Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Population-Based Risk for Complications After Transthoracic Needle Lung Biopsy of a Pulmonary Nodule: An Analysis of Discharge Records

BACKGROUND Because pulmonary nodules are found in up to 25% of patients undergoing computed tomography of the chest, the question of whether to perform biopsy is becoming increasingly common. Data on complications after transthoracic needle lung biopsy are limited to case series from selected institutions. OBJECTIVE To determine population-based estimates of risks for complications after transthoracic needle biopsy of a pulmonary nodule. DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis. SETTING The 2006 State Ambulatory Surgery Databases and State Inpatient Databases for California, Florida, Michigan, and New York from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. PATIENTS 15 865 adults who had transthoracic needle biopsy of a pulmonary nodule. MEASUREMENTS Percentage of biopsies complicated by hemorrhage, any pneumothorax, or pneumothorax requiring a chest tube, and adjusted odds ratios for these complications associated with various biopsy characteristics, calculated by using multivariate, population-averaged generalized estimating equations. RESULTS Although hemorrhage was rare, complicating 1.0% (95% CI, 0.9% to 1.2%) of biopsies, 17.8% (CI, 11.8% to 23.8%) of patients with hemorrhage required a blood transfusion. In contrast, the risk for any pneumothorax was 15.0% (CI, 14.0% to 16.0%), and 6.6% (CI, 6.0% to 7.2%) of all biopsies resulted in pneumothorax requiring a chest tube. Compared with patients without complications, those who experienced hemorrhage or pneumothorax requiring a chest tube had longer lengths of stay (P < 0.001) and were more likely to develop respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation (P = 0.020). Patients aged 60 to 69 years (as opposed to younger or older patients), smokers, and those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had higher risk for complications. LIMITATIONS Estimated risks may be inaccurate if coding of complications is incomplete. The analyzed databases contain little clinical detail (such as information on nodule characteristics or biopsy pathology) and cannot indicate whether performing the biopsy produced useful information. CONCLUSION Whereas hemorrhage is an infrequent complication of transthoracic needle lung biopsy, pneumothorax is common and often necessitates chest tube placement. These population-based data should help patients and physicians make more informed choices about whether to perform biopsy of a pulmonary nodule. PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE Department of Veterans Affairs and National Cancer Institute.
HPV vaccine: One, two, or three doses for cervical cancer prevention?

the HPV vaccine protection afforded by two doses and by one dose. Kreimer et al. based on the clinical efficacy data, argue that there is suggestive evidence that HPV vaccine program using two-dose regimen instead of the standard three-dose regimen could potentially vaccinate 50% more women and could reduce cervical cancer incidence more than a program that uses the same number of total doses but in fewer women. [4] The decision of the GAVI Alliance to support HPV vaccination in 2011, in combination with the acceptance of less than three dose schedule could increase the implementation of HPV vaccination programs in low-income countries.
MANAGEMENT OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL KNOWLEDGE IN RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATIONS

1. ABSTRACT The factors that determine the development of Knowledge Management (KM) as an emerging concept are addressed. Knowledge management (KM) is placed in the context of evolution of research and technology organisations (RTOs) management. After reviewing the level of development of knowledge management as a management approach, since one cannot yet talk about knowledge management systems, certain questions are raised, and a reflection based on the type of leadership is proposed to pave the way for change. The development of leaders that favour learning cultures is a far-reaching action, going beyond investing in mainly technology and infrastructure. The author wraps up with a case study of his own centre, LABEIN, describing the initiative it has carried out in recent years in skills-based management.
Redirecting direct manipulation or what happens when the goal is in front of you but the interface says to turn left?

The feeling of directness arises when the interface permits the user to manipulate an interface object in a way analogous to manipulating the real object. However, we argue here that the essence of direct manipulation is not directness per se, but manipulation of task relevant objects in a task relevant manner. The research reported studies users of HyperCard after 20 hours of practice. We found that when users deviated from taught strategies that 25% of the time they invented new strategies that attempted a more direct manipulation of the task object than that permitted by the design of the interface.
Pseudogaps and the spin-bag approach to high-Tc superconductivity.

It is shown that antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations in a two-dimensional metal, such as heavily doped cuprate superconductors, lead to a pseudogap in the electronic spectrum. The spectral function evolves from one peak in the Fermi-liquid regime to two peaks, one for particles and one for holes. The self-energy of spin bags and their pairing interaction are calculated. These results are consistent with the corresponding results in the weakly doped ordered antiferromagnet.
Cerebral reorganization of function after brain damage

This book integrates neuroscience research on neuroplasticity with clinical investigation of reorganization of function after brain injury, especially from the perspective of eventually translating the findings to rehabilitation. Historical foundationw in neuroplasticity research are presented to provide a perspective for recent findings. Leading investigators synthesize their work with research from other laboratories to provide a current update on neuroanatomic features which enhance enuroplasticity and provide a substrate for reorginaization of function. The capacity for recovery from brain injury associated with focal lesions as compared to diffuse cerebral insult is discussed. Interventions such as environmental enhancement and drugs to enhance reorganizatioin of function after brain injury have been studied in animalmodels and in human studies. Methodologies to study neurophysiological measures, trancranial magnetic stimulation, and computational modeling. Implications of neuroplasticity research for innovations in rehabilitation of persons with brain injury are critically reviewed.
Gender And Crime In Modern Europe

This work explores the construction of gender norms and examines how they were reflected and reinforced by legal institutional practices in Europe in this period. taking a gendered approach, criminal prosecution and punishment are discussed in relation to the victims and perpretrators. This volume investigates various representations of femininity by assessing female experiences including wife-beating, divorce, abortion, prostitution, property crime and embezzlement at the work place. In addition, issues such as neglect, sexual abuse and the "invention" of the juvenile offender are analyzed.
Combined Therapy of Pioglitazone and Atorvastatin Alleviate Diabetes in Rats More Effectively than That of Mono Therapy

Present research was designated to investigate the hypoglycemic, hypolipidemic and antioxidant activity of the combination of pioglitazone and atorvastatin on long-term alloxan-induced diabetes rats (AIDRs). The experiments were carried out to determine blood glucose level, lipid profile, free radial scavenging activities, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase in liver tissue. In addition, left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy and cardiomyocyte size were also determined by histological analysis. It was found that in short-term induction, pioglitazone significantly reduced the blood glucose level without having any considerable effect on lipid profile and antioxidant enzymes (SOD and catalase) in rats. On the other hand, atorvastatin significantly reduced total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG) and low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) with marked increase in the level of high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and improved activity of SOD and catalase enzymes. However, pathological changes of heart and pancreas were not observed after short-term exposure to alloxan in rats. Long-term diabetes induction resulted in LV hypertrophy and prominent shrinkage of islets of Langerhans cells. Treatment with atorvastatin in combination with pioglitazone significantly reduced the LV hypertrophy, TC, TG and LDL level whereas they noticeably increased HDL level, DPPH (1,1-Diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl) free radical scavenging activity, SOD and catalase activity with satisfactory recovery of Langerhans cells. The result demonstrated that combination therapy was more effective than that of mono-therapy for preventing diabetes with cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in rats.
Suppression of hepatitis B virus x protein-mediated tumorigenic effects by ursolic Acid.

This study investigated the potential effects of natural products ursolic acid (UA) and oleanolic acid (OA) against HBx-mediated tumorigenic activities in vitro and in vivo. HBx transactivated Sp-1 and Smad 3/4 in Huh7 and FL83B hepatocytes and induced cell migration of Huh7 and HepG2. HBx also induced MMP-3 secretion in Huh7 and acted against TGF-β-induced apoptosis in Hep3B. UA almost completely blocked the HBx-mediated effects, while OA had a partial inhibitive effect. Utilization of specific MAPK inhibitors and immunoblotting demonstrated that UA selectively activated MAPK signaling in certain tested cells. Preintraperitoneal injection of UA fully prevented the tumor growth of HBV-containing 2.2. 15 cells, while OA-treated mice had smaller tumors than the control group. Our results suggested that UA possesses a hepatoprotective ability and illustrated the evident effects against HBx-mediated tumorigenic activities without toxicity in a mouse model.
A Comparative Study of Search Logs by using ZEALOUS and Privacy Preserving Algorithms

This paper contains a comparative study about publishing frequent keywords, queries, and clicks in search logs. We compare the disclosure limitation guarantees and the theoretical and practical utility of various approaches. Our comparison includes earlier work on anonymity and in distinguishes ability and our proposed solution to achieve probabilistic differential privacy in search logs. In our comparison, we revealed interesting relationships between in distinguish ability and probabilistic differential privacy which might be of independent interest. Our results (positive as well as negative) can be applied more generally to the problem of publishing frequent items or item sets . Our paper concludes with a large experimental study using real applications where we compare ZEALOUS and previous work that achieves k-anonymity in search log publishing. Our results show that ZEALOUS yields comparable utility to k−anonymity while at the same time achieving much stronger privacy guarantees.
Sex of Muscle Stem Cells Does Not Influence Potency for Cardiac Cell Therapy

We have previously shown that populations of skeletal muscle-derived stem cells (MDSCs) exhibit sex-based differences for skeletal muscle and bone repair, with female cells demonstrating superior engrafting abilities to males in skeletal muscle while male cells differentiating more robustly toward the osteogenic and chondrogenic lineages. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the therapeutic capacity of MDSCs transplanted into myocardium is influenced by sex of donor MDSCs or recipient. Male and female MDSCs isolated from the skeletal muscle of 3-week-old mice were transplanted into recipient male or female dystrophin-deficient (mdx) hearts or into the hearts of male SCID mice following acute myocardial infarction. In the mdx model, no difference was seen in engraftment or blood vessel formation based on donor cell or recipient sex. In the infarction model, MDSC-transplanted hearts showed higher postinfarction angiogenesis, less myocardial scar formation, and improved cardiac function compared to vehicle controls. However, sex of donor MDSCs had no significant effects on engraftment, angiogenesis, and cardiac function. VEGF expression, a potent angiogenic factor, was similar between male and female MDSCs. Our results suggest that donor MDSC or recipient sex has no significant effect on the efficiency of MDSC-triggered myocardial engraftment or regeneration following cardiac injury. The ability of the MDSCs to improve cardiac regeneration and repair through promotion of angiogenesis without differentiation into the cardiac lineage may have contributed to the lack of sex difference observed in these models.
Middle interhemispheric variant of holoprosencephaly syntelencephaly

Abstract Middle interhemispheric holoprosencephaly (MIH) or syntelencephaly is a variant of holoprosencephaly in which the posterior frontal and parietal lobes are fused, while the frontal poles and the occipital lobes are separated by the interhemispheric fissure. We describe a two and half year old girl who presented with spastic diplegia, in whom the magnetic resonance imaging revealed MIH. Her ambulation was limited by the spasticity of her limbs but her language, social and adaptive skills were much ahead of her motor abilities. Etiopathogenesis of MIH and its differences from the ‘classic’ forms of holoprosencephaly are also discussed.
Data flow testing of service-oriented workflow applications

WS-BPEL applications are a kind of service-oriented application. They use XPath extensively to integrate loosely-coupled workflow steps. However, XPath may extract wrong data from the XML messages received, resulting in erroneous results in the integrated process. Surprisingly, although XPath plays a key role in workflow integration, inadequate researches have been conducted to address the important issues in software testing. This paper tackles the problem. It also demonstrates a novel transformation strategy to construct artifacts. We use the mathematical definitions of XPath constructs as rewriting rules, and propose a data structure called XPath rewriting graph (XRG), which not only models how an XPath is conceptually rewritten but also tracks individual rewritings progressively. We treat the mathematical variables in the applied rewriting rules as if they were program variables, and use them to analyze how information may be rewritten in an XPath conceptually. We thus develop an algorithm to construct XRGs and a novel family of data flow testing criteria to test WS-BPEL applications. Experiment results show that our testing approach is promising.
Elevated levels of insulin, leptin, and blood lipids in olanzapine-treated patients with schizophrenia or related psychoses.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of the antipsychotic agent olanzapine on glucose-insulin homeostasis to explain possible mechanisms behind olanzapine-associated weight gain. METHOD Fourteen patients on treatment with olanzapine (all meeting DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia or related psychoses) were studied. Fasting blood samples for glucose, insulin, the growth hormone (GH)-dependent insulin-like growth factor I, and the insulin-dependent insulin-like growth factor binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) were analyzed, as well as GH, leptin, and blood lipid levels and the serum concentrations of olanzapine and its metabolite N-desmethylolanzapine. In addition, body mass index (BMI) was calculated. Moreover, weight change during olanzapine treatment was determined. RESULTS Twelve of the 14 patients reported weight gain between 1 and 10 kg during a median olanzapine treatment time of 5 months, whereas data were not available for the other 2 patients. Eight patients (57%) had BMI above the normal limit. Eleven patients were normoglycemic, and 3 showed increased blood glucose values. Most patients (10/14; 71%) had elevated insulin levels (i.e., above the normal limit). Accordingly, the median value of IGFBP-1 was significantly lower for the patients in comparison with healthy subjects. Moreover, 8 (57%) of 14 patients had hyperleptinemia, 62% (8/13) had hypertriglyceridemia, and 85% (11/13) hypercholesterolemia. Weight change correlated positively to blood glucose levels and inversely to the serum concentration level of N-desmethylolanzapine. Additionally, the levels of blood glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol correlated inversely to the serum concentration of N-desmethylolanzapine. CONCLUSION Olanzapine treatment was associated with weight gain and elevated levels of insulin, leptin, and blood lipids as well as insulin resistance, with 3 patients diagnosed to have diabetes mellitus. Both increased insulin secretion and hyprleptinemia may be mechanisms behind olanzapine-induced weight gain. Moreover, it is suggested that the metabolite N-desmethylolanzapine, but not olanzapine, has a normalizing effect on the metabolic abnormalities.
A Higher order Bayesian Neural Network with Spiking Units

We treat a Bayesian confidence propagation neural network, primarily in a classifier context. The one-layer version of the network implements a naive Bayesian classifier, which requires the input attributes to be independent. This limitation is overcome by a higher order network. The higher order Bayesian neural network is evaluated on a real world task of diagnosing a telephone exchange computer. By introducing stochastic spiking units, and soft interval coding, it is also possible to handle uncertain as well as continuous valued inputs.
A smoothing proxy service for variable-bit-rate streaming video

Provisioning network resources for multimedia streaming is complicated by the bursty, high-bandwidth traffic introduced by compressed video, as well as the variability of the throughput, delay, and loss properties of the Internet, and the lack of end-to-end control by any one service provider. To address these problems, we propose that proxies should perform online smoothing by transmitting frames into the client playback buffer in advance of each burst, to reduce network resource requirements without degradation in video quality. This paper describes the practical systems issues we have encountered in building a smoothing proxy service using off-the-shelf components, in the context of an MPEG-2/RTP streaming testbed.
Neurological and cognitive impairments detected in older people without a diagnosis of neurological or cognitive disease

Advanced age is associated with the finding of abnormalities on neurological and cognitive assessment. This review aims to identify studies that evaluated community samples of patients without a history of neurological disease and attempts to combine these data. While neurological signs were common, they were not universal and should not be considered an inevitable component of ageing. Additionally, they are associated with an increased risk of multiple adverse outcomes including functional decline and death. Therefore they should not be considered benign. Cognitive changes detected in studies that examined healthy older adults were only mild. More pronounced change suggests the development of dementia or mild cognitive impairment (a precursor to dementia). Changes in either neurological or cognitive examination in older adults should be considered abnormal and due to underlying disease. They should be investigated and treated in a similar way to abnormalities detected in younger individuals.
Improving the Efﬁciency of Gossiping

—In the current industrial practice, there is an increasing demand for an effective communication infrastructure to interconnect several heterogeneous systems. The effectiveness of the adopted communication infrastructure is deﬁned in terms of the provided reliability and timeliness despite manifestations of failures within the network. Current approaches do not address both these aspects [7], but one aspect is generally assured at the expense of the other. Our driving idea is to take the best solution to achieve reliability and to improve its achievable performance so as to guarantee timely deliveries. Speciﬁcally, we propose to introduce determinism within the gossiping approach and to combine push and pull schemes. We have experimentally assessed such solutions through simulations, so as to ﬁnd which is the one that best achieves both reliability and timeliness.
A convex approximation method for multiuser MISO sum rate maximization under discrete rate constraints

This paper considers a discrete sum rate maximization (DSRM) problem for transmit optimization in multiuser MISO downlink. Unlike many existing sum rate maximization designs, DSRM focuses on a scenario where each user's achievable rate can only be chosen from a given discrete rate set. This discrete rate-based design is motivated by the fact that practical communication systems can support only a finite number of combinations of modulation and coding schemes. We tackle the DSRM problem first by deriving a novel reformulation of DSRM, in which the discrete rate variables are absorbed by the objective function. Then, from this reformulation, an approximation algorithm based on convex optimization and iterative solution refinement is developed. Simulations results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms.
KLUEless: Polarity Classification and Association

This paper describes the KLUEless system which participated in the SemEval-2015 task on “Sentiment Analysis in Twitter”. This year the updated system based on the developments for the same task in 2014 (Evert et al., 2014) and 2013 (Proisl et al., 2013) participated in all five subtasks. The paper gives an overview of the core features extended by different additional features and parameters required for individual subtasks. Experiments carried out after the evaluation period on the test dataset 2015 with the gold standard available are integrated into each subtask to explain the submitted feature selection.
Improving Online Handwritten Mathematical Expressions Recognition with Contextual Modeling

We propose in this paper a new contextual modelling method for combining syntactic and structural information for the recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions. Those models are used to find the most likely combination of segmentation/recognition hypotheses proposed by a 2D segment or. Models are based on structural information concerning the layouts of symbols. They are learned from a mathematical expressions dataset to prevent the use of heuristic rules which are fuzzy by nature. The system is tested with a large base of synthetic expressions and also with a set of real complex expressions.
Structured Causal Inference for Rare Events: An Industrial Application to Analyze Heating-Cooling Device Failure

Large-scale analysis of data, especially in the industrial domain, is frequently a predictive exercise with a focus on extracting underlying correlations in the data. However, such analyses are often susceptible to biases and confounding effects. This paper investigates the use of causal data mining techniques where in the aforementioned biases can be mitigated. We investigate the application of such inference techniques to estimate the cause and effect relationships in an industrial setting particularly in the case when the outcome class is rare. Further, we discuss the underlying causal structure assumptions associated with each technique. Finally, we apply these techniques on a real world dataset obtained from an industrial setting.