Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The apolipoprotein epsilon2 allele and the severity of coronary artery disease in Type 2 diabetic patients.

AIMS To examine the hypothesis that apolipoprotein E2 is associated with more severe coronary disease in Type 2 diabetic patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In this retrospective cohort study, 491 patients with angiographically assessed coronary disease were recruited from those attending a university hospital cardiology department. Participants completed detailed questionnaires, from which the presence or absence of diabetes was determined. Fasting blood samples were obtained for apolipoprotein E genotype and measurement of blood lipid parameters. RESULTS The prevalence of triple vessel disease was significantly lower in non-diabetic, epsilon2 allele carriers (39.3% vs. 16.2%; odds ratio (OR) 0.30 (0.12-0.71), P < 0.03) compared with E3/3 carriers. In Type 2 diabetic patients, epsilon2 allele carriers had an excess of triple vessel disease compared with E3/3 genotypes (43.3 vs. 68.8%; OR 2.8 (1.07-7.30), P < 0.05). The differences were independent of other variables. The apo E4 subgroup showed no significant differences in the frequency of triple vessel disease. CONCLUSIONS Diabetic epsilon2 allele carriers had more severe coronary artery disease than diabetic patients with other apo E isoforms. In non-diabetic patients the epsilon2 allele appeared to protect against severe coronary disease. We hypothesize that interaction between the diabetic milieu and the epsilon2 allele accelerates plaque progression. It suggests that diabetic patients who are carriers of the epsilon2 allele, even in the heterozygous form, should be the focus of particular therapeutic attention. Diabet. Med. 18, 445-450 (2001)
Approximate ML Decision-Feedback Block Equalizer for Doubly Selective Fading Channels

To effectively suppress intersymbol interference (ISI) at low complexity, in this paper, we propose an approximate maximum-likelihood decision-feedback block equalizer (A-ML-DFBE) for doubly selective (frequency- and time-selective) fading channels. The proposed equalizer design makes efficient use of the special time-domain representation of multipath channels through a matched filter, a sliding window, a Gaussian approximation, and a decision feedback. The A-ML-DFBE has the following features: 1) It achieves a performance that is close that to that of maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) and significantly outperforms minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based detectors. 2) It has substantially lower complexity than conventional equalizers. 3) It easily realizes complexity and performance tradeoff by adjusting the length of the sliding window. 4) It has a simple and fixed-length feedback filter. The symbol error rate (SER) is derived to characterize the behavior of the A-ML-DFBE and can also be used to find the key parameters of the proposed equalizer. In addition, we further prove that the A-ML-DFBE obtains full multipath diversity.
Women in the Presence: Constructing Community and Seeking Spirituality in Mainline Protestantism

Women in the Presence is a study of the religious lives of middle-class laywomen. Focusing on the ways in which the members of one Bible study group for women at a suburban Presbyterian church articulate their beliefs and define their communicative boundaries, the book reveals a style of managing privacy, diversity, and fellowship that displays distinct strengths and poignant prohibitions. Based on eighteen months of participant-observation fieldwork, complemented by extensive individual interviews, Jody Shapiro Davie shows that often the deepest beliefs of group members are voiced only indirectly and that crucial elements of their personal beliefs are not discussed at all among the group. Women in the Presence makes apparent some of the difficulties and complexities of contemporary middle-class religious life in America: the fear of self-revelation that leads to spiritual isolation; denominational efforts not to alienate anyone that result in polite, superficial, and lifeless churches; and the conventions of middle-class culture that repress the individual's desire for sincere and active engagement with the life of the soul. Approaching a middle-class American church through an anthropologist-folklorist's eyes, Women in the Presence offers a fresh perspective on the pursuit of spirituality by mainstream Protestant women. Unique in its field, this book will be of interest to the general reader and to scholars concerned with congregational studies, women and religion, vernacular religion and belief, and the anthropology of contemporary American religious life.
Inequality Decompositions By Factor Components

This paper disaggregates the income of individuals or households into different factor components, such as earnings, investment income, and transfer payments, and considers how to assess the contributions of these sources to total income inequality. In the approach adopted, a number of basic principles of decomposition are proposed and their implications for the assignment of component contributions are examined.
Identifying Infrequent Translations by Aligning Non Parallel Sentences

Aligning a sequence of words to one of its infrequent translations is a difficult task. We propose a simple and original solution to this problem that yields to significant gains over a state-of-the-art transpotting task. Our approach consists in aligning non parallel sentences from the training data in order to reinforce online the alignment models. We show that using only a few pairs of non parallel sentences allows to improve significantly the alignment of infrequent translations.
Characterization of Volatile Organic Compound Profiles of Bacterial Threat Agents

Abstract : Volatile organic compound (VOC) profiles are potentially an underutilized class of threat agent signatures that may be exploited in the identification of threat agents. In the present study we first focused on determining if VOC profiles collected from liquid culture headspace could be utilized to differentiate between bacterium of different genus, in this case Bacillus and Yersinia. The second focus of this study was to determine is VOC profiles could effectively differentiate between species of the same genus.
Diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency in severe sepsis and septic shock.

RATIONALE Diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency in critically ill patients has relied on random or cosyntropin-stimulated cortisol levels, and has not been corroborated by a more accurate diagnostic standard. OBJECTIVE We used the overnight metyrapone stimulation test to investigate the diagnostic value of the standard cosyntropin stimulation test, and the prevalence of sepsis-associated adrenal insufficiency. METHODS This was an inception cohort study. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS In two consecutive septic cohorts (n = 61 and n = 40), in 44 patients without sepsis and in 32 healthy volunteers, we measured (1) serum cortisol before and after cosyntropin stimulation, albumin, and corticosteroid-binding globulin levels, and (2) serum corticotropin, cortisol, and 11beta-deoxycortisol levels before and after an overnight metyrapone stimulation. Adrenal insufficiency was defined by postmetyrapone serum 11beta-deoxycortisol levels below 7 microg/dl. More patients with sepsis (31/61 [59% of original cohort with sepsis] and 24/40 [60% of validation cohort with sepsis]) met criteria for adrenal insufficiency than patients without sepsis (3/44; 7%) (p < 0.001 for both comparisons). Baseline cortisol (< 10 microg/dl), Delta cortisol (< 9 microg/dl), and free cortisol (< 2 microg/dl) had a positive likelihood ratio equal to infinity, 8.46 (95% confidence interval, 1.19-60.25), and 9.50 (95% confidence interval, 1.05-9.54), respectively. The best predictor of adrenal insufficiency (as defined by metyrapone testing) was baseline cortisol of 10 microg/dl or less or Delta cortisol of less than 9 microg/dl. The best predictors of normal adrenal response were cosyntropin-stimulated cortisol of 44 microg/dl or greater and Delta cortisol of 16.8 microg/dl or greater. CONCLUSIONS In sepsis, adrenal insufficiency is likely when baseline cortisol levels are less than 10 microg/dl or delta cortisol is less than 9 microg/dl, and unlikely when cosyntropin-stimulated cortisol level is 44 microg/dl or greater or Delta cortisol is 16.8 microg/dl or greater.
Sound Summarizations for Alchi Ontologies - How to Speedup Instance Checking and Instance Retrieval

In the last years, the vision of the Semantic Web fostered the interest in reasoning over ever larger sets of assertional statements in ontologies. In this senario, state-of-the-art description logic reasoning systems cannot deal with real-world ontologies any longer, since they rely on in-memory structures. In these scenarios it will become more important to rely on unsound or incomplete reasoning structures, to obtain a set of candidates/obvious solutions to queries, i.e. only apply state-of-the-art reasoning systems to the computationally hard solutions. In this paper we propose a summarization-based approach which is always sound, but possibly incomplete. We think that this technique will support description logic systems to deal with the steadily growing amounts of assertional data.
An anti-insulin serum, but not a glucagon antagonist, alters glycemia in fed chickens.

Attempts at altering plasma glucose and, as a consequence, food intake were performed in fed broiler chickens by single i.v. injection of des-His1(Glu9) glucagon amide (a glucagon antagonist) or a non-stimulating anti-insulin serum. Plasma glucose level was not altered by des-His1(Glu9) glucagon amide but was rapidly and largely increased (for at least 2 h) by the injection of the insulin-immune serum. Hour and cumulative food intake were unaltered up to 10 h post injection. These results strongly suggest that in fed chickens, plasma glucose is mainly, if not exclusively, controlled by plasma insulin, and that the transient and heavy hyperglycemia evoked by inhibiting insulin action does not alter food intake.
On bipartite 2‐factorizations of kn − I and the Oberwolfach problem

It is shown that if F1, F2, …, Ft are bipartite 2‐regular graphs of order n and α1, α2, …, αt are positive integers such that α1 + α2 + ⋅ + αt = (n − 2)/2, α1≥3 is odd, and αi is even for i = 2, 3, …, t, then there exists a 2‐factorization of Kn − I in which there are exactly αi 2‐factors isomorphic to Fi for i = 1, 2, …, t. This result completes the solution of the Oberwolfach problem for bipartite 2‐factors. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 68:22‐37, 2011
Fast inter-mode decision algorithm for high-efficiency video coding based on similarity of coding unit segmentation and partition mode between two temporally adjacent frames

Abstract. High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) introduces a flexible hierarchy of three block structures: coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU), which have brought about higher coding efficiency than the current national video coding standard H.264/advanced video coding (AVC). HEVC, however, simultaneously requires higher computational complexity than H.264/AVC, although several fast inter-mode decisions were proposed in its development. To further reduce this complexity, a fast inter-mode decision algorithm is proposed based on temporal correlation. Because of the distinct difference of inter-prediction block between HEVC and H.264/AVC, in order to use the temporal correlation to speed up the inter prediction, the correlation of inter-prediction between two adjacent frames needs to be analyzed according to the structure of CU and PU in HEVC. The probabilities of all the partition modes in all sizes of CU and the similarity of CU segmentation and partition modes between two adjacent frames are tested. The correlation of partition modes between two CUs with different sizes in two adjacent frames is tested and analyzed. Based on the characteristics tested and analyzed, at most, two prior partition modes are evaluated for each level of CU, which reduces the number of rate distortion cost calculations. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm further reduces coding time by 33.0% to 43.3%, with negligible loss in bitrate and peak signal-to-noise ratio, on the basis of the fast inter-mode decision algorithms in current HEVC reference software HM7.0.
Intraoperative Myocardial Ischemia: Localization by Continuous 12-Lead Electrocardiography

Based primarily on results obtained during exercise treadmill testing, electrocardiographic (ECG) leads II and V5 are the suggested optimal leads for detecting intraoperative myocardial ischemia. However, these recommendations have not been validated in this setting using all 12 ECG leads. Accordingly, the authors studied 105 patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) undergoing noncardiac surgery with general anesthesia by continuously recording the 12-lead ECG intraoperatively in all patients. The average duration of monitoring was 8.2 ± 2.7 h (mean ± SD). Ischemic episodes (i.e., ± 1-mm horizontal or downsloping ST depression, ± 1.5-mm slowly upsloping ST depression or ± 1.5-mm ST of 51 ischemic episodes, 45 involved ST depression alone, and the remaining six involved both ST depression and elevation. ST segment changes occurred in a single lead only in 134 episodes, while multiple leads were involved in 37 episodes. Lead sensitivity was estimated assuming that all St segment changes were true positive responses. Sensitivity using a single lead was greatest in V5 (75%) and V4 (61%), and intermediate in II, V3 and V6 (33%, 24%, and 37%, respectively). The remaining seven leads demonstrated very low sensitivity (2–14%) or exhibited no ischemic changes (I and a V1). Combining leads V4 and V5 increased sensitivity to 90%, while the standard clinical combination, II and V5, was only 80% sensitive. Sensitivity increased to 96% by combining II, V4, and V5. The further addition of V2 and V3 (five leads) increased sensitivity to 100%. This study confirms previous recommendations for the routine use of a V5 lead (either uni- or bipolar) in all patients at risk for ischemia. V4 is more sensitive than lead II, and should be considered as a second choice. However, lead II, superior for detection of atrial dysrhythmias, is more easily obtained with conventional monitors. The use of all three would appear to be the optimal arrangement for most clinical needs, and is recommended if the clinician has the capability.
Simian fetal brain progenitor cells for studying viral neuropathogenesis

The pathogenesis of neurologic dysfunctions caused by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection is not yet well understood. Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection of macaques is an important animal model for HIV-1 infection. This is the first report to characterize brain progenitor cells (BPCs) isolated from embryonic brain of cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) by neurosphere assay and utilize BPC-derived cell culture for studying SIV infection. The self-renewal and multilineage differentiation properties of BPCs are convenient for planning viral infection experiments. The BPC-derived culture does not contain macrophage/microglial cells, fibroblasts, or endothelial cells. Thus, this culture is appropriate for studying direct relation between SIV infection and neuronal and glial cells. First, the authors characterized undifferentiated and differentiated simian BPCs by immunocytochemistry, flow cytometry analysis, real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR. The BPCs induced to differentiate by the addition of 1% fetal bovine serum (FBS) were composed of heterogeneous cells expressing nestin, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), and/or tubulin beta III isoform (Tuj). None of them expressed the monocyte/macrophage/microglial marker. mRNA expression of CD4, CXCR4, CCR5, GPR1, STRL33, and APJ in both undifferentiated and differentiated BPCs were shown by RT-PCR method, suggesting that SIV would infect and replicate in this culture system. Then, it was confirmed that the neurotropic SIV strain, SIV17/E-Fr, replicated productively in BPC-derived cells. The SIV/17E-FrΔnefGFP was inoculated to identify the infected cells and immunocytochemistry analysis revealed that green fluorescent protein (GFP)-expressing cells were mostly GFAP positive and coexpressed with SIV p27 antigen. Thus, BPC-derived cell culture system is applicable for studying SIV infection in glial and neuronal cells.
A pocket sized foldable quadcopter for situational awareness and reconnaissance

Flying robots are rapidly becoming an essential tool in search and rescue missions because they can rapidly gather information from inaccessible or unsafe locations, thus increasing safety and rapidity of interventions. With this aim, we present a pocket sized foldable quadcopter equipped with a camera. The drone is a portable and rugged “flying-eye” that aims to extend or move the field of view of the rescuer for situational awareness and safe reconnaissance. The quadcopter can be packaged for transportation by folding its arms and it self-deploys in a glimpse before usage. Its compliant foldable arms make it rugged, reducing the risk of failure after collisions. The drone is remotely operated and it can stream sound, thermal and visual images in real time to rescuers. The prototype of the foldable quadcopter is experimentally characterized and assessed in preliminary field tests.
Host Gene Expression Profiling of Dengue Virus Infection in Cell Lines and Patients

Background Despite the seriousness of dengue-related disease, with an estimated 50–100 million cases of dengue fever and 250,000–500,000 cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome each year, a clear understanding of dengue pathogenesis remains elusive. Because of the lack of a disease model in animals and the complex immune interaction in dengue infection, the study of host response and immunopathogenesis is difficult. The development of genomics technology, microarray and high throughput quantitative PCR have allowed researchers to study gene expression changes on a much broader scale. We therefore used this approach to investigate the host response in dengue virus-infected cell lines and in patients developing dengue fever. Methodology/Principal Findings Using microarray and high throughput quantitative PCR method to monitor the host response to dengue viral replication in cell line infection models and in dengue patient blood samples, we identified differentially expressed genes along three major pathways; NF-κB initiated immune responses, type I interferon (IFN) and the ubiquitin proteasome pathway. Among the most highly upregulated genes were the chemokines IP-10 and I-TAC, both ligands of the CXCR3 receptor. Increased expression of IP-10 and I-TAC in the peripheral blood of ten patients at the early onset of fever was confirmed by ELISA. A highly upregulated gene in the IFN pathway, viperin, was overexpressed in A549 cells resulting in a significant reduction in viral replication. The upregulation of genes in the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway prompted the testing of proteasome inhibitors MG-132 and ALLN, both of which reduced viral replication. Conclusion/Significance Unbiased gene expression analysis has identified new host genes associated with dengue infection, which we have validated in functional studies. We showed that some parts of the host response can be used as potential biomarkers for the disease while others can be used to control dengue viral replication, thus representing viable targets for drug therapy.
On Triplet Markov Chains

The restoration of a hidden process X from an observed process Y is often performed in the framework of hidden Markov chains (HMC). HMC have been recently generalized to triplet Markov chains (TMC). In the TMC model one introduces a third random chain U and assumes that the triplet T = (X; U; Y ) is a Markov chain (MC). TMC generalize HMC but still enable the development of ecien t Bayesian algorithms for restoring X from Y. This paper lists some recent results concerning TMC; in particular, we recall how TMC can be used to model hidden semi-Markov Chains or deal with non-stationary HMC. Keywords: hidden Markov chains, hidden semi-Markov chains, pairwise Markov chains, triplet Markov chains, Bayesian segmentation, Kalman ltering and smooth- ing, iterative conditional estimation. i) the pdf of Xi w.r. t. , and p(yijxi) the conditional pdf (w.r.t. ) of Yi given Xi, where denotes the counting measure and denotes the Lebesgue measure. Later on, other pdf or conditional pdf w.r. t. Lebesgue measure, count- ing measure, or product measures involving the Lebesgue and/or the counting measure(s) will also be considered; the true meaning of p(:) or of p(:j:) is easily deduced from the context.
Stem Cells and the Regeneration of the Aging Cardiovascular System

It is well established that cardiovascular repair mechanisms become progressively impaired with age and that advanced age is itself a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Although therapeutic developments have improved the prognosis for those with cardiovascular disease, mortality rates have nevertheless remained virtually unchanged in the last twenty years. Clearly, there is a need for alternative strategies for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. In recent years, the idea that the heart is capable of regeneration has raised the possibility that cell-based therapies may provide such an alternative to conventional treatments. Cells that have the potential to generate cardiomyocytes and vascular cells have been identified in both the adult heart and peripheral tissues, and in vivo experiments suggest that these cardiovascular stem cells and cardiovascular progenitor cells, including endothelial progenitor cells, are capable of replacing damaged myocardium and vascular tissues. Despite these findings, the endogenous actions of cardiovascular stem cells and cardiovascular progenitor cells appear to be insufficient to protect against cardiovascular disease in older individuals. Because recent evidence suggests that cardiovascular stem cells and cardiovascular progenitor cells are subject to age-associated changes that impair their function, these changes may contribute to the dysregulation of endogenous cardiovascular repair mechanisms in the aging heart and vasculature. Here we present the evidence for the impact of aging on cardiovascular stem cell/cardiovascular progenitor cell function and its potential importance in the increased severity of cardiovascular pathophysiology observed in the geriatric population. (Circ Res. 2007;100:1116-1127.)