Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human monocyte-derived macrophages induce collagen breakdown in fibrous caps of atherosclerotic plaques. Potential role of matrix-degrading metalloproteinases and implications for plaque rupture.

BACKGROUND Rupture of the fibrous cap of the atherosclerotic plaque is a key event that predisposes to coronary thrombosis, leading to acute coronary syndromes. Recent studies have shown that the fibrous caps of vulnerable and ruptured atherosclerotic plaques have reduced collagen and glycosaminoglycan content in association with an increased macrophage density and a reduced smooth muscle cell density. Since collagen breakdown in the fibrous caps may contribute to a thinning and weakening of the cap, increasing its vulnerability to rupture, we tested the hypothesis that monocyte-derived macrophages, by producing matrix-degrading metalloproteinases (MMPs), could induce collagen breakdown in human atherosclerotic fibrous caps. METHODS AND RESULTS Monocytes were isolated from human blood by Ficoll-Paque density gradient and allowed to grow in cell culture until phenotypic and staining characteristics indicated transformation into macrophages (4 to 7 days). Fibrous caps were dissected from human aortic or carotid plaques and incubated for 48 hours with macrophages in serum-free medium without (n = 21) and with (n = 10) an MMP inhibitor or with cell- and serum-free medium only (n = 9). Hydroxyproline released in the culture medium was measured by a spectrophotometric method and used as evidence of collagen breakdown in the fibrous caps. Immunocytochemistry with specific monoclonal antibodies was used to identify expression of MMP-1 (interstitial collagenase) and MMP-2 (72-kD gelatinase) in cell culture, and zymography was used to detect MMP activity in the culture supernatant. The amount of hydroxyproline released was significantly greater when fibrous caps were incubated with macrophages than when incubated with cell-free medium (0.4 +/- 0.16 micrograms.mL-1.mg-1 versus 0.02 +/- 0.03 micrograms.mL-1.mg-1 of tissue; P < .04 by Mann-Whitney test). There was no hydroxyproline release when fibrous caps were incubated with macrophages in the presence of an MMP inhibitor. Immunocytochemistry demonstrated MMP-1 and MMP-2 expression by macrophages between days 4 and 7, and zymography confirmed the presence of MMP-2 activity in the supernatant. CONCLUSIONS In this study, human monocyte-derived macrophages were shown to induce collagen breakdown in fibrous caps of human atherosclerotic plaques associated with cellular expression and zymographic evidence of MMP activity; no evidence of collagen breakdown was found in the presence of an MMP inhibitor. These findings support the hypothesis that increased macrophage density and/or activation in the atherosclerotic plaque may induce collagen breakdown in the fibrous cap by secreting MMPs and possibly other proteases, thus contributing to vulnerability to plaque rupture.
High WSS or Low WSS? Complex Interactions of Hemodynamics with Intracranial Aneurysm Initiation, Growth, and Rupture: Toward a Unifying Hypothesis

Summary: Increasing detection of unruptured intracranial aneurysms, catastrophic outcomes from subarachnoid hemorrhage, and risks and cost of treatment necessitate defining objective predictive parameters of aneurysm rupture risk. Image-based computational fluid dynamics models have suggested associations between hemodynamics and intracranial aneurysm rupture, albeit with conflicting findings regarding wall shear stress. We propose that the “high-versus-low wall shear stress” controversy is a manifestation of the complexity of aneurysm pathophysiology, and both high and low wall shear stress can drive intracranial aneurysm growth and rupture. Low wall shear stress and high oscillatory shear index trigger an inflammatory-cell-mediated pathway, which could be associated with the growth and rupture of large, atherosclerotic aneurysm phenotypes, while high wall shear stress combined with a positive wall shear stress gradient trigger a mural-cell-mediated pathway, which could be associated with the growth and rupture of small or secondary bleb aneurysm phenotypes. This hypothesis correlates disparate intracranial aneurysm pathophysiology with the results of computational fluid dynamics in search of more reliable risk predictors.
Prediction and imitation in speech

It has been suggested that intra- and inter-speaker variability in speech are correlated. Interlocutors have been shown to converge on various phonetic dimensions. In addition, speakers imitate the phonetic properties of voices they are exposed to in shadowing, repetition, and even passive listening tasks. We review three theoretical accounts of speech imitation and convergence phenomena: (i) the Episodic Theory (ET) of speech perception and production (Goldinger, 1998); (ii) the Motor Theory (MT) of speech perception (Liberman and Whalen, 2000; Galantucci et al., 2006); (iii) Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; Giles and Coupland, 1991; Giles et al., 1991). We argue that no account is able to explain all the available evidence. In particular, there is a need to integrate low-level, mechanistic accounts (like ET and MT), and higher-level accounts (like CAT). We propose that this is possible within the framework of an integrated theory of production and comprehension (Pickering and Garrod, 2013). Similarly to both ET and MT, this theory assumes parity between production and perception. Uniquely, however, it posits that listeners simulate speakers' utterances by computing forward-model predictions at many different levels, which are then compared to the incoming phonetic input. In our account phonetic imitation can be achieved via the same mechanism that is responsible for sensorimotor adaptation; i.e., the correction of prediction errors. In addition, the model assumes that the degree to which sensory prediction errors lead to motor adjustments is context-dependent. The notion of context subsumes both the preceding linguistic input and non-linguistic attributes of the situation (e.g., the speaker's and listener's social identities, their conversational roles, the listener's intention to imitate).
The Health of Female Child Care Providers: Implications for Quality of Care

Abstract The purpose of this investigation was to determine the health behaviors and perceived health status of child care providers. Health behaviors and health status were also examined in relation to caring for children and the providers’ perceptions of quality child care. A researcher-developed questionnaire, adapted from Williams, Mason, and Wold (2001), was mailed to a random sample of 1,000 child care providers employed in 49 child care centers in Georgia. Results indicated that, overall, the sample was a healthy population with 86.8% rating their health as good to excellent. Seventy-three percent (73%) received a physical exam annually, and 70% reported having health insurance. Despite these ratings, participants reported that they were overweight, were emotionally strained, and did not engage in physical exercise at least 3 times per week. Although most performed breast self-exams, the majority did not fully understand breast health practices. Furthermore, the majority of the child care providers (78.7%) believed that their health does not impact the care that they provide to children. Last, their definitions of quality of care for children suggested a minimal standard of care or less. These findings provide information that can be useful in designing occupational health programs within community child care settings and in promoting healthy behaviors in women.
Knowledge based decision tree construction with feature importance domain knowledge

Decision Tree is a widely used supervised learning algorithm due its many advantages like fast non parametric learning, comprehensibility and son. But, Decision Tree require large training set to learn accurately because, decision tree algorithms recursively partition the data set that leaves very few instances in the lower levels of the tree. In order to address this drawback, we present a novel algorithm named Importance Aided Decision Tree (IADT). It that takes Feature Importance as an additional domain knowledge. Additional domain knowledge have been shown to enhance the performance of learners. Decision Tree algorithm always finds the most important attributes in each node. Thus, Importance of features is a relevant domain knowledge for decision tree algorithm. Our algorithm uses a novel approach to incorporate this feature importance score into decision tree learning. This approach makes decision trees more accurate and robust. We presented theoretical and empirical performance analysis to show that IADT is superior to standard decision tree learning algorithms.
Geographical variation in mutualistic networks: similarity, turnover and partner fidelity

Although species and their interactions in unison represent biodiversity and all the ecological and evolutionary processes associated with life, biotic interactions have, contrary to species, rarely been integrated into the concepts of spatial β-diversity. Here, we examine β-diversity of ecological networks by using pollination networks sampled across the Canary Islands. We show that adjacent and distant communities are more and less similar, respectively, in their composition of plants, pollinators and interactions than expected from random distributions. We further show that replacement of species is the major driver of interaction turnover and that this contribution increases with distance. Finally, we quantify that species-specific partner compositions (here called partner fidelity) deviate from random partner use, but vary as a result of ecological and geographical variables. In particular, breakdown of partner fidelity was facilitated by increasing geographical distance, changing abundances and changing linkage levels, but was not related to the geographical distribution of the species. This highlights the importance of space when comparing communities of interacting species and may stimulate a rethinking of the spatial interpretation of interaction networks. Moreover, geographical interaction dynamics and its causes are important in our efforts to anticipate effects of large-scale changes, such as anthropogenic disturbances.
Unified inter- and intra-recording duration model for multiple music audio alignment

This paper presents a probabilistic audio-to-audio alignment method that focuses on the relationship among the note durations of different performances of a piece of music. A key issue in probabilistic audio alignment methods is in expressing how interrelated are the durations of notes in the underlying piece of music. Existing studies focus either on the duration of adjacent notes within a recording (intra-recording duration model), or the duration of a given note across different recordings (inter-recording duration model). This paper unifies these approaches through a simple modification to them. Furthermore, the paper extends the unified model, allowing the dynamics of the note duration to change sporadically. Experimental evaluation demonstrated that the proposed models decrease the alignment error.
Homocysteine Impairs the Nitric Oxide Synthase Pathway: Role of Asymmetric Dimethylarginine

Background—Hyperhomocysteinemia is a putative risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which also impairs endothelium-dependent vasodilatation. A number of other risk factors for cardiovascular disease may exert their adverse vascular effects in part by elevating plasma levels of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), an endogenous inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase. Accordingly, we determined if homocysteine could increase ADMA levels. Methods and Results—When endothelial or nonvascular cells were exposed to DL-homocysteine or to its precursor L-methionine, ADMA concentration in the cell culture medium increased in a dose- and time-dependent fashion. This effect was associated with the reduced activity of dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH), the enzyme that degrades ADMA. Furthermore, homocysteine-induced accumulation of ADMA was associated with reduced nitric oxide synthesis by endothelial cells and segments of pig aorta. The antioxidant pyrrollidine dithiocarbamate preserved DDAH activity and reduced ADMA accumulation. Moreover, homocysteine dose-dependently reduced the activity of recombinant human DDAH in a cell free system, an effect that was due to a direct interaction between homocysteine and DDAH. Conclusion—Homocysteine post-translationally inhibits DDAH enzyme activity, causing ADMA to accumulate and inhibit nitric oxide synthesis. This may explain the known effect of homocysteine to impair endothelium-mediated nitric oxide–dependent vasodilatation.
Diffusion-based channel characterization in molecular nanonetworks

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of devices in a scale ranging from one to a few hundred nanometers, known as nanomachines. How these nanomachines will communicate is still an open debate. Molecular communication is a promising paradigm that has been proposed to implement nanonetworks, i.e., the interconnection of nanomachines. Recent studies have attempted to model the physical channel of molecular communication, mainly from a communication or information-theoretical point of view. In this work, we focus on the diffusion-based molecular communication, whose physical channel is governed by Fick's laws of diffusion. We characterize the molecular channel following two complementary approaches: first, we obtain the channel impulse response, transfer function and group delay; second, we propose a pulse-based modulation scheme and we obtain analytical expressions for the most relevant performance evaluation metrics, which we also validate by simulation. Finally, we compare the scalability of these metrics with their equivalents in a wireless electromagnetic channel. We consider that these results provide interesting insights which may serve designers as a guide to implement future molecular nanonetworks.
Exploiting Variant Corpora for Machine Translation

This paper proposes the usage of variant corpora, i.e., parallel text corpora that are equal in meaning but use different ways to express content, in order to improve corpus-based machine translation. The usage of multiple training corpora of the same content with different sources results in variant models that focus on specific linguistic phenomena covered by the respective corpus. The proposed method applies each variant model separately resulting in multiple translation hypotheses which are selectively combined according to statistical models. The proposed method outperforms the conventional approach of merging all variants by reducing translation ambiguities and exploiting the strengths of each variant model.
New Approaches to Reduce Staphylococcus Aureus Nosocomial Infection Rates: Treating S. Aureus Nasal Carriage

BACKGROUND: Nosocomial infections cause significant patient morbidity and mortality. The 2.5 million nosocomial infections that occur each year cost the US healthcare system $5 million to $10 million. Staphylococcus aureus has long been recognized as an important pathogen in human disease and is the most common cause of nosocomial infections. OBJECTIVE To describe the epidemiology of S. aureus nosocomial infections that are attributable to patients' endogenous colonization. DATA SOURCES Review of the English-language literature and a MEDLINE search (as of September 1997). DATA SYNTHESIS: The ecologic niche of S. aureus is the anterior nares. The prevalence of S. aureus nasal carriage is approximately 20–25%, but varies among different populations, and is influenced by age, underlying illness, race, certain behaviors, and the environment in which the person lives or works. The link between S. aureus nasal carriage and development of subsequent S. aureus infections has been established in patients on hemodialysis, on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis, and those undergoing surgery. S. aureus nasal carriers have a two- to tenfold increased risk of developing S. aureus surgical site or intravenous catheter infections. Thirty percent to 100% of S. aureus infections are due to endogenous flora and infecting strains were genetically identical to nasal strains. Three treatment strategies may eliminate nasal carriage: locally applied antibiotics or disinfectants, systemic antibiotics, and bacterial interference. Among these strategies, locally applied or systemic antibiotics are most commonly used. Nasal ointments or sprays and oral antibiotics have variable efficacy and their use frequently results in antimicrobial resistance among S. aureus strains. Of the commonly used agents, mupirocin (pseudomonic acid) ointment has been shown to be 97% effective in reducing S. aureus nasal carriage. However, resistance occurs when the ointment has been applied for a prolonged period over large surface areas. CONCLUSIONS Given the importance of S. aureus nosocomial infections and the increased risk of S. aureus nasal carriage in patients with nosocomial infections, investigators need to study cost-effective strategies to prevent certain types of nosocomial infections or nosocomial infections that occur in specific settings. One potential strategy is to decrease S. aureus nasal carriage among certain patient populations.
Cerebral Arterial Stenoses and Stroke: Novel Features of Aicardi-Goutières Syndrome Caused by the Arg164X Mutation in SAMHD1 Are Associated with Altered Cytokine Expression

Aicardi‐Goutières syndrome (AGS) is a rare inborn multisystemic disease, resembling intrauterine viral infection and resulting in psychomotor retardation, spasticity and chilblain‐like skin lesions. Diagnostic criteria include intracerebral calcifications and elevated interferon‐alpha and pterin levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). We report on four adult siblings with unknown neurodegenerative disease presenting with cerebrovascular stenoses, stroke and glaucoma in childhood, two of whom died at the age of 40 and 29 years. Genome‐wide homozygosity mapping identified 170 candidate genes embedded in a common haplotype of 8Mb on chromosome 20q11‐13. Next generation sequencing of the entire region identified the c.490C>T (p.Arg164X) mutation in SAMHD1, a gene most recently described in AGS, on both alleles in all affected siblings. Clinical diagnosis of AGS was then confirmed by demonstrating intracerebral calcifications on cranial computed tomography in all siblings and elevated pterin levels in CSF in three of them. In patient fibroblasts, lack of SAMHD1 protein expression was associated with increased basal expression of IL8, while stimulated expression of IFNB1 was reduced. We conclude that cerebrovascular stenoses and stroke associated with the Arg164X mutation in SAMHD1 extend the phenotypic spectrum of AGS. The observed vascular changes most likely reflect a vasculitis caused by dysregulated inflammatory stress response. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The comparative efficacy of two long-acting dry-cow cephalonium products in curing and preventing intramammary infections

Abstract AIMS: To test equivalence between two different cephalonium dry-cow therapy (DCT) products with regard to the incidence of bacteriological cure of existing infections of quarters, the incidence of new intramammary infections (IMI) from 2–5 days postpartum and the incidence of clinical mastitis from drying-off to 21 days postpartum. METHODS: All cows (n=1,570) on four commercial dairy farms in Southland were eligible for inclusion. Power analysis using a variance inflation factor indicated a required minimum of 2,101 quarters per treatment group. Cows were blocked by herd, parity, previous history of mastitis and most recent somatic cell count (SCC), and then randomly allocated to either of two cephalonium treatments at the cow level, viz the treatment group (new formulation cephalonium) or the positive control group (existing reference formulation cephalonium). All quarters within a cow were assigned the same treatment. Samples collected from all quarters with a SCC ≥500,000 cells/mL at drying-off, and those with a positive culture postpartum were cultured, as well as samples from all quarters collected between 2–5 days postpartum. All cases of mastitis were recorded and sampled for culture. The risk of quarter-level incidence of bacteriological cure, IMI and clinical mastitis was modelled using a GLM and generalised estimating equation (GEE), including the effects of treatment group, age,farm, udder-health status at drying-off and length of dry period. RESULTS: For 829 infected quarters, the estimated incidence of bacteriological cure for all pathogens was 78.0 (95% CI=64.3–91.6)% for the treatment group and 75.7 (95% CI=61.6–89.8)% for the positive control group (p=0.71). Incidence of cure varied with the farm (p=0.001), type of pathogen pre-treatment (p=0.009) and log10SCC at drying-off (p<0.001). For 4,530 quarters, the estimated incidence of new IMI, with any pathogen, for treatment and positive control groups was 16.1 (95% CI=13.1–19.7)% and 16.0 (95% CI=13.0–19.5)% respectively (p=0.91). Incidence of IMI varied with farm (p<0.001), pathogen and SCC status before treatment (p<0.001), and length of the dry period (in days) (p<0.001). For 5,136 quarters, the estimated incidence of clinical mastitis was 1.0 (95% CI=0.5–1.7)% in the treatment group and 1.1 (95% CI=0.6–2.0)% in the positive control group (p=0.64). CONCLUSIONS: Use of the two different cephalonium products at drying-off in four dairy herds in Southland resulted in equivalence with respect to incidence of bacteriological cure of existing infections, incidence of new IMI postpartum, and incidence of clinical mastitis in early lactation.
2D image based road pavement crack detection by calculating minimal paths and dynamic programming

Road distress needs to be detected early to optimize road maintenance cost; automatic survey of road distress is a big challenge, particularity for the detection of tiny cracks due to important variation of pavement textures. This paper presents a new method for crack detection by finding the minimal path passing on each pixel of image from every path with a length d; we propose also a dynamic programming implementation to make it applicable in real condition. Methods are tested on synthesis images set and a large set of real images. Results show that cracks as small as 2mm could be detected.
Editorial: A Special Issue from the Open Grid Forum

We describe the results of the RDF(S) activity within the Open Grid Forum () (OGF) Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group () whose objective is to develop standard service-based grid access mechanisms for data expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. We produce two specifications, focused on the provision of SPARQL querying capabilities for accessing RDF data and a set of RDF Schema ontology handling primitives for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting RDF data. In this paper we present a set of use cases that justify this work and an overview of these specifications, which will enter in editorial process at OGF25. We conclude by outlining the future work that will be made in the context of this standardization process. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Note: All URLs in this paper are as of 07-22-2008.