous systems have either assumed only perspective distortions, or used techniques like structured lighting, shading, or side-imaging for obtaining 3D shape. This paper describes a system for handheld camera-based document capture using general purpose stereo vision methods followed by a new document dewarping technique. Examples of shape modeling and dewarping of book images is shown.
Dual stepsize explicit numerical integration method and applications

Numerical integration, or time domain simulation, is an important tool to study dynamical systems. Many dynamical systems are stiff, for instance, electric power systems consist of a variety of components with greatly different time scales. Although explicit integration methods are computationally efficient, they are not commonly used for studying stiff systems, because these methods may have numerical instability problems. In this paper, an explicit numerical integration method with dual stepsizes is proposed for analyzing stiff systems. The algorithm uses a small and a large stepsize to integrate different system components. Under the proposed decomposition, we demonstrate the numerical property and prove that dual stepsize integration is guaranteed to converge for all linear test systems in absolute stability. Thus, the method has both advantages: numerical stability and computational efficiency. The properties of the proposed method are illustrated through a mathematical example and two power system examples.
Medical Management of Male Infertility in the Absence of a Specific Etiology

Abstract Idiopathic male infertility can be diagnosis in approximately one-third of infertile males. The empirical medical treatment with or without assisted reproductive techniques appears common in male infertility practice. This type of management can be classified as hormonal treatment including gonadotropins, antiestrogens, and aromatase inhibitors and support with antioxidant supplements such as carnitine, lycopene, glutathione, and vitamin E. This review investigates the evidence of commonly used empirical medical management of male infertility when there is no demonstrable diagnosis.
A computational model of the analysis of some first-order and second-order motion patterns by simple and complex cells

Although spatio-temporal gradient schemes are widely used in the computation of image motion, algorithms are ill conditioned for particular classes of input. This paper addresses this problem. Motion is computed as the space-time direction in which the difference in image illuminance from the local mean is conserved. This method can reliably detect motion in first-order and some second-order motion stimuli. Components of the model can be identified with directionally asymmetric and directionally selective simple cells. A stage in which we compute spatial and temporal derivatives of the difference between image illuminance and the local mean illuminance using a truncated Taylor series gives rise to a phase-invariant output reminiscent of the response of complex cells.
Deadline is not Enough: How to Achieve Importance-aware Server-centric Data Centers via a Cross Layer Approach

Today's datacenters face important challenges for providing low-latency high-quality interactive services to meet user's expectation. For improving the application throughput, recent research works have embedded application deadline information into design of network flow schedule to meet the latency requirement. Here, arises a critical question: does application-level throughput mean providing better quality service? We note that there are usually a set of semantic related responses (or flows) for answering a query; and, some responses are highly correlative with the query while others do not. Thus, this observation motivates us to associate the importance of the contents with the application flows (or responses) in order to enhance the service quality. We first model the application importance maximization problem in a generic network and in a server-centric network. Since both of them are too complicated to be deployed in the real world, we propose the importance-aware delivery protocol, which is a distributed event-driven rate-based delivery control protocol, for server-centric datacenter networks. The proposed protocol is able to make use of the multiple disjoin paths of server-centric network, and jointly consider flow importance, flow size, and deadline to maximize the goodput of most-related semantic data of a query. Through real-data-based or synthetic simulations, the results show that our proposed protocol significantly outperforms D3 and MPTCP in terms of the precision at K and the sum of application-level importance.
The Global Cardiovascular Risk Transition: Associations of Four Metabolic Risk Factors with National Income, Urbanization, and Western Diet in 1980 and 2008

Background— It is commonly assumed that cardiovascular disease risk factors are associated with affluence and Westernization. We investigated the associations of body mass index (BMI), fasting plasma glucose, systolic blood pressure, and serum total cholesterol with national income, Western diet, and, for BMI, urbanization in 1980 and 2008. Methods and Results— Country-level risk factor estimates for 199 countries between 1980 and 2008 were from a previous systematic analysis of population-based data. We analyzed the associations between risk factors and per capita national income, a measure of Western diet, and, for BMI, the percentage of the population living in urban areas. In 1980, there was a positive association between national income and population mean BMI, systolic blood pressure, and total cholesterol. By 2008, the slope of the association between national income and systolic blood pressure became negative for women and zero for men. Total cholesterol was associated with national income and Western diet in both 1980 and 2008. In 1980, BMI rose with national income and then flattened at ≈Int$7000; by 2008, the relationship resembled an inverted U for women, peaking at middle-income levels. BMI had a positive relationship with the percentage of urban population in both 1980 and 2008. Fasting plasma glucose had weaker associations with these country macro characteristics, but it was positively associated with BMI. Conclusions— The changing associations of metabolic risk factors with macroeconomic variables indicate that there will be a global pandemic of hyperglycemia and diabetes mellitus, together with high blood pressure in low-income countries, unless effective lifestyle and pharmacological interventions are implemented.
Psychosocial Care for Adolescent and Young Adult Hematopoietic Cell Transplant Patients

Psychological issues following hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) are unfortunately common. Literature specific to the transplant experience for the needs of adolescents and young adults (AYA) is lacking. The purpose of this article is to (1) describe the allogeneic transplant experience for AYA transplant patients during the first year following transplantation including demographic and treatment characteristics, (2) present AYA data obtained during and following a six-part posttransplant discharge study, (3) illustrate typical AYA experiences using case studies, and (4) propose AYA intervention strategies within Erickson's stages of psychosocial development. A quality of life model provided the research conceptual framework, and the content analysis framework for the qualitative research. Themes that emerged within each domain were the following: sexuality/fertility, fatigue, depression/poor coping/habits, adherence issues, use of technology, dependency issues, changes in roles/relationships, issues with school/education, financial issues, family problems/issues, miscellaneous, religion/spirituality, fear of future, uncertainty, life, death, more life appreciation. These data guide us for providing targeted interventions for the needs of this AYA population. This paper has presented literature and developmental theory, qualitative and qualitative data from an intervention study, and clinical cases in order to propose a developmental treatment model for AYA transplant patients. A coordinated and multidisciplinary approach is needed for the HCT patient who is an AYA.
Quantitative ultrasonic characterization of lesion composition and remodeling in atherosclerotic rabbit aorta.

We have previously shown that high-frequency, high-resolution ultrasound can characterize the acoustic properties and composition of fatty plaques in cholesterol-fed rabbits. To determine whether quantitative ultrasound can delineate the regression of atherosclerotic lesions by detecting a change in their composition from fatty to fibrous types induced by alterations in dietary regimen, we fed six New Zealand White rabbits a 2% cholesterol diet for 3 months, followed by a standard diet for 3 additional months to promote the development of fibrous intimal lesions. Segments of aortas were excised, and backscattered radiofrequency data were acquired from 400 to 600 independent sites in each specimen with an acoustic microscope operated at 50 MHz. Control data were provided by measuring backscatter from adjacent portions of the aortas devoid of lesions. Histological and immunocytochemical analyses of the fibrous intimal lesions confirmed the presence of smooth muscle cells and abundant connective tissue with little appreciable lipid. Backscatter from normal aortic segments (-30.7 +/- 1.0 dB) was approximately 10-fold greater than that from fibrous lesions (-42.4 +/- 1.0 dB; P < .05). We previously reported that integrated backscatter from fatty lesions was -50.6 +/- 0.7 dB, or approximately 10-fold less than that from fibrous lesions (P < .05). Values for integrated backscatter from the media of each tissue type were approximately equal (-30.0 +/- 1.7 versus -30.7 +/- 1.6 versus -33.4 +/- 0.8 dB for normal versus fibrous versus fatty tissues, respectively; P = not significant). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Epigenetic Mechanisms in Heart Failure Pathogenesis

Although neurohormonal antagonist and device therapies have improved outcomes in patients with systolic heart failure (HF), residual morbidity and mortality remain high.1,2 Novel HF therapeutic approaches thus remain an unmet clinical need of pressing urgency. Such approaches depend, in turn, on keener understanding of the molecular pathways underlying HF pathogenesis. Although a number of novel myocardial signaling effectors have been implicated as drivers of HF pathogenesis,1,3 translating these findings into human therapies has remained extremely challenging. Gene expression profiling studies in animal HF models4 and in human failing hearts5 consistently demonstrate aberrant gene control in HF. The term epigenetics—a fusion of epigenesis and genetics—was coined ≥50 years ago to describe the process of cell fate commitment during development.6 Today, the epigenome denotes the totality of sequence-independent processes that modulate cell-state–specific gene expression (eg, post-translational histone or DNA modifications and noncoding RNA/protein complex interactions with chromatin). 7–10 The epigenome may differ between cell types, drive local formation of higher order chromatin structures, modulate transcription factor (TF) access to DNA, and preserve memory of past transcriptional activities.10 This review focuses on the chromatin-specific epigenetic regulatory mechanisms that may inform novel therapeutic targets in HF. We specifically highlight examples of chromatin remodeling, biochemical modifications to histones, and integrated features of chromatin-dependent signal transduction that are pertinent to cardiac biology. Other epigenetic pathways in HF, including miRNAs, have been extensively reviewed elsewhere.11,12 Eukaryotic cell identity or more broadly, cellular state, is largely governed by precise spatiotemporal coordination of gene expression.9 Pathological transformation from a normal to a diseased cardiomyocyte (eg, hypertrophied and hypocontractile) represents a cell state transition driven by defined transcriptional events. Dynamic interplay among …
At-Speed Distributed Functional Testing to Detect Logic and Delay Faults in NoCs

In this work, we propose a distributed functional test mechanism for NoCs which scales to large-scale networks with general topologies and routing algorithms. Each router and its links are tested using neighbors in different phases. The router under test is in test mode while all other parts of the NoC are operational. We use triple module redundancy (TMR) for the robustness of all testing components that are added into the switch. Experimental results show that our functional test approach can detect stuck-at, short and delay faults in the routers and links. Our approach achieves 100 percent stuck-at fault coverage for the data path and 85 percent for the control paths including routing logic, FIFO's control path, and the arbiter of a 5 × 5 router. We also show that our approach is able to detect delay faults in critical control and data paths. Synthesis results show that the area overhead of our test components with TMR support is 20 percent for covering stuck-at, delay, and short-wire faults and 7 percent for covering only stuck-at and delay faults in the 5 × 5 router. Simulation results show that our online testing approach has an average latency overhead of 3 percent in PARSEC traffic benchmarks on an 8 × 8 NoC.
Sheared Nematic Liquid Crystal Polymer Monolayers

We provide a comprehensive study on the planar (2D) orienta- tional distributions of nematic polymers under an imposed shear flow of ar- bitrary strength. We extend previous analysis for persistence of equilibria in steady shear and for transitions to unsteady limit cycles, from closure models (21) to the Doi-Hess 2D kinetic equation. A variation on the Boltzmann distri- bution analysis of Constantin et al. (3, 4, 5) and others (8, 22, 23) for potential flow is developed to solve for all persistent steady equilibria, and characterize parameter boundaries where steady states cease to exist, which predicts the transition to tumbling limit cycles.
Requirements for a mobile personal health record to improve cardiovascular healthcare services

Analyzing health records of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease can help understanding their conditions and therefore improving healthcare services offered to them. To improve the cardiology healthcare quality and efficiency in the Autonomic Nervous System centre in Avicenne Hospital in Rabat in Morocco, a mobile personal health record (mPHR) along with an electronic health record have been developed. This paper presents our mPHR's functional requirements used in the product development. It also presents some aspects of quality evaluation of the mPHR. An experiment has been conducted to assess and improve the mPHR's quality using the ISO/IEC 25010 standard.
When it gets more difficult, use both hands: exploring bimanual curve manipulation

In this paper we investigate the relationship between bimanual (two-handed) manipulation and the cognitive aspects of task integration, divided attention and epistemic action. We explore these relationships by means of an empirical study comparing a bimanual technique versus a unimanual (one-handed) technique for a curve matching task. The bimanual technique was designed on the principle of integrating the visual, conceptual and input device space domain of both hands. We provide evidence that the bimanual technique has better performance than the unimanual technique and, as the task becomes more cognitively demanding, the bimanual technique exhibits even greater performance benefits. We argue that the design principles and performance improvements are applicable to other task domains.