Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glucose tolerance and hyperinsulinaemia in obese women: role of adipose tissue distribution, muscle fibre characteristics and androgens

Abstract. The separate independent statistical contribution of abdominal distribution of fat, hyperandrogenicity and muscle morphology to glucose intolerance and hyperinsulinaemia was analysed in 88 obese women. In univariate analyses the waist/hip circumference ratio (WHR), body fat and lean body mass were all positively associated, and SHBG levels were negatively associated with insulin and glucose values. Muscle fibre areas were positively correlated with insulin but not with glucose concentrations. Adjustment for other variables did not remove the positive association between WHR and fasting insulin and glucose concentrations. SHBG, free testosterone and type IIb fibre areas were, however, significant confounding factors in the relationship between WHR and summed insulin and glucose concentrations. We conclude that fat distribution in obese women is associated with fasting hyperglycaemia and hyperinsulinaemia, independently of androgens and muscle fibre morphology, but that reduced SHBG concentrations and increased type IIb fibre areas may partly explain increased glucose and insulin responses to an oral glucose load in abdominally obese women.
Labile Hypertension: A Faulty Concept? The Framingham Study

Labile blood pressure elevation is believed to have less clinical significance than "fixed hypertension. " This assertion was examined in the Framingham cohort of 5209 men and women followed for 20 years for the development of cardiovascular events in relation to three routinely measured blood pressures at each of 10 biennial examinations.Variability of pressure judged from the standard deviation about the mean of three pressures was not a consistent characteristic of subjects from one examination to the next (r = 0.07). Higher pressures were more labile than low ones, so that "fixed hypertensives" actually had more labile pressures than did so-called labile hypertensives. Lability also increased with age.Labile hypertension, determined during a 1-hour period of observation, adds nothing to the ability of the mean blood pressure to predict cardiovascular disease. The mean, minimum and maximum of three pressures measured during an examination were equally efficient predictors of cardiovascular disease. In multivariate analysis, for any given average pressure, risk of cardiovascular events was unaffected by the degree of variability of the pressure. It is recommended that the average of a series of pressures be used to determine risk, preferably over more than one examination.
Design and Development of Long Range Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor Chip and System for High Sensitivity Detection

Long range surface plasmon resonance (LRSPR) was used to improve the propagation lengths, electric field strengths, and the sharpness of angular resonance curves compared with the conventional surface plasmon resonance (CSPR). LRSPR sensor chip was designed with buffer layer whose refractive indices in the vicinity of water. The resonance curves of the LRSPR and conventional SPR were compared under different parameters of multilayer structure by Winspall software. The theoretical calculation showed that the sensitivity of LRSPR method was higher than the conventional SPR. Homemade LRSPR sensor system was constructed with a red laser light source, a P-polarizer, a triangle glass prism, a long range sensor chip and a linear CCD detector. The performance of the LRSPR sensor were tested and compared. The results showed that the sensitivity of LRSPR chip was improved compared with the conventional SPR which was in accordance with the theoretical calculation. LRSPR showed a higher sensitivity and detection range so that it could be used as an excellent living cell sensing method for the real-time monitoring. Introduction Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors were used for direct, label-free detection of chemicals and biological species [1]. It was an extremely sensitive optical technique to detect the changes in refractive index occurring at the sensor interface. Considerable research has been carried out on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) that has a broad range of applications including studies of biomolecular interactions [2], including DNA/DNA, DNA-binding protein, antibody-antigen systems [3-5]. However, for detection of biological agents in low concentrations or cells, the biosensors must provide high-resolution to resolve the changes in refractive index. The refractive index changes were too low to be measured directly and the penetration depth of the evanescent field was not enough to detect cells in conventional surface plasmon resonance (CSPR) biosensors. In order to improve the sensitivity and the penetration depth of the evanescent field for the molecular or cells detection, Long range surface plasmon resonance (LRSPR) biosensors were developed [6]. LRSPR biosensors were special surface plasmon modes which propagated along a thin metal film suspended between two dielectrics with similar refractive indices [7]. Long range surface plasmon resonance (LRSPR) was used to improve the penetration depth, electric field strengths, and the sharpness of angular resonance curves compared 270 This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. 2nd International Conference on Biomedical and Biological Engineering 2017 (BBE 2017) Advances in Biological Sciences Research (ABSR), volume 4
Chondroprogenitor cells of synovial tissue.

OBJECTIVE To assess the chondrogenic potential of cells within the synovium. METHODS Explants of synovium taken from various sites in the joint were embedded in agarose and cultured with transforming growth factor beta1 (TGFbeta1) to assess their chondrogenic potential. Isolated synovial cells were also tested for their chondrogenic potential by culturing them as aggregates in a chemically defined medium with TGFbeta1. Cartilage formation was determined with histologic staining and immunohistochemistry. The osteochondral potential of the isolated cells was also assessed after subcutaneous implantation of the cells, loaded into porous calcium phosphate ceramic cubes, in athymic mice. RESULTS A total of 48 synovial explants were cultured in agarose with TGFbeta1. The formation of cartilage was observed in the outer region of 21 explants, and type II collagen was localized in that region by immunohistochemistry. A larger percentage of TGFbeta1+ explants from the inner synovium sites formed cartilage compared with those from the outer synovium sites. Chondrogenesis occurred in aggregates incubated with TGFbeta1 as early as day 7, and by day 14, all TGFbeta1+ aggregates demonstrated chondrogenesis. In contrast with the results of the in vitro aggregate assay for chondrogenesis, no formation of cartilage or bone was evident in any section containing synovial cell-loaded ceramic cubes that were harvested at either 3 or 6 weeks after implantation subcutaneously in athymic mice. CONCLUSION Synovial explants and isolated synovial cells will undergo chondrogenesis when cultured in the presence of TGFbeta1. The data indicate a possible synovial origin for the chondrocytic cells found in rheumatoid pannus. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the clinical findings of synovial chondrogenesis leading to synovial chondromatosis.
A Post-processing Approach to Statistical Word Alignment Reflecting Alignment Tendency between Part-of-speeches

Statistical word alignment often suffers from data sparseness. Part-of-speeches are often incorporated in NLP tasks to reduce data sparseness. In this paper, we attempt to mitigate such problem by reflecting alignment tendency between part-of-speeches to statistical word alignment. Because our approach does not rely on any language-dependent knowledge, it is very simple and purely statistic to be applied to any language pairs. End-to-end evaluation shows that the proposed method can improve not only the quality of statistical word alignment but the performance of statistical machine translation.
Participation of medial pontine reticular formation in eye movement generation in monkey.

THE DEEP CORE Of the brain particular the med ial pontine stem, reticu and in lar formation (PRF), has long been considered to be directlv involved in the immediate supranuclear control of eye movements. This belief is based on the demonstration of direct anatomic connections from this area to all the oculomotor nuclei (ZZ), on the severe and permanent disruption of eye movement that results from focal lesions placed in this area (3), and on the shortlatency eye movements that are evoked by electrical stimulation in this area (6). Single-neuron recordings in this or closely adjacent brain stem areas (5, 7, 8, 15, 24) have revealed several categories of neural activity that is closely and differentially correlated with various types of eye movemen ts. These previous studies have either been conducted on animals without the primate’s repertory of eye movements (7, S), have been brief, qualitative reports concerned only with segregating the units by type (5, 24), or have not considered unit behavior during smooth pursuit or vestibularly driven movements (15). It has been previously shown that each oculomotor neuron participates in all the types of primate eye movement (21). Therefore, in working out the details of the supranuclear organization of the oculomotor system the question that remains to be clarified is how and at what level signals from the various separate eye-movement-generating subsystems are brought together. In this respect it is important to have . more precise and detailed recordings on each type of reticular formation whose activity is correlated with
Progressive Transmission of Polyhedral Solids Using a Hierarchical Representation Scheme

In the last years several 3D model compression methods for multiresolution applications have been presented, most of them using 3D meshes. Octrees are a natural multiresolution representation scheme, although it is approximate. Extensions of classical Octrees that represent polyhedral object exactly have been proposed. One of them are the SP-Octrees, that incorporates boundary information of the represented object in the internal nodes of the octal tree, and include new terminal node types that contain boundary information of the solid. This new scheme can represent polyhedral objects exactly with a smaller storage requirement, and can accelerate basic operations with the model. In this work we present the use of this new representation scheme for progressive transmission of polyhedral solids.
Platform-Centric Android Monitoring - Modular and Efficient

We present an add-on for the Android platform, capable of intercepting nearly all interactions between apps or apps with the platform, including arguments of method invocations in a human-readable format. A preliminary performance evaluation shows that the performance penalty of our solution is roughly comparable with similar tools in that area. The advantage of our solution, however, is that it is truly modular in the sense that we do not actually modify the Android platform itself, and can include it even with an already running system. Possible uses of such an add-on are manifold; we discuss one from the area of runtime verification that aims at improving system security.
Factors Influencing the Structures and Proprieties of Polycrystalline Magnetic Fe-Ni-Co-Al-Ta-B Shape Memory Alloys

Metallic materials that show the ability to return to their initial shape or size when subjected to a heating process are called shape memory alloys (SMAs). In 1932 Chang and Read reported shape memory transformation and noted its reversibility in AuCd alloy by metallographic observations and resistivity changes. Shape memory effect (SME) was first reported in 1938 in a Cu-Zn alloy and was observed in 1951 in a bent bar of AuCd [1]. Due to their properties, SMAs as Ni-Ti and Cu-Zn-Al, experience large reversible strains either by SME or by superelasticity. Presently, most of SMAs practical applications are encountered at Ni-Ti-base alloys because they show excellent superelastic strains and good ductility. Most of metallic materials have elastic strains limited to about 0.2%, and application of stress over a critical value causes plastic deformation due to slip or twin boundary motion. Polycrystalline alloys such as Fe-Mn-Si, Fe-Ni-C and Fe-Ni-Co-Ti, have been developed as “ferrous (SMAs)” because their workability is greater, their cost is lower and are beginning to be more commercially attractive than Ni-Ti-based SMAs. The disadvantage is that, at room temperature, the superelasticity can hardly be showed in this “ferrous SMAs”, because their martensitic transformations, γ [face centered cubic (fcc)]e [hexagonal close packed (hcp)] or γ-α′ [body center cubic (bcc)] or [body center tetragonal (bct)] are basically nonthermoelastic [2]. It is known that Fe-Pd and Fe-Pt alloys exhibit a thermoelastic fcc-face-centered tetragonal (fct) transformation, but in spite of extensive studies, no superelasticity at room temperature was reported long time after the discovery of Fe-Ni-Co-Ti alloy in 1984 [3]. Tanaka et al. reported in 2010, at a ferrous polycrystalline SMA in aged state with {035} texture at room temperature, a superelastic strain over 13% which was ascribed to thermoelastic γ-α′ transformation. The composition of this superelastic alloy was Fe-28Ni-17Co-11,5Al-2.5Ta-0.05B (at.%). This ferrous shape-memory alloy has great potential as a high-damping and sensor material [4]. The purpose of the present paper has been to analyze both superelastic and magnetic properties, in melt spun Fe-28Ni-17Co-11,5Al-2.5Ta-0.05B ribbons and to discuss heat treatment effects on these properties.
Cypher® versus Taxus®: the stent war

Cypher® (sirolimus-eluting stent) and Taxus® (paclitaxel-eluting stent) have been approved for use in percutaneous coronary intervention. Both of the stents have shown superiority over bare metal stents in reducing major adverse cardiac events, restenosis rates and target vessel revascularisation. Results of clinical trials with head-to-head comparison of Taxus and Cypher stents in patients with obstructive coronary artery diseases have recently been reported. This review compares the performance of Cypher and Taxus stents as noted in observational studies and clinical trials in various types of coronary artery lesions.
A comparison of UK primary care data with other national data sources for monitoring the prevalence of smoking during pregnancy

Background We aimed to assess the potential usefulness of primary care data in the UK for estimating smoking prevalence in pregnancy by comparing the primary care data estimates with those obtained from other data sources. Methods In The Health Improvement Network (THIN) primary care database, we identified pregnant smokers using smoking information recorded during pregnancy. Where this information was missing, we used smoking information recorded prior to pregnancy. We compared annual smoking prevalence from 2000 to 2012 in THIN with measures from the Infant Feeding Survey (IFS), Smoking At Time of Delivery (SATOD), Child Health Systems Programme (CHSP) and Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR). Results Smoking estimates from THIN data converged with estimates from other sources after 2004, though still do not agree completely. For example, in 2012 smoking prevalence at booking was 11.6% in THIN using data recorded only during pregnancy, compared with 19.6% in SMR data. However, the use of smoking data recorded up to 27 months before conception increased the THIN prevalence to 20.3%, improving the comparability. Conclusions Under-recording of smoking status during pregnancy results in unreliable prevalence estimates from primary care data and needs improvement. However, in the absence of gestational smoking data, the inclusion of pre-conception smoking records may increase the utility of primary care data. One strategy to improve gestational smoking status recording in primary care could be the inclusion of pregnancy in the Quality and Outcome’s Framework as a condition for which smoking status and smoking cessation advice must be recorded electronically in patient records.
Pharmacokinetic Interaction of the Antiparasitic Agents Ivermectin and Spinosad in Dogs

Neurological side effects consistent with ivermectin toxicity have been observed in dogs when high doses of the common heartworm prevention agent ivermectin are coadministered with spinosad, an oral flea prevention agent. Based on numerous reports implicating the role of the ATP-binding cassette drug transporter P-glycoprotein (P-gp) in ivermectin efflux in dogs, an in vivo study was conducted to determine whether ivermectin toxicity results from a pharmacokinetic interaction with spinosad. Beagle dogs were randomized to three groups treated orally in parallel: Treatment group 1 (T01) received ivermectin (60 μg/kg), treatment group 2 (T02) received spinosad (30 mg/kg), and treatment group 3 (T03) received both ivermectin and spinosad. Whereas spinosad pharmacokinetics were unchanged in the presence of ivermectin, ivermectin plasma pharmacokinetics revealed a statistically significant increase in the area under the curve (3.6-fold over the control) when ivermectin was coadministered with spinosad. The majority of the interaction is proposed to result from inhibition of intestinal and/or hepatic P-gp-mediated secretory pathways of ivermectin. Furthermore, in vitro Transwell experiments with a human multidrug resistance 1-transfected Madin-Darby canine kidney II cell line showed polarized efflux at concentrations ≤2 μM, indicating that spinosad is a high-affinity substrate of P-gp. In addition, spinosad was a strong inhibitor of the P-gp transport of digoxin, calcein acetoxymethyl ester (IC50 = 3.2 μM), and ivermectin (IC50 = 2.3 μM). The findings suggest that spinosad, acting as a P-gp inhibitor, increases the risk of ivermectin neurotoxicity by inhibiting secretion of ivermectin to increase systemic drug levels and by inhibiting P-gp at the blood-brain barrier.
Treatment of oesophageal ulcerations using endoscopic transplantation of tissue-engineered autologous oral mucosal epithelial cell sheets in a canine model

Background: With the recent development of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), large oesophageal cancers can be removed with a single procedure, with few limits on the resectable range. However, after aggressive ESD, a major complication that arises is postoperative inflammation and stenosis that can considerably affect the patient’s quality of life. Aims: To examine a novel treatment combining ESD and the endoscopic transplantation of tissue-engineered cell sheets created using autologous oral mucosal epithelial cells, in a clinically relevant large animal model. Methods: Oral mucosal epithelial cells, harvested from beagle dogs, were cultured under normal conditions at 37°C, on temperature-responsive dishes. After ESD (5 cm in length, 180° in range), cell sheets were harvested by a simple reduction in temperature to 20°C, and transplanted by endoscopy. Results: The transplanted cell sheets were able to adhere to and survive on the underlying muscle layers in the ulcer sites, providing an intact, stratified epithelium. Four weeks after surgery, complete wound healing, with no observable stenosis, was seen in the animals receiving autologous cell sheet transplantation. By contrast, noticeable fibrin mesh and host inflammation, consistent with the intermediate stages of wound healing, were observed in the control animals that received only ESD. Conclusions: These findings in a clinically relevant canine model show the effectiveness of a novel combined endoscopic approach for the potential treatment of oesophageal cancers that can effectively enhance wound healing and possibly prevent postoperative oesophageal stenosis.
Phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase mediates proliferative signals in intestinal epithelial cells

Background and aims: Determination of intracellular signalling pathways that mediate intestinal epithelial proliferation is fundamental to the understanding of the integrity and function of the intestinal tract under normal and diseased conditions. The phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt pathway transduces signals initiated by growth factors and is involved in cell proliferation and differentiation. In this study, we assessed the role of PI3K/Akt in transduction of proliferative signals in intestinal epithelial cells. Methods: A rat intestinal epithelial (RIE) cell line and human colorectal cancer HCA-7 and LS-174 cell lines served as in vitro models. The Balb/cJ mouse was the in vivo model. Results: PI3K activation was critical for G1 cell cycle progression of intestinal epithelial cells. Ectopic expression of either active p110α or Akt-1 increased RIE cell proliferation. In vivo experiments demonstrated that PI3K activation was closely associated with the proliferative activity of intestinal mucosa. Treatment of mice with PI3K inhibitors blocked induction of PI3K activity and attenuated intestinal mucosal proliferation associated with oral intake. Epidermal growth factor and transforming growth factor α stimulated PI3K activation which was required for growth factor induced expression of cyclin D1. Conclusions: The PI3K/Akt pathway transduces mitogenic signals from growth factor receptors to the cell cycle machinery and plays a critical role in regulation of intestinal epithelial proliferation.
Monocyte/Macrophage Regulation of Vascular Calcification In Vitro

Background—Calcification is a common complication of atherosclerosis and other chronic inflammatory processes that involves infiltration of monocytes and accumulation of macrophages. Methods and Results—To determine whether these cells modulate vascular calcification in vitro, calcifying vascular cells (CVCs), a subpopulation of osteoblast-like cells derived from the artery wall, were cocultured with human peripheral blood monocytes for 5 days. Results showed that alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity, a marker of osteoblastic differentiation, was significantly greater in cocultures than in cultures of CVCs or monocytes alone. Both ALP activity and matrix mineralization increased in proportion to the number of monocytes added. Activation of monocyte/macrophages (M/Ms) by oxidized LDL further increased ALP activity in cocultures. However, neither conditioned medium from oxidized-LDL–activated M/Ms or transwell coculture had this effect on CVCs, which suggests a need for cell-to-cell contact. In contrast, conditioned medium from lipopolysaccharide-activated M/Ms increased ALP activity of CVCs. ELISA showed that lipopolysaccharide-activated M/Ms secreted tumor necrosis factor-&agr;, and neutralizing antibody to tumor necrosis factor-&agr; attenuated the induction of ALP activity by the conditioned media. Conclusions—These results suggest that M/Ms enhance in vitro vascular calcification via 2 independent mechanisms: cell-cell interaction and production of soluble factors such as tumor necrosis factor-&agr;.