Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of leptospirosis in farm animals.

fever, haemolytic anaemia, haemoglobiuria and jaundice. Infection in pregnant cattle can result in abortion. In lactating cows, infections are often associated with agalactia. Cattle also serve as a maintenance host of serovar Hardjo, which consists of two different genotypes, Hardjobovis and Hardjoprajitno. Antibodies against this serovar were detected in 25 to 65% of cattle in the US, Europe, South America and Australia and L. borgpetersenii serovar Hardjo type Hardjobovis (Lb Hardjobovis) is the most common in cattle
Intermittent Recombinant Growth Hormone Treatment in Short Children Born Small for Gestational Age: Four-Year Results of a Randomized Trial of Two Different Treatment Regimens

Background: Treatment of short children born small for gestational age (SGA) with recombinant human growth hormone (r-hGH) increases growth velocity during childhood. As in other indications, the growth velocity in these patients is more marked during the first year of treatment and then decreases. This study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of different r-hGH treatment schedules (67 µg/kg/day in a discontinuous or continuous regimen) during the second year of r-hGH treatment by comparing height velocity changes and total gain of height over a 4-year period. Methods: 58 growth-retarded SGA children aged 2–5 years were randomized to a TOTO regimen [4 years alternating treatment (T) and observation (O), n = 30] or a TTOO regimen (2 years’ treatment, followed by 2 years’ observation, n = 28). Height velocity (HV) and total height gain were assessed during the 4-year study. Results: In both groups, HV and HV standard deviation score (HV-SDSCA) increased during treatment and decreased during observation periods. Interruption of treatment in the TOTO group did not result in a better gain in height standard deviation score (H-SDSCA) when compared with the TTOO group. After 4 years of study, the gain in H-SDSCA was 1.4 ± 01 in the TOTO group and 1.6 ± 0.2 in the TTOO group leading to a mean height of –2.0 ± 1.0 SDS and –2.0 ± 0.8 SDS, respectively. The rate of bone maturation was similar in the two groups. Conclusions: In short SGA children, TOTO and TTOO regimens produced significant improvements in growth during r-hGH treatment. However, treatment interruption after 1 year did not influence the overall gain in height SDS when compared with 2 years’ continuous treatment.
Future technologies and techniques in peritoneal dialysis—opportunities and challenges ahead

In the last 5 years, we have started to witness the emergence of new technologies and techniques that offer the potential for improved patient outcomes but which often still lack clinical demonstration and/or confirmation in well-designed, multicentre studies. These include biocompatible solutions, glucose sparing regimens, low-sodium solutions, bimodal solution formulations and continuous flow peritoneal dialysis (CFPD). This review discusses the potential benefits ascribable to each of these technologies and an analysis of the challenges that have to be surmounted before anyone of these candidate technologies can be declared as established. The demonstration of either hard clinical endpoints or validated surrogate endpoints is very feasible in terms of sample size requirements for some outcome measures, such as preservation of RRF, but will be much more challenging for other endpoints such as preservation of UF capacity.
Human Anterior Cingulate Cortex Neurons Encode Cognitive and Emotional Demands

The cortical mechanisms and substrates of cognitive and emotional demands are poorly understood. Lesion studies and functional imaging implicate the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The caudal ACC (cACC) has been implicated in cognitive processes such as attention, salience, interference, and response competition, mostly on the basis of neuroimaging results. To test the hypothesis that individual cACC neurons subserve these functions, we monitored neuronal activity from single cells in the cACC while subjects were engaged in a mental arithmetic task, the cognitively demanding counting Stroop task, and/or the emotional Stroop interference task. We now report the first direct measures of single neurons in humans identifying a population of cACC neurons that respond differentially or in a graded manner to cognitively demanding high- and low-conflict Stroop tasks, including those with emotional valence. These data indicate that cACC neurons may be acting as salience detectors when faced with conflict and difficult or emotional stimuli, consistent with neuroimaging results of cACC responses to abrupt sensory, novel, task-relevant, or painful stimuli.
Calcium and Potassium Channels in Experimental Subarachnoid Hemorrhage and Transient Global Ischemia

Healthy cerebrovascular myocytes express members of several different ion channel families which regulate resting membrane potential, vascular diameter, and vascular tone and are involved in cerebral autoregulation. In animal models, in response to subarachnoid blood, a dynamic transition of ion channel expression and function is initiated, with acute and long-term effects differing from each other. Initial hypoperfusion after exposure of cerebral vessels to oxyhemoglobin correlates with a suppression of voltage-gated potassium channel activity, whereas delayed cerebral vasospasm involves changes in other potassium channel and voltage-gated calcium channels expression and function. Furthermore, expression patterns and function of ion channels appear to differ between main and small peripheral vessels, which may be key in understanding mechanisms behind subarachnoid hemorrhage-induced vasospasm. Here, changes in calcium and potassium channel expression and function in animal models of subarachnoid hemorrhage and transient global ischemia are systematically reviewed and their clinical significance discussed.
An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for Industry Clusters

Knowledge-based economy forces companies in every country to group together as a cluster in order to maintain their competitiveness in the world market. The cluster development relies on two key success factors which are knowledge sharing and collaboration between the actors in the cluster. Thus, our study tries to propose a knowledge management system to support knowledge management activities within the cluster. To achieve the objectives of the study, ontology takes a very important role in the knowledge management process in various ways; such as building reusable and faster knowledge-bases and better ways of representing the knowledge explicitly. However, creating and representing ontology creates difficulties to organization due to the ambiguity and unstructured nature of the source of knowledge. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to propose the methodology to capture, create and represent ontology for organization development by using the knowledge engineering approach. The handicraft cluster in Thailand is used as a case study to illustrate our proposed methodology.
Use of biomarkers in the management of heart failure: are we there yet?

“What gets you into trouble is not what you don’t know, it’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so. ” — Yogi Berra Although the advent of clinical practice guidelines and disease management strategies for patients with heart failure has resulted in dramatic overall improvements in patient care, the day-to-day management of individual patients with heart failure remains challenging. As one example, current heart failure practice guidelines recommend that doses of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and β-blocker should be titrated to the levels used in clinical trials. Although this “one dose fits all” approach is entirely logical (and necessary) from the standpoint of clinical trial design, it is not necessarily logical in the management of individual heart failure patients, in whom body mass (and hence drug disposition) may range from morbidly obese to cachectic. The above example, which is emblematic of the types of problems that clinicians face when they try to adapt and individualize practice guidelines for their own patients, raises the broader question of how clinicians should individualize management strategies for heart failure. See p 1278 In the current issue of the Circulation , Anand and colleagues1 report on changes in brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) and plasma norepinephrine (PNE) levels in patients who were enrolled in the Valsartan Heart Failure Trial (Val-HeFT). The authors measured BNP and NE levels before randomization and during follow-up in approximately 4300 patients enrolled in the trial. As with other studies that have examined therapeutic responses in relation to levels of circulating neurohormones, Anand and colleagues1 observed that the relative risk of having an event was significantly higher for those patients in whom the baseline BNP and NE levels were significantly elevated. The authors also found that BNP was a more sensitive predictor of morbidity and mortality than was NE. However, …
Zero-Example Multimedia Event Detection and Recounting with Unsupervised Evidence Localization

Retrieval of a complex multimedia event has long been regarded as a challenging task. Multimedia event recounting, other than event detection, focuses on providing comprehensible evidence which justifies a detection result. Recounting enables "video skimming", which not only enhances video exploration, but also makes human-in-the-loop possible for improving the detection result. Most existing systems treat event recounting as a disjoint post-processing step over the result of event detection. Unlike these systems, this doctoral research aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how recounting, i.e., evidence localization, helps in event detection in the first place. It can potentially benefit the overall design of an efficient event detection system with or without human-in-the-loop. More importantly, we propose a framework for detecting and recounting everyday events without any needs of training examples. The system only takes a text description of an event as input, then performs evidence localization, event detection and recounting in a large, unlabelled video corpus. The goal of the system is to take advantage of event recounting which eventually improves zero-example event detection. We present preliminary results and work in progress.
Cancer cachexia in the age of obesity: skeletal muscle depletion is a powerful prognostic factor, independent of body mass index.

PURPOSE Emerging evidence suggests muscle depletion predicts survival of patients with cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS At a cancer center in Alberta, Canada, consecutive patients with cancer (lung or GI; N = 1,473) were assessed at presentation for weight loss history, lumbar skeletal muscle index, and mean muscle attenuation (Hounsfield units) by computed tomography (CT). Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted. Concordance (c) statistics were used to test predictive accuracy of survival models. RESULTS Body mass index (BMI) distribution was 17% obese, 35% overweight, 36% normal weight, and 12% underweight. Patients in all BMI categories varied widely in weight loss, muscle index, and muscle attenuation. Thresholds defining associations between these three variables and survival were determined using optimal stratification. High weight loss, low muscle index, and low muscle attenuation were independently prognostic of survival. A survival model containing conventional covariates (cancer diagnosis, stage, age, performance status) gave a c statistic of 0.73 (95% CI, 0.67 to 0.79), whereas a model ignoring conventional variables and including only BMI, weight loss, muscle index, and muscle attenuation gave a c statistic of 0.92 (95% CI, 0.88 to 0.95; P < .001). Patients who possessed all three of these poor prognostic variables survived 8.4 months (95% CI, 6.5 to 10.3), regardless of whether they presented as obese, overweight, normal weight, or underweight, in contrast to patients who had none of these features, who survived 28.4 months (95% CI, 24.2 to 32.6; P < .001). CONCLUSION CT images reveal otherwise occult muscle depletion. Patients with cancer who are cachexic by the conventional criterion (involuntary weight loss) and by two additional criteria (muscle depletion and low muscle attenuation) share a poor prognosis, regardless of overall body weight.
Visual query tools for uncertain spatio-temporal data

Some multimedia archives contain data which have vague locations in time and space. By this we mean that, although there is some idea of when and where the entity is located, the precise information is unknown. In this paper, we present a novel approach to displaying and querying such uncertain data. We use the concepts of dynamic queries, add to this a 2D query tool for performing spatial queries and enable Boolean combinations of queries. We have implemented these ideas in a pilot system for querying African artwork. In this way, we show how it is possible for novice users to easily query large multimedia archives with complex uncertain attributes.
Voltage- and Site-Dependent Control of the Somatic Impact of Dendritic IPSPs

Inhibitory interneurons target specific subcellular compartments of cortical pyramidal neurons, where location-specific interactions of IPSPs with voltage-activated ion channels are likely to influence the inhibitory control of neuronal output. To investigate this, we simulated IPSPs as a conductance source at sites across the somato-apical dendritic axis (up to 750 μm) of neocortical layer 5 pyramidal neurons. Analysis revealed that the electrotonic architecture of cortical pyramidal neurons is highly voltage dependent, resulting in a significant site-dependent disparity between the amplitude, kinetics, and dendro-somatic attenuation of IPSPs generated from depolarized (-50 mV) and hyperpolarized (-80 mV) membrane potentials. At the soma, the time course of IPSPs evoked from depolarized potentials was greatest when generated from proximal dendritic sites and decreased as events were generated more distally, whereas the somatic time course of IPSPs evoked from hyperpolarized potentials was independent of the dendritic site of generation. This behavior resulted from the concerted actions of axo-somatic sodium channels that increased the duration of proximal dendritic IPSPs generated at depolarized potentials and distal dendritic hyperpolarization-activated channels that mediated site independence of somatic IPSP time course at hyperpolarized potentials. Functionally, this voltage-dependent control of IPSPs shaped the spatial and temporal profile of inhibition of axonal action potential firing and dendritic spike generation. Together, these findings demonstrate that the somatic impact of dendritic IPSPs is highly voltage dependent and controlled by classes of ion channels differentially distributed across axodendritic domains, directly revealing site-dependent inhibitory synaptic processing in cortical pyramidal neurons.
Monitoring Retroviral RNA Dimerization In Vivo via Hammerhead Ribozyme Cleavage

ABSTRACT We have used a strategy for colocalization of Psi (Ψ)-tethered ribozymes and targets to demonstrate that Ψ sequences are capable of specific interaction in the cytoplasm of both packaging and nonpackaging cells. These results indicate that current in vitro dimerization models may have in vivo counterparts. The methodology used may be applied to further genetic analyses on Ψ domain interactions in vivo.
Description and Evaluation of Adaptations to the Global Trigger Tool to Enhance Value to Adverse Event Reduction Efforts

Objective To adapt the Global Trigger Tool (GTT) as a sustainable monitoring tool able to characterize adverse events (AEs) for organizational learning, within the context of limited resources. Methods Baylor Health Care System (BHCS) expanded the AE data collected to include judgments of preventability, presence on admission, relation to care provided or not provided, and narrative descriptions. To reduce costs, we focused on patients with length of stay (LOS) of 3 days or more, suspecting greater likelihood they had experienced an AE; adapted the sample size and frequency of review; and used a single nurse reviewer followed by quality assurance review within the Office of Patient Safety. We compared AE rates in patients with LOS of less than 3 days versus 3 days or greater, assessed trigger yields and interrater reliability, and submitted identified AEs to each hospital for validation as event types targeted for reduction. Results In 2008, 91% of identified AEs were in patients with LOS of 3 days or greater; there were 6.4 AEs per 100 discharges with LOS of less than 3 days versus 27.1 AEs per 100 discharges with LOS of 3 days or greater. Over 4 years, we reviewed 16,172 medical records; 14,184 had positive triggers, 17.1% of which were associated with an AE. Most AEs were identified via the “surgical” (36.3%) and “patient care” (36.0%) trigger modules. Reviewers showed fair to good agreement (&kgr; = 0.62), and hospital clinical leaders strongly agreed that the identified events were AEs. Conclusions The GTT can be adapted to health-care organizations’ goals and resource limitations. This flexibility was essential in crossing our organization’s “value threshold. ”
A Pedestrian Tracking Algorithm Based on Mean Shift Using Color Histogram Equalization Method

This paper presents an improved pedestrian tracking algorithm with image sequences acquired by surveillance cameras. This pedestrian tracking algorithm is based on mean shift algorithm, and it uses color histogram equalization to improve the original algorithm. The improved algorithm performs much better than the original algorithm in some situations. We use the CAVIAR project/IST 2001 37540 dataset to evaluate the algorithm.
Fusing Heterogeneous Features From Stacked Sparse Autoencoder for Histopathological Image Analysis

In the analysis of histopathological images, both holistic (e.g., architecture features) and local appearance features demonstrate excellent performance, while their accuracy may vary dramatically when providing different inputs. This motivates us to investigate how to fuse results from these features to enhance the accuracy. Particularly, we employ content-based image retrieval approaches to discover morphologically relevant images for image-guided diagnosis, using holistic and local features, both of which are generated from the cell detection results by a stacked sparse autoencoder. Because of the dramatically different characteristics and representations of these heterogeneous features (i.e., holistic and local), their results may not agree with each other, causing difficulties for traditional fusion methods. In this paper, we employ a graph-based query-specific fusion approach where multiple retrieval results (i.e., rank lists) are integrated and reordered based on a fused graph. The proposed method is capable of combining the strengths of local or holistic features adaptively for different inputs. We evaluate our method on a challenging clinical problem, i.e., histopathological image-guided diagnosis of intraductal breast lesions, and it achieves 91.67% classification accuracy on 120 breast tissue images from 40 patients.
Data diversity of a distributed honey net based malware collection system

The value of a Data collection mechanism like Honeypot/Honeyntes lies in being attacked and probed[1]. Hence the efficiency of these resources depends upon the amount and value of data collected by them but then there is no appropriate measure present to quantify the value of data collated by these systems. Most of the honeynet projects proves the efficiency of their honeynet systems based upon the volume of data collected but then the volume of data in it self could be a misleading parameters as in the case where a honeypot collects a high volume of the data but the data lacks in the diversity as it collects the same attacks in a given time frame again and again from different data sources. In this paper we have done efforts to 1) introduced the diversity index which is commonly used in the ecological studies as a measure to quantify the value of data in terms of diversity of the data 2) and to prove that the diversity of the data collected by a distributed honeynet is greater than that of a honeynet deployed at a single location.
Endovascular infections caused by Histoplasma capsulatum: a case series and review of the literature.

CONTEXT Endovascular infection is an uncommon but devastating manifestation of histoplasmosis, which is often diagnosed late in disease. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the clinical and pathologic characteristics of patients with endovascular infections caused by Histoplasma capsulatum. DESIGN All cases of patients with documented endovascular histoplasmosis at a single tertiary care center in an endemic region during the period 1993-2010 were reviewed. RESULTS Patients presented with a subacute febrile illness and a history of endovascular devices. All patients had positive Histoplasma serology. Routine bacterial culture results were negative for all patients. In addition to yeast forms typical of histoplasmosis, pathologic findings also revealed mycelial forms in 4 of 5 patients. Inflammation was scant. Urinary antigen detection was positive in 4 of 5 patients and Histoplasma blood culture results were positive for 3 of 5 patients. Four patients were treated with a combination of surgical and medical therapy, which consisted of amphotericin B followed by itraconazole; these 4 patients had complete resolution of symptoms and no documented relapse. One patient died before planned surgery. CONCLUSIONS Histoplasma capsulatum endovascular infections are clinically characterized by a subacute febrile illness with negative bacterial cultures in patients with prosthetic endografts or valves. Noninvasive diagnostics are often the initial clue to the diagnosis. Combined medical and surgical treatment is associated with survival. On histopathologic examination both mycelial and yeast forms are often observed, with absent to minimal tissue inflammatory reaction.
Genetic Disorders of NaCl Transport in the Distal Convoluted Tubule

The distal convoluted tubule (DCT) reabsorbs 5–10% of filtered Na, and is an important site for regulation of Na balance. Additionally, the amount and composition of the tubular fluid that leaves the DCT affects H and K secretion in more distal nephrin segments. Mutations in five genes whose products are expressed in the DCT demonstrate these points and help to define the mechanisms by which the DCT contributes to control of electrolyte balance and volume. Loss of function mutations in the apical thiazide-sensitive NaCl cotransporter and the basolateral K channel Kir4.1, and activating mutations in the Ca-sensing receptor cause a phenotypically similar salt wasting syndrome. Mutation in two recently identified kinases, WNK1 and WNK4 cause a salt-retaining syndrome through increased apical expression of NaCl cotransporter. Recent studies indicate that these genes are important not only for understanding the physiology of the distal nephron, but that they and others may also contribute to blood pressure variation in the general population.