Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overexpression of Interleukin-1 Receptor Antagonist Provides Cardioprotection Against Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury Associated With Reduction in Apoptosis

Background—Interleukin-1 (IL-1) plays a role in mediating acute inflammation during ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury in the heart, which leads to both necrosis and apoptosis of cardiomyocytes. IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra) is known to inhibit the effects of IL-1&agr; and IL-1&bgr;, resulting in attenuated inflammatory injury, and to protect cells from IL-1&bgr;–induced apoptosis in vitro. We hypothesized that IL-1ra overexpression would provide cardioprotection by reducing inflammation-mediated myocardial damage including apoptosis after I/R injury in vivo. Methods and Results—Rat hearts were transfected with human secreted–type IL-1ra gene by intracoronary infusion of Hemagglutinating Virus of Japan liposome and were heterotopically transplanted. IL-1ra overexpression in these hearts was confirmed by enzyme immunoassay and immunohistochemistry. Myocardial tolerance of the transplanted heart was evaluated with the use of a novel system in which the heart, existing within the recipient’s abdomen, was given 30 minutes of ischemia by left coronary artery occlusion and 24 hours of reperfusion. Consequently, infarct size was decreased in IL-1ra–transfected hearts compared with control-transfected ones (26.9±3.2% versus 46.2±3.0%, P =0.001), corresponding to lower myocardial myeloperoxidase activity (2.20±0.69 versus 6.82±1.19 U/g wet wt, P <0.001) and decreased neutrophil infiltration in histological study. Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labeling and DNA-laddering studies demonstrated that cardiomyocyte apoptosis was attenuated in IL-1ra–transfected hearts (21.4±3.3 versus 41.4±3.4%, P =0.002), correlating with reduced post I/R upregulation of Bax, Bak, and caspase-3. Conclusions—IL-1ra introduced by gene transfection protected myocardium from I/R injury by attenuating the inflammatory response, which was associated with decreased apoptosis. This suggests a potentially important role of IL-1/IL-1ra in myocardial I/R injury and the value of IL-1ra-gene therapy for myocardial preservation.
Online Skill Discovery using Graph-based Clustering

We introduce a new online skill discovery method for reinforcement learning in discrete domains. The method is based on the bottleneck principle and identifies skills using a bottom-up hierarchical clustering of the estimated transition graph. In contrast to prior clustering approaches, it can be used incrementally and thus several times during the learning process. Our empirical evaluation shows that “assuming dense local connectivity in the face of uncertainty” can prevent premature identification of skills. Furthermore, we show that the choice of the linkage criterion is crucial for dealing with non-random sampling policies and stochastic environments.
Bivariate gamma distribution from complex inverse wishart matrix

In this letter, a new form of bivariate gamma distribution is proposed from the complex inverse Wishart matrix. We have derived the closed-form expressions for the probability density function and the joint central moments of this bivariate gamma distribution. Finally, the analytical results are used to obtain the outage probability for a multiple-input multiple-output wireless communication systems with two transmit antennas.
Conversational speech synthesis and the need for some laughter

This paper reports progress in the synthesis of conversational speech, from the viewpoint of work carried out on the analysis of a very large corpus of expressive speech in normal everyday situations. With recent developments in concatenative techniques, speech synthesis has overcome the barrier of realistically portraying extra-linguistic information by using the actual voice of a recognizable person as a source for units, combined with minimal use of signal processing. However, the technology still faces the problem of expressing paralinguistic information, i.e., the variety in the types of speech and laughter that a person might use in everyday social interactions. Paralinguistic modification of an utterance portrays the speaker's affective states and shows his or her relationships with the speaker through variations in the manner of speaking, by means of prosody and voice quality. These inflections are carried on the propositional content of an utterance, and can perhaps be modeled by rule, but they are also expressed through nonverbal utterances, the complexity of which may be beyond the capabilities of many current synthesis methods. We suggest that this problem may be solved by the use of phrase-sized utterance units taken intact from a large corpus
Improved Transliteration Mining Using Graph Reinforcement

Mining of transliterations from comparable or parallel text can enhance natural language processing applications such as machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents an enhanced transliteration mining technique that uses a generative graph reinforcement model to infer mappings between source and target character sequences. An initial set of mappings are learned through automatic alignment of transliteration pairs at character sequence level. Then, these mappings are modeled using a bipartite graph. A graph reinforcement algorithm is then used to enrich the graph by inferring additional mappings. During graph reinforcement, appropriate link reweighting is used to promote good mappings and to demote bad ones. The enhanced transliteration mining technique is tested in the context of mining transliterations from parallel Wikipedia titles in 4 alphabet-based languages pairs, namely English-Arabic, English-Russian, English-Hindi, and English-Tamil. The improvements in F1-measure over the baseline system were 18.7, 1.0, 4.5, and 32.5 basis points for the four language pairs respectively. The results herein outperform the best reported results in the literature by 2.6, 4.8, 0.8, and 4.1 basis points for the four language pairs respectively.
Quercetin as an Emerging Anti-Melanoma Agent: A Four-Focus Area Therapeutic Development Strategy

Replacing current refractory treatments for melanoma with new prevention and therapeutic approaches is crucial in order to successfully treat this aggressive cancer form. Melanoma develops from neural crest cells, which express tyrosinase – a key enzyme in the pigmentation pathway. The tyrosinase enzyme is highly active in melanoma cells and metabolizes polyphenolic compounds; tyrosinase expression thus makes feasible a target for polyphenol-based therapies. For example, quercetin (3,3′,4′,5,7-pentahydroxyflavone) is a highly ubiquitous and well-classified dietary polyphenol found in various fruits, vegetables, and other plant products including onions, broccoli, kale, oranges, blueberries, apples, and tea. Quercetin has demonstrated antiproliferative and proapoptotic activity in various cancer cell types. Quercetin is readily metabolized by tyrosinase into various compounds that promote anticancer activity; additionally, given that tyrosinase expression increases during tumorigenesis, and its activity is associated with pigmentation changes in both early- and late-stage melanocytic lesions, it suggests that quercetin can be used to target melanoma. In this review, we explore the potential of quercetin as an anti-melanoma agent utilizing and extrapolating on evidence from previous in vitro studies in various human malignant cell lines and propose a “four-focus area strategy” to develop quercetin as a targeted anti-melanoma compound for use as either a preventative or therapeutic agent. The four areas of focus include utilizing quercetin to (i) modulate cellular bioreduction potential and associated signaling cascades, (ii) affect transcription of relevant genes, (iii) regulate epigenetic processes, and (iv) develop effective combination therapies and delivery modalities/protocols. In general, quercetin could be used to exploit tyrosinase activity to prevent, and/or treat, melanoma with minimal additional side effects.
Serum concentrations of TNF-α and its soluble receptors during psychotherapy in German soldiers suffering from combat-related PTSD.

BACKGROUND Changes in serum concentrations of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and its soluble receptors (sTNF-R) p55 and p75 have been shown to be associated with various psychiatric treatments. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Before and after treatment, serum levels of TNF-α, sTNF-R p55 and sTNF-R p75 were measured in 38 German soldiers who had been deployed abroad and suffered from combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Patients were randomized either to inpatient psychotherapy (N=21) including eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) or to outpatient clinical management (N=17). Symptoms of PTSD were measured using the Post-traumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale (PDS). RESULTS The PDS score significantly decreased across time in both groups. Serum concentrations of TNF-α increased, while sTNF-R p55 and sTNF-R p75 levels decreased significantly. After the treatment period, we could not detect any significant difference regarding TNF-α, sTNF-R p55 or sTNF-R p75 levels between the inpatient psychotherapy group and the outpatient clinical management control group. CONCLUSIONS This relatively small clinical study suggests that specific inpatient psychotherapy but also non-specific supportive outpatient treatment for PTSD are associated with changes in the TNF-α system. This may represent an immunological effects or side effects of psychotherapy.
What Is the Best Site for Measuring the Effect of Ventilation on the Pulse Oximeter Waveform?

The cardiac pulse is the predominant feature of the pulse oximeter (plethysmographic) waveform. Less obvious is the effect of ventilation on the waveform. There have been efforts to measure the effect of ventilation on the waveform to determine respiratory rate, tidal volume, and blood volume. We measured the relative strength of the effect of ventilation on the reflective plethysmographic waveform at three different sites: the finger, ear, and forehead. The plethysmographic waveforms from 18 patients undergoing positive pressure ventilation during surgery and 10 patients spontaneously breathing during renal dialysis were collected. The respiratory signal was isolated from the waveform using spectral analysis. It was found that the respiratory signal in the pulse oximeter waveform was more than 10 times stronger in the region of the head when compared with the finger. This was true with both controlled positive pressure ventilation and spontaneous breathing. A significant correlation was demonstrated between the estimated blood loss from surgical procedures and the impact of ventilation on ear plethysmographic data (rs = 0.624, P = 0.006).
A chemically synthesized peptide which elicits humoral and cellular immune responses to mycobacterial antigens

Monoclonal antibodies directed to Mycobacterium bovis BCG (BCG) and to M. tuberculosis H37Rv (H37Rv) were used in conjunction with affinity chromatography to prepare a mycobacterial component which was designated BCG-a. A synthetic peptide antigen was prepared based on the amino acid sequence of BCG-a and was designated BCG-a-P. Significant immunological similarities were found between BCG-a-P and antigens in extracts of BCG and H37Rv but not between BCG-a-P and antigens of nontuberculous mycobacteria. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay detected antibodies to BCG-a-P in sera from rabbits that had been immunized with BCG and H37Rv sonicates. In Western blot analysis, antibodies to BCG-a-P reacted to 10,000-molecular-weight components of extracts of BCG and H37Rv. Delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity reactions to BCG-a-P were elicited in guinea pigs immunized with sonicates of BCG and H37Rv but were weak or nonexistent in unimmunized animals or in animals immunized with sonicates of nontuberculous mycobacteria. This study points out the feasibility of using monoclonal antibodies to prepare and characterize synthetic mycobacterial peptides with a potential for immunodiagnostic purposes.
A Rendering Method for Woven Clothes Reflections Jinhua

We proposed a physics-based rendering method for reflection of woven textiles. Both reflection properties of fibers and yarns are taken into account, which are the primary factors affecting visual appearance of cloths. The reflection from fiber surfaces is analyzed using Kirchhoff diffraction theory, assuming a statistical surface. Yarns are usually consisted of a group of fibers and they are simulated by a group of parallel infinite long triangle prisms which considers the different cross section shapes of fibers. The reflections from yarns are derived according to such geometry, taking into account of masking and shadowing. The model is compared with experimental data from spectrophotometer measurement on different woven textile samples and fit very well by numerical simulations. Theoretically the model is suitable to different kinds of woven textile structure and fiber materials. Also it can be developed to be used in computer graphics applications.
Drugs for treatment of very high blood pressure during pregnancy.

BACKGROUND Very high blood pressure during pregnancy poses a serious threat to women and their babies. The use of drugs to lower blood pressure will reduce this risk for the women, and possibly also for the baby. OBJECTIVES The objective of this review was to compare different antihypertensive drugs used for treatment of severe hypertension during pregnancy. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group trials register (April 2002), the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (The Cochrane Library, Issue 2 2002) and MEDLINE (April 2002). SELECTION CRITERIA Studies were randomised trials. Quasi random designs were excluded. Participants were women with severe hypertension during pregnancy. Women postpartum at trial entry were excluded. Interventions were any comparisons of one antihypertensive agent with another. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Data were extracted independently by two reviewers to assess eligibility and describe the trial characteristics, and by one reviewer for the meta-analyses. Discrepancies were resolved by discussion. There was no blinding of authorship or results. Whenever possible, unpublished data were sought from investigators. MAIN RESULTS Twenty trials were included (1637 women) and 19 were excluded. There were ten different comparisons. Hydralazine was the most common drug for others to be evaluated against. Diazoxide, given as 75mg bolus injections, appears to be associated with maternal hypotension requiring treatment, and ketanserin is less effective than hydralazine at reducing blood pressure. There is no other clear evidence that any one of the other antihypertensive agents is better than another for women with severe hypertension during pregnancy. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS Until better evidence is available, the choice of antihypertensive should depend on the experience and familiarity of an individual clinician with a particular drug, and on what is known about adverse maternal and fetal side-effects. Exceptions are diazoxide and ketanserin, which are probably not good choices.
Essays on the economic analysis of discrimination, law enforcement, and smoking

ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF DISCRIMINATION, LAW ENFORCEMENT, AND SMOKING by Brian C. Rowe Chair: Daniel S. Silverman This dissertation examines issues related to the efficiency and effectiveness of government policies to provide public goods. In the first essay, I develop an empirical test for whether police officers discriminate on driver gender when enforcing traffic laws. The test is designed to only detect discrimination that is unrelated to providing safe conditions on the roads. The empirical method developed in the essay may be applicable in a number of other contexts where evaluators (such as police officers, judges, or mortgage lenders) may potentially discriminate when making decisions regarding subjects who belong to different demographic groups. The second essay makes a theoretical argument showing that because police officers can detect many different crimes by making a traffic stop, the widespread practice of giving stopped traffic law violators a warning instead of a fine can be efficient. Warnings would at first seem to be inefficient because they lower the expected penalty from breaking the law, and thereby reduce deterrence for a given amount of public resources devoted to detecting and stopping violations. My argument therefore points out an efficiency rationale for providing individual government agents discretion in deciding which detected law breakers to penalize. In the third and final essay, my co-author Daniel Eisenberg and I use the Vietnam draft lottery to test the commonly held presumption that smoking as a young person strongly predicts smoking in later adulthood. This presumption, well documented by many observational studies, underlies many anti-smoking policies in the United States. Yet some of the persistence of smoking over time might be attributable to individual factors, such as tolerance for health risks, which are difficult to account for in observational data. Using variation in smoking induced by the draft lottery, we do not find a strong relationship between smoking in early and late adulthood, suggesting that anti-smoking policies directed at young people may not be effective in achieving the policy goal of reducing adult smoking rates.
A Communication-Assisted Overcurrent Protection Scheme for Radial Distribution Systems With Distributed Generation

Conventional overcurrent protection schemes for radial distribution systems usually attempt to coordinate a recloser at the beginning of the feeder with the fuses on the laterals. The integration of distributed generation in distribution systems leads to problems related to protection coordination that are difficult to be solved by applying conventional protection techniques. This paper proposes an efficient communication-based protection scheme that implements common directional overcurrent relays instead of reclosers at the line, assisted by intertripping and blocking transfer functions. The proposed protection strategy guarantees selectivity regardless of whether the generating units are connected to the network or not, and can be designed retaining either the fuse-blowing or fuse-saving philosophy. Meaningful conclusions are derived from the application of the scheme on a test distribution system.
Deeply Preferred Operators: Lazy Search Meets Lookahead

Heuristics in state-space search are primarily used to estimate the distance from states to the goal. In domain-independent heuristic-search planning, using extra information derived from the heuristic computation to mark some successors as preferred, and then biasing the search towards the preferred successors, resulted in significant improvements in planning performance. Preferred operators, however, help to discriminate only between the immediate successors of the evaluated state. We propose a simple and effective technique that takes advantage of more of the information provided by the heuristic computation. This techniques, called lazy lookahead, consists of two components: A generalization of preferred operators to deeper descendants of the evaluated states, and a suitable generalization of deferred heuristic evaluation (aka lazy search) to such “deeply preferred” descendants. Our evaluation shows that employing lazy lookahead results in better performance than using standard preferred operators.
Effects of cannabinoids on sympathetic and parasympathetic neuroeffector transmission in the rabbit heart.

Cannabinoids elicit marked cardiovascular responses. It is not clear how peripheral effects on the autonomic nervous system contribute to these responses. The aim of the present study was to characterize the peripheral actions of cannabinoids on the autonomic innervation of the heart. Experiments were carried out on pithed rabbits. In the first series of experiments, postganglionic sympathetic cardioaccelerator fibers were stimulated electrically. The synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists WIN55212-2 (0.005, 0.05, 0.5, and 1.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) and CP55940 (0.003, 0.03, 0.3, and 1 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) dose dependently inhibited the electrically evoked cardioacceleration. The inhibition by WIN55212-2 (0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) was prevented by the CB(1) cannabinoid receptor antagonist SR141716A (0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ). WIN55212-2 (0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) did not change the increase in heart rate evoked by injection of isoprenaline. In the second series of experiments, preganglionic vagal fibers were stimulated electrically. WIN55212-2 (0.005, 0.05, and 0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) and CP55940 (0.003, 0.03, and 0.3 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) dose dependently inhibited the stimulation-evoked decrease in heart rate. The inhibition produced by WIN55212-2 (0.005, 0.05, and 0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ) was antagonized by SR141716A (0.5 mg kg(-1) i.v. ). The results indicate that cannabinoids, by activating CB(1) cannabinoid receptors, inhibit sympathetic and vagal neuroeffector transmission in the heart. The mechanism of the sympathoinhibition is probably presynaptic inhibition of noradrenaline release from postganglionic sympathetic neurons. The mechanism of the inhibition of vagal activity was not clarified: cannabinoids may have an inhibitory action on both pre- and postganglionic vagal neurons.
Clinicopathological significance of galectin-3 expression in ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas.

PURPOSE Galectin-3, a member of the beta-galactoside-binding lectin family, has multiple biological functions including cell-cell interactions and cell-extracellular matrix adhesion, cellular proliferation, cellular differentiation, and apoptosis. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship of galectin-3 expression to clinicopathological findings and patient prognosis in ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN We examined galectin-3 expression in 104 surgically resected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cases with stages I through IV using immunohistochemistry and investigated the relationship of it to overall survival. RESULTS Patients were divided into two groups: a low expression group, where <60% of tumor cells were positive; and a high expression group, where > or =60% of tumor cells were positive. Cases in the low expression group had a significant tendency to be at later stages, to have distant metastasis, and to have less differentiated tumors, compared with cases in the high expression group (P = 0.001 for stage, P = 0.001 for metastasis, and P = 0.006 for differentiation). Postoperative overall survival was worse in the low galectin-3 expression group than in the high galectin-3 expression group (P = 0.004). Multivariate analysis showed that the risk ratio of prognosis was 2.06 among patients in the low galectin-3 expression group compared with the high galectin-3 expression group (P = 0.006). CONCLUSIONS Decreased expression of galectin-3 was associated with advanced stage, tumor de-differentiation, and metastasis in ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. Galectin-3 expression might be a useful prognostic marker for survival in ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas.
A framework for performance evaluation of real-time rendering algorithms in virtual reality

We describe a framework for ‘a performance evaluation system for real-time rendering algorithms in Virtual Reality. The system embeds a numeric method to evaluate image quality and approaches td construct different types of VR tasks to conduct fair tests of real-time rendering algorithms. We test a real-time rendering algorithm with this jramework. Experimental results show that the system supports broad tests of real-time rendering algorithms, and can form the basis for comparing their performance.