Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[Alterations of MDM2 and p53 genes in bone tumors].

OBJECTIVE To determine the frequency of MDM2 and p53 genes and their possible role in the pathogenesis and development in bone tumors. METHODS Digoxigenin labeling in situ hybridization technique was used to investigate the expression of MDM2 and p53 in 38 cases of bone tumors, including 12 osteosarcomas, 10 chondrosarcomas, 14 giant cell tumors of bone and 2 chondroblastomas. The relationship between MDM2 and p53 expressions was analyzed. RESULTS The positive rates for MDM2 in osteosarcoma, chondrosarcoma and giant cell tumor of bone were 41.7%, 50.0% and 35.7%, while those for p53 were 58.3%, 40.0% and 21.4%, respectively. The two cases of chondroblastoma showed both MDM2 and p53 overexpression. There was a striking association between MDM2 and p53 overexpressions. CONCLUSION MDM2 and p53 alterations are frequent events in bone tumors and may be involved in tumorigenesis or tumor progression in bone tumors.
Tools And Methodologies For Low Power Design

Designing for low power has becomeincreasingly important in a wide variety ofapplications, including wireless telephony, mobilecomputing, high performance computing, and highspeed networking. Despite reductions in powersupply voltages, power consumption continues to riseand demands increased support from EDA tools andmethodologies. Various tools have emerged toaddress different levels of the power problem, yetconventional methodologies often focus on the lowleverage aspects. This paper will survey existingcommercial tools used in low power design andpresent them in the context of an architecture focusedlow power design methodology.
Dose‐additive inhibition of chinook salmon acetylcholinesterase activity by mixtures of organophosphate and carbamate insecticides

Organophosphate and carbamate insecticides are widely detected in surface waters of the western United States. These chemicals interfere with acetylcholine‐mediated synaptic transmission in the nervous systems of fish and other aquatic animals via the inhibition of AChE (acetylcholinesterase) enzyme activity. Anticholinesterase insecticides commonly co‐occur in the environment. This raises the possibility of antagonistic, additive, or synergistic neurotoxicity in exposed fish, including threatened and endangered species of Pacific salmon. We extracted AChE from the olfactory nervous system of chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and investigated the inhibitory effects of organophosphates (the oxon derivatives of diazinon, chlorpyrifos, and malathion) and carbamates (carbaryl and carbofuran), alone and in two‐way combinations. We found that the joint toxicity of anticholinesterase mixtures can be accurately predicted from the inhibitory potencies of individual chemicals within a mixture. This indicates that organophosphate and carbamate insecticides are noninteractive in terms of AChE inhibition and that it might be possible to estimate the cumulative neurotoxicity of mixtures by simple dose addition. Because organophosphates and carbamates are likely to have additive effects on the neurobehavior of salmon under natural exposure conditions, ecological risk assessments that focus on individual anticholinesterases might underestimate the actual risk to salmon in watersheds in which mixtures of these chemicals occur.
Dual applications of free-standing holographic nanopatterns for lift-off and stencil lithography

In this article, the authors report a new lift-off process to obtain nanoporous free-standing trilayer film of metal/photoresist/antireflective coating (ARC) stack and to reuse the thin and flexible membrane as a versatile stencil lithography mask for the dual purposes. For the initial lift-off process of metal nanostructures, nanoperiodic pore patterns of the photoresist/ARC bilayer were first defined by holographic lithography and reactive ion etching on a silicon substrate. Then a thin metal layer was deposited through the nanopores, forming the uniform array of metal nanostructures on the silicon substrate. Different from a traditional lift-off process, the by-product of the metal/photoresist/ARC trilayer was not dissolved away but released intact from the substrate as a free-standing membrane by using a specially designed solution (NH3/H2O2/H2O). It uniquely allows the use of the free-standing membrane as a novel stencil for direct bonding and continuous release onto/from various new substrates, incl.
k-TSS language models in speech recognition systems

The aim of this work is to show the ability of stochastic regular grammars to generate accurate language models which can be well integrated, allocated and handled in a continuous speech recognition system. For this purpose, a syntactic version of the well-known n -gram model, called k -testable language in the strict sense (k -TSS), is used. The complete definition of a k -TSS stochastic finite state automaton is provided in the paper. One of the difficulties arising in representing a language model through a stochastic finite state network is that the recursive schema involved in the smoothing procedure must be adopted in the finite state formalism to achieve an efficient implementation of the backing-off mechanism. The use of the syntactic back-off smoothing technique applied to k -TSS language modelling allowed us to obtain a self-contained smoothed model integrating several k -TSS automata in a unique smoothed and integrated model, which is also fully defined in the paper. The proposed formulation leads to a very compact representation of the model parameters learned at training time: probability distribution and model structure. The dynamic expansion of the structure at decoding time allows an efficient integration in a continuous speech recognition system using a one-step decoding procedure. An experimental evaluation of the proposed formulation was carried out on two Spanish corpora. These experiments showed that regular grammars generate accurate language models (k -TSS) that can be efficiently represented and managed in real speech recognition systems, even for high values of k, leading to very good system performance.
Altevo Research Accounting for Higher Moment Betas in Asset – Liability Management: Finding the Optimal Equity Diversifier

In this paper we utilize higher moment betas to identify suitable equity diversifiers for the equity part of a traditional bond‐ and equity portfolio. With a Modified VaR optimization program put into an Asset – Liability Management framework we show that an allocation to hedge funds can reduce the down side risk in the portfolio and at the same time improve returns.
Technical Progress in Single-Incision Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy in Our Initial Experience

Single-incision laparoscopic cholecystectomy (SILC) has rapidly spread throughout the world because of its low invasiveness and because it is a scarless procedure. Various surgical methods of performing SILC are present in each institute; however, it is necessary to develop a standardized procedure that we can perform safely, such as the conventional 4-port laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC). The SILC experiment in our institute was started by use of the commercial SILS Port and changed from a 3-port method via an umbilicus to a 2-port method to improve some problems. Although none of the conversions to conventional 4-port LC and also none of the complications such as bile duct injury occurred in each method, the 2-port method functioned best and was also economical. However, it is most important to adopt strict criteria and select the patients suitable for SILC to demonstrate SILC safety same as 4-port LC.
African American Race is an Independent Risk Factor in Survival from Initially Diagnosed Localized Breast Cancer

BACKGROUND: African American race negatively impacts survival from localized breast cancer but co-variable factors confound the impact. METHODS: Data sets were analyzed from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) directories from 1973 to 2011 consisting of patients with designated diagnosis of breast adenocarcinoma, race as White or Caucasian, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, age, stage I, II or III, grade 1, 2 or 3, estrogen receptor or progesterone receptor positive or negative, marital status as single, married, separated, divorced or widowed and laterality as right or left. The Cox Proportional Hazards Regression model was used to determine hazard ratios for survival. Chi square test was applied to determine the interdependence of variables found significant in the multivariable Cox Proportional Hazards Regression analysis. Cells with stratified data of patients with identical characteristics except African American or Caucasian race were compared. RESULTS: Age, stage, grade, ER and PR status and marital status significantly co-varied with race and with each other. Stratifications by single co-variables demonstrated worse hazard ratios for survival for African Americans. Stratification by three and four co-variables demonstrated worse hazard ratios for survival for African Americans in most subgroupings with sufficient numbers of values. Differences in some subgroupings containing poor prognostic co-variables did not reach significance, suggesting that race effects may be partly overcome by additional poor prognostic indicators. CONCLUSIONS: African American race is a poor prognostic indicator for survival from breast cancer independent of 6 associated co-variables with prognostic significance.
Simplifying generalized belief propagation on redundant region graphs

The cluster variation method has been developed into a general theoretical framework for treating short-range correlations in many-body systems after it was first proposed by Kikuchi in 1951. On the numerical side, a message-passing approach called generalized belief propagation (GBP) was proposed by Yedidia, Freeman and Weiss about a decade ago as a way of computing the minimal value of the cluster variational free energy and the marginal distributions of clusters of variables. However the GBP equations are often redundant, and it is quite a non-trivial task to make the GBP iteration converges to a fixed point. These drawbacks hinder the application of the GBP approach to finite-dimensional frustrated and disordered systems. In this work we report an alternative and simple derivation of the GBP equations starting from the partition function. Based on this derivation we propose a natural and systematic way of removing the redundance of the GBP equations. We apply the simplified generalized belief propagation (SGBP) equations to the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising model and Edwards-Anderson spin glass model. The numerical results confirm that the SGBP message-passing approach is able to achieve satisfactory performance on these model systems. We also suggest that a subset of the SGBP equations can be neglected in the numerical iteration process without affecting the final results.
Automated system for matching PCGE students to their appropriate engineering school pathway

Choosing the right field is crucial for the person's future, and his country's development. Meanwhile, in Moroccan's engineering schools, many students integrate a given field, only because it's the tendency, and their ranking allowed them to reach it. While they could have excelled in their most appropriate field, and give the best to their country. In this paper, we described the Moroccan system of integrating the engineering schools. After that, we proposed a model to classify the students according to their main skills, on the basis of their grades and a test of his personal skills. Then, we studied the requirements of integrating the engineering schools fields. After that, we proposed an automated system for matching the students to their most adapted fields. Finally, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, an experiment was conducted on PCGE students.
Parathyroid hormone stimulates bone formation and resorption in organ culture: evidence for a coupling mechanism.

We have developed an in vitro system, using embryonic chicken tibiae grown in a serum-free medium, which exhibits simultaneous bone formation and resorption. Tibiae from 8-day embryos increased in mean (+/- SD) length (4.0 +/- 0.4 to 11.0 +/- 0.3 mm) and dry weight (0.30 +/- 0.04 to 0.84 +/- 0.04 mg) during 12 days in vitro. There was increased incorporation of [3H]proline into hydroxyproline (120 +/- 20 to 340 +/- 20 cpm/mg of bone per 24 hr) as a measure of collagen synthesis, as well as a 62 +/- 5% increase in total calcium and 45Ca taken up as an indication of active mineralization. A physiologic concentration (1 pM) of parathyroid hormone was found to stimulate bone resorption over control levels in this system. Parathyroid hormone stimulated the release of [3H]hydroxyproline from the bone shafts but not from the cartilage ends, indicating the specificity of the response. With 1 pM parathyroid hormone we observed an acute inhibition of bone formation, followed (after 12-16 hr) by a chronic stimulation of bone formation during the 12-day incubation. Both mineral uptake and matrix formation were enhanced at approximately the same rate during the 12-day incubation. The chronic enhancement of formation required parathyroid hormone only for the initial 8-10 hr of incubation. These results could be explained by the production or release of a factor from bone to stimulate formation in response to the acute increase in resorption--a "coupling factor. " Indeed, dialyzed culture medium conditioned by actively resorbing bones stimulated bone formation over controls when added to organ cultures at a 1:20 dilution. The factor is larger than 12,000 daltons as determined by dialysis. The factor is specific for the bone shaft and did not affect the cartilage ends.
Comparative Study and Analysis of DGA Methods for Transformer Mineral Oil

Dissolved gas-in-oil analysis (DGA) is a sensitive and reliable technique for the detection of incipient fault condition within oil-immersed transformers. The presence of certain key gases is monitored and quantified. There are a number of methods developed for analyzing these gases and interpreting their significance: Key Gas, Rogers Ratio, Doernenburg, Logarithmic Nomograph, IEC Ratio and Duval Triangle. This paper investigates the accuracy and consistency of these methods in interpreting the transformer condition. The evaluation is carried out on DGA data obtained from the local power utilities and from published papers. The data consists of 92 different cases. The key gases considered are hydrogen, methane, ethane, ethylene and acetylene. A MATLAB program was developed to automate the evaluation of the methods.
A 300 kpb Genome Segment, Including a Complete Set of tRNA Genes, is Dispensable for Acidithiobacillus Ferrooxidans

The genome sequences from two strains of the acidophilic, autotrophic, chemolithotrophic proteobacterium A. ferrooxidans are available from genome databases. Bioinformatic sequence comparison revealed the existence in one strain of a putative integrative conjugative element (ICE), containing an entire set of clustered tRNA genes. ICE is missing in the other strain, suggesting that this element as well as the tRNA genes cluster is dispensable for the bacterium. Bioinformatic predictions suggest that the tRNA genes cluster might mainly contribute to the translation of ICE encoded genes.
Steatosis and fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis C

Background: Steatosis is present on liver biopsy in approximately 50% of patients with hepatitis C; its association with stage of fibrosis has been reported, but its relation to other fibrosis associated factors is unknown. Aim: To study the relation between steatosis and other histological features in patients with hepatitis C, and changes in steatosis with time. Methods: Cross sectional study: 233 routine liver biopsies from 219 patients with hepatitis C; hepatectomy specimens from 65 patients transplanted for hepatitis C cirrhosis. Longitudinal study: 41 patients with two biopsies and 10 patients with three biopsies performed over 2–8 years. Biopsies were scored by the Ishak scheme, and degree of steatosis assessed subjectively. Multivariate analysis was used to study the interaction of fibrosis associated factors. Changes in steatosis over time in individual patients were explored in the longitudinal study. Results: Steatosis was present in 50% of biopsies. It correlated strongly with fibrosis in non-cirrhotic samples, but declined in cirrhosis, and was unusual in transplant hepatectomy specimens. On multivariate analysis of non-cirrhotic biopsies, steatosis was associated with increasing patient age and remained significantly associated with fibrosis independent of portal inflammation and interface hepatitis. In the longitudinal study, steatosis persisted and increased over time, except in patients developing cirrhosis. Conclusions: Steatosis is associated with fibrosis independently of necroinflammation, but declines in cirrhosis. It may represent a pathogenic pathway distinct from necroinflammatory activity in the generation of liver fibrosis, and should be included in the assessment of biopsies for clinical and research purposes.
Development of a finger-shaped tactile sensor and its evaluation by active touch

A finger-shaped tactile sensor previously reported in a scaled-up version was miniaturized and its signal processing speed improved. The miniaturized tactile sensor consists of a hemispherical optical waveguide with an elastic cover, a fiber-optics plate (FOP), a position-sensitive detector (PSD), and infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for the light source. When an object comes in contact with the sensor, the elastic cover is depressed and light from the LEDs, which normally maintains total internal reflection within the waveguide, is scattered at the contact location of the waveguide and the cover. The scattered light is transmitted to the PSD through the FOP. The contact location and the normal to the surface of the object are determined from the output of the PSD. The sensor's fundamental characteristics were evaluated through experiments using the miniaturized version. The sensor was installed at the tip of a robotic finger to create an active touch system. By combining tactile sensing and motion control of the finger, the profile of an unseen object was successfully delineated. <<ETX>>
Design and Fabrication of Symmetric FGM Plates

Optimisation of symmetric FGM plates and disks during sintering by computer simulation was illustrated with respect to processing parameters such as green density, particle size and composition profiles. The goal was to minimise the FGM distortion, to avoid cracks and to generate an optimum residual stress distribution. As an example, FGM hardmetal cutting tools (WC-Co-TiC) and ZrO2-Al2O3 wear resistance disks were designed and fabricated using electrophoretic deposition (EPD) and pressureless sintering. The results show that optimal parameters in the FGM could be reasonably determined by the simulations in order to achieve a successful fabrication.
Intracellular transport and storage of secretory proteins in relation to cytodifferentiation in neoplastic pancreatic acinar cells

The pancreatic acinar carcinoma established in rat by Reddy and Rao (1977, Science 198:78-80) demonstrates heterogeneity of cytodifferentiation ranging from cells containing abundant well- developed secretory granules to those with virtually none. We examined the synthesis intracellular transport and storage of secretory proteins in secretory granule-enriched (GEF) and secretory granule-deficient (GDF) subpopulations of neoplastic acinar cells separable by Percoll gradient centrifugation, to determine the secretory process in cells with distinctly different cytodifferentiation. The cells pulse-labeled with [3H]leucine for 3 min and chase incubated for up to 4 h were analyzed by quantitative electron microscope autoradiography. In GEF neoplastic cells, the results of grain counts and relative grain density estimates establish that the label moves successively from rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) leads to the Golgi apparatus leads to post-Golgi vesicles (vacuoles or immature granules) leads to mature secretory granules, in a manner reminiscent of the secretory process in normal pancreatic acinar cells. The presence of approximately 40% of the label in association with secretory granules at 4 h postpulse indicates that GEF neoplastic cells retain (acquire) the essential regulatory controls of the secretory process. In GDF neoplastic acinar cells the drainage of label from RER is slower, but the peak label of approximately 20% in the Golgi apparatus is reached relatively rapidly (10 min postpulse). The movement of label from the Golgi to the post- Golgi vesicles is evident; further delineation of the secretory process in GDF neoplastic cells, however, was not possible due to lack of secretory granule differentiation. The movement of label from RER leads to the Golgi apparatus leads to the post-Golgi vesicles suggests that GDF neoplastic cells also synthesize secretory proteins, but to a lesser extent than the GEF cells. The reason(s) for the inability of GDF cells to concentrate and store exportable proteins remain to be elucidated.
Update on field use of the available drugs for the chemotherapy of human African trypanosomiasis

SUMMARY Despite the fact that eflornithine was considered as the safer drug to treat human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) and has been freely available since 2001, the difficulties in logistics and cost burden associated with this drug meant that the toxic melarsoprol remained the drug of choice. The World Health Organization responded to the situation by designing a medical kit containing all the materials needed to use eflornithine, and by implementing a training and drugs distribution programme which has allowed a transition to this much safer treatment. The introduction of the combination of nifurtimox and eflornithine (NECT) has accelerated the shift from melarsoprol to the best treatment available, due to reduced dosage and treatment time for eflornithine that has significantly lessened the cost and improved the burden of logistics encountered during treatment and distribution. The decrease in the use of more dangerous but cheaper melarsoprol has meant a rise in the per patient cost of treating HAT. Although NECT is cheaper than eflornithine monotherapy, an unexpected consequence has been a continuing rise in the per patient cost of treating HAT. The ethical decision of shifting to the best available treatment imposes a financial burden on HAT control programmes that might render long-term application unsustainable. These factors call for continuing research to provide new safer and more effective drugs that are simple to administer and cheaper when compared to current drugs.