Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myocardial kinetics of reporter probe 124I-FIAU in isolated perfused rat hearts after in vivo adenoviral transfer of herpes simplex virus type 1 thymidine kinase reporter gene.

UNLABELLED Reporter gene imaging holds promise for noninvasive monitoring of cardiac gene therapy. We recently demonstrated that (124)I-labeled 2'-fluoro-2'-deoxy-5'-iodo-1beta-d-arabinofuranosyluracil ((124)I-FIAU) is suitable for PET of myocardial expression of herpes simplex virus type 1 thymidine kinase reporter gene (HSV1-tk). In contrast to previous studies in tumors, early specific uptake was followed by rapid washout. Myocardial kinetics of (124)I-FIAU are still poorly understood. This study aimed at a further investigation under controlled conditions using an isolated heart perfusion model. METHODS Male Wistar rats underwent transthoracic regional injection of replication-defective adenovirus (2.5 x 10(9) plaque-forming units) containing either HSV1-tk (n = 16) or LacZ reporter gene (n = 15) into the inferior wall. Nonmanipulated rats (n = 5) served as further controls. Hearts were excised 2 d later and perfused according to the Langendorff technique with (124)I-FIAU-containing buffer (15 min, followed by 30 min of nonradioactive perfusion). Experiments were performed under baseline conditions and in the presence of thymidine (competitive substrate) or fludarabine (in vitro inhibitor of 5'-nucleotidase). Time-activity curves were acquired by external coincident detectors. The myocardial rate of (124)I-FIAU uptake (K(i)), clearance rate (K(o)), and volume of distribution (V(d) = K(i)/K(o)) were calculated. Subsequently, hearts were subjected to gamma-counting, followed by microtome slicing and autoradiography. RESULTS The V(d) from Langendorff perfusion significantly correlated with final whole-heart tracer retention (r = 0.88, P = 0.019) and the autoradiographic area of regional myocardial activity (r = 0.89, P = 0.016). HSV1-tk hearts showed higher K(i) and V(d) of (124)I-FIAU compared with that of controls (P < 0.001) and detectable but slower washout compared with that of the LacZ group (P < 0.01). Addition of thymidine to the perfusate inhibited myocardial uptake of (124)I-FIAU by reducing V(d) and K(i) in HSV1-tk and LacZ hearts compared with the baseline. Addition of fludarabine did not result in the expected reduction of washout in HSV1-tk hearts due to inhibition of 5'-nucleotidases (which may dephosphorylate (124)I-FIAU monophosphate). It acted as an uptake inhibitor similar to thymidine, reducing V(d) in HSV1-tk hearts. CONCLUSION Assessment of specific reporter probe kinetics after regional in vivo reporter gene transfer is feasible using the isolated perfused rat heart preparation. This model allows one to study the effects of pharmacologic interventions and may refine understanding of the reporter probe signal for in vivo imaging. Different nucleoside analogs significantly inhibit (124)I-FIAU uptake, emphasizing the importance of transporter mechanisms for reporter probe kinetics.
The effect of tamoxifen on the genital tract

Abstract Tamoxifen is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) that is widely used in the treatment of patients with breast cancer and for chemoprophylaxis in high risk women. Tamoxifen results in a spectrum of abnormalities involving the genital tract, the most significant being an increased incidence of endometrial cancer and uterine sarcoma. This article reviews the effects of tamoxifen on the genital tract and the strengths and weaknesses of various imaging modalities for evaluating the endometrium.
Interaction between functional health literacy, patient activation, and glycemic control

Background Functional health literacy (FHL) and patient activation can impact diabetes control through enhanced diabetes self-management. Less is known about the combined effect of these characteristics on diabetes outcomes. Using brief, validated measures, we examined the interaction between FHL and patient activation in predicting glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) control among a cohort of multimorbid diabetic patients. Methods We administered a survey via mail to 387 diabetic patients with coexisting hypertension and ischemic heart disease who received outpatient care at one regional VA medical center between November 2010 and December 2010. We identified patients with the study conditions using the International Classification of Diseases-Ninth Revision-Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) diagnoses codes and Current Procedure Terminology (CPT) procedures codes. Surveys were returned by 195 (50.4%) patients. We determined patient activation levels based on participant responses to the 13-item Patient Activation Measure and FHL levels using the single-item screening question, “How confident are you filling out medical forms by yourself? ” We reviewed patient medical records to assess glycemic control. We used multiple logistic regression to examine whether activation and FHL were individually or jointly related to HbA1c control. Results Neither patient activation nor FHL was independently related to glycemic control in the unadjusted main effects model; however, the interaction between the two was significantly associated with glycemic control (odds ratio 1.05 [95% confidence interval 1.01–1.09], P=0.02). Controlling for age, illness burden, and number of primary care visits, the combined effect of these measures on glycemic control remained significant (odds ratio 1.05 [95% confidence interval 1.01–1.09], P=0.02). Conclusion The interaction between FHL and patient activation is associated with HbA1c control beyond the independent effects of these parameters alone. A personalized approach to diabetes management incorporating these characteristics may increase patient-centered care and improve outcomes for patients with diabetes.
The history and future of neural modeling for cochlear implants

ABSTRACT This special issue of Network: Computation in Neural Systems on the topic of “Computational models of the electrically stimulated auditory system” incorporates review articles spanning a wide range of approaches to modeling cochlear implant stimulation of the auditory system. The purpose of this overview paper is to provide a historical context for the different modeling endeavors and to point toward how computational modeling could play a key role in the understanding, evaluation, and improvement of cochlear implants in the future.
ZRoot ZLayerGroup ZGroup ZDrawingSurface ZPolyline ZVisualLeaf ZPolyline ZVisualLeaf ZVisualLeaf ZCamera ZVisualLeaf ZRectangle

In this paper we investigate the use of scene graphs as a general approach for implementing two-dimensional (2D) graphical applications, and in particular Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs). Scene graphs are typically found in three-dimensional (3D) graphics packages such as Sun's Java3D and SGI's OpenInventor. They have not been widely adopted by 2D graphical user interface toolkits. To explore the effectiveness of scene graph techniques, we have developed Jazz, a general-purpose 2D scene graph toolkit. Jazz is implemented in Java using Java2D, and runs on all platforms that support Java 2. This paper describes Jazz and the lessons we learned using Jazz for ZUIs. It also discusses how 2D scene graphs can be applied to other application areas.
Vitamin A absorption and metabolism in the chick: response to high dietary intake and to tocopherol

1. Absorption of 14C-labelled retinol was determined along the gastrointestinal tract of chicks, using 141Cerium as a non-absorbed reference substance, as influenced by high dietary vitamin A and the addition of tocopherol to the diet. 2. The site of major vitamin A absorption was the proximal small intestine and high intake of vitamin A reduced slightly the percentage over-all absorption. 3. Labelled glucuronides were secreted into the duodenum and were 50–60% reabsorbed in the small intestines. High-vitamin-A intakes enhanced the duodenal flow of retinyl glucuronides. 4. In vitro hepatic retinol esterification and glucuronide production were enhanced in chicks given high dietary vitamin A. 5. Plasma transport and clearance of retinol were enhanced by feeding high levels of vitamin A and further enhanced when tocopherol at high concentrations was present in the diet. 6. Dietary tocopherol had no effect on absorption, increased hepatic vitamin A stores and in vitro retinol esterification, and decreased retinyl glucuronide flows through the duodenum.
Augmenting handset capacity through virtual storage

Current cell phones are capable of accessing the Internet, downloading music and games, taking pictures, and recording videos. These activities can easily result in a huge amount of multimedia content requiring tens or hundreds of gigabytes of storage, which is several orders of magnitude more than the storage capacity of today's cell phones. In this paper, we propose a novel remote storage solution to increase the amount of storage accessible to a mobile user. Our solution consists of two components: a client program running on the cell phone and a remote server to manage remote storage. The novelty of our solution results from the client program that makes the accesses to the remote storage completely transparent and seamless to the user. Thus, the user's perception of the amount of storage available on the cell phone is considerably higher than the actual capacity of the phone. In addition, the client program implements sophisticated caching algorithms and wireless optimizations to ensure that the user-perceived performance is not significantly impacted. © 2007 Alcatel-Lucent.
Perceived Rigidity in Motion-in-Depth Increases with Contour Perspective

When observers are asked to match the depth of an object according to its height, they often report systematic errors depending on viewing distance. Systematic biases can also arise while vergence distances are induced by binocular disparities. Observers of stereoscopic images tend to overestimate the depth of objects displayed in front of the screen, while the depth of objects displayed behind the screen plane is underestimated. This phenomenon creates a serious problem in that veridicality in depth perception appears distorted when one attempts to render the metrics of a captured 3-D world. These distortions could also subsist with structure-from-motion information and during motion-in-depth. Observers judged the circularity of transparent rotating cylinders that were either static or moving in depth. Crossed results show that participants could precisely retrieve the best modulation between presented depth and width. As this effect could be amplified with stimuli containing stronger perspective cues (ie contour perspective), participants judged the rigidity of spinning cubes, moving along the line of sight, which were either edges-defined or defined by randomly textured surfaces (dots). The results showed that, although depth constancy was not improved by contour perspective, perceived rigidity was increased by perspective when the best scaling estimate was displayed. This finding suggests that appropriate binocular disparity information in combination to monocular signal is necessary for stereoscopic depth perception.
Diffraction-free optical beam propagation with near-zero phase variation in extremely anisotropic metamaterials

Extremely anisotropic metal-dielectric multilayer metamaterials are designed to have the effective permittivity tensor of a transverse component (parallel to the interfaces of the multilayer) with zero real part and a longitudinal component (normal to the interfaces of the multilayer) with ultra-large imaginary part at the same wavelength, including the optical nonlocality analysis based on the transfer-matrix method. The diffraction-free deep-subwavelength optical beam propagation with near-zero phase variation in the designed multilayer stack due to the near-flat iso-frequency contour is demonstrated and analyzed, including the effects of the multilayer period and the material loss.
Design of T-S fuzzy controller for two-wheeled mobile robot

The switching Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model-based position control design for a differentially driven wheeled mobile robot is considered in this paper. In this work, the kinematic equations of the differentially driven wheeled mobile robot are firstly represented by exact T-S fuzzy systems. Then the switching section method is further employed to avoid uncontrollable problem of the derived T-S fuzzy model. Consequently, the switching parallel distributed compensation is utilized to control the switching fuzzy system. Moreover, the guaranteed cost control concept is utilized to improve the performance of the control system. Finally, the experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the control design.
Recognizing cross-lingual textual entailment with co-training using similarity and difference views

Cross-lingual textual entailment is a relatively new problem that detects the entailment relationship between two text fragments written in different languages. Previous work adopted machine learning algorithms and similarity measures as features to address this task. In order to overcome the high cost of human annotation and further improve the recognition performance, we present a novel co-training approach to solve this problem. We first use an off-the-shelf machine translation tool to eliminate the language gap between two texts. Then we measure the similarities and differences between two texts and regard them as sufficient and redundant views. We use those two views to conduct the co-training procedure to perform classification. Besides, a new effective Kullback-Leibler (KL) based criterion is proposed to select the results from all possible iterations. Experiments on cross-lingual datasets provided by SemEval 2013 show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline systems and previous work.
Echocardiographic indices in normal German shepherd dogs

Sixty clinically normal German shepherd dogs, 31 males and 29 females, ranging in age from 1 and 5 years and with a body weight ranging from 22 to 37.2 kg, were examined by the two-dimensional mode, M-mode, and Doppler echocardiography. In Doppler mode, the mitral valve flows were obtained, where the aim was to determine the velocity peaks and ratios of the E and A waves and the mitral E wave deceleration time. The velocity peaks were obtained for the tricuspid, pulmonary and aortic valves. On the left ventricular outflow tract flow, the time velocity integral and aortic cross-sectional area was used to calculate the cardiac output. A statistically significant correlation with the body weight was found for the systolic left atrial and diastolic aortic diameter on two-dimensional mode. On M-mode, there was a significant correlation between the body weight and the systolic left atrium and diastolic aortic dimension, systolic and diastolic left ventricular, septal and posterior wall dimensions. Doppler echocardiography showed that there was no significant correlation between the body weight and the mitral, tricuspid, pulmonary and aortic valves flows. These results demonstrate that it is important to know the normal echocardiographic values for German shepherd dogs because there are some characteristics peculiar to this particular breed. The data obtained is expected to be helpful for studies on small animal cardiology.
Autophagy-dependent production of secreted factors facilitates oncogenic RAS-driven invasion.

UNLABELLED The tumor-promoting functions of autophagy are primarily attributed to its ability to promote cancer cell survival. However, emerging evidence suggests that autophagy plays other roles during tumorigenesis. Here, we uncover that autophagy promotes oncogenic RAS-driven invasion. In epithelial cells transformed with oncogenic RAS, depletion of autophagy-related genes suppresses invasion in three-dimensional culture, decreases cell motility, and reduces pulmonary metastases in vivo. Treatment with conditioned media from autophagy-competent cells rescues the invasive capacity of autophagy-deficient cells, indicating that these cells fail to secrete factors required for RAS-driven invasion. Reduced autophagy diminishes the secretion of the promigratory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is necessary to restore invasion of autophagy-deficient cells. Moreover, autophagy-deficient cells exhibit reduced levels of matrix metalloproteinase 2 and WNT5A. These results support a previously unrecognized function for autophagy in promoting cancer cell invasion via the coordinate production of multiple secreted factors. SIGNIFICANCE Our results delineate a previously unrecognized function for autophagy in facilitating oncogenic RAS-driven invasion. We demonstrate that an intact autophagy pathway is required for the elaboration of multiple secreted factors favoring invasion, including IL-6.
Hyporesponsiveness to erythropoietic therapy due to chronic inflammation

The anaemia associated with chronic renal failure is multi‐factorial. Although a relative erythropoietin deficiency is a major factor, it has also been recognized in recent times that uraemia is a chronic inflammatory state, and thus patients with renal failure also develop anaemia due to mechanisms associated with chronic inflammation. Thus, patients with chronic renal failure have activation of various immune cells, both monocytes and T‐cells. These mononuclear cells have also been shown to release pro‐inflammatory cytokines such as IL‐1, IL‐6, TNF‐alfa and interferon gamma. These cytokines, particularly TNF‐alfa and interferon gamma, are known to cause significant suppression of erythropoiesis. The exact molecular mechanism for this effect is not yet clear, but interferon gamma is an important stimulator of apoptosis in various cell types, including erythroid progenitor cells. This effect may be potentiated by other cytokines such as TNF‐alfa, and this might then antagonise the anti‐apoptotic action of erythropoietin on erythroid progenitors cells, thus reducing responsiveness to exogenous erythropoietic therapy. Chronic renal failure is also associated with increased hepcidin production which may also exacerbate the anaemia by inducing a functional iron deficiency in such patients.
Swedification patterns of Latin and Greek affixes in clinical text

Swedish medical language is rich with Latin and Greek terminology which has undergone a Swedification since the 1980s. However, many original expressions are still used by clinical professionals. The goal of this study is to obtain precise quantitative measures of how the foreign terminology is manifested in Swedish clinical text. To this end, we explore the use of Latin and Greek affixes in Swedish medical texts in three genres: clinical text, scientific medical text and online medical information for laypersons. More specifically, we use frequency lists derived from tokenised Swedish medical corpora in the three domains, and extract word pairs belonging to types that display both the original and Swedified spellings. We describe six distinct patterns explaining the variation in the usage of Latin and Greek affixes in clinical text. The results show that to a large extent affixes in clinical text are Swedified and that prefixes are used more conservatively than suffixes.
Plain CT vs MR venography in acute cerebral venous sinus thrombosis: Triumphant dark horse

Abstract Context: Most patients with cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) present with nonspecific signs and symptoms and are likely to undergo nonenhanced head computed tomography (NCT) at presentation, which may show a normal report in up to two-thirds of patients. However, in case of acute thrombosis, sensitivity of diagnosing CVST is high as sinuses are hyperdense. Though magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered the imaging modality of choice for diagnosing CVST, it is not universally available in an acute setting. Aims: To evaluate whether increased attenuation in cerebral venous sinuses in acute condition can be used to diagnose acute CVST and to determine its diagnostic value. Materials and Methods: The study involves two independent groups. One group of patients with sinus thrombosis were confirmed by MR venography (group A). The other group included patients without sinus thrombosis (group B). The HU (CT attenuation), hemoglobin (HGB), hematocrit (HCT), and H: H (HU: HCT) ratio of both groups were compared. Thirty-six patients (59 thrombotic sinuses) were studied in group A and 40 in group B. Statistical Analysis: Average HU and H: H ratio were compared using two-tailed t-test, and linear regression analysis was used to assess correlation between HCT and HU. Results: Average HU (73.7 vs 48.6) and H: H ratio values were higher in group A patients compared to group B (P < 0.05). Linear regression analysis showed positive correlation between HGB and HCT with HU among both the groups (P < 0.05). Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that acute CVST can be diagnosed using HU values in NCT.
On the Fly Testing of Regular Patterns in Distributed Computations

A class of properties of distributed computations is described and an algorithm which detects them is presented. This class of properties called regular patterns allows the user to specify an expected (or unwanted) behavior of a computation as sequences of relevant events (or as sequences of local predicates that must be successively verified). The sequences are defined by a finite state automaton (hence the name regular patterns) A computation verifies the property if and only if one of its causal paths matches a sequence.
Mining traffic accident features by evolutionary fuzzy rules

Traffic accidents represent a major problem threatening peoples lives, health, and property. Traffic behavior and driving in particular is a social and cultural phenomenon that exhibits significant differences across countries and regions. Therefore, traffic models developed in one country might not be suitable for other countries. Similarly, attributes of importance, dependencies, and patterns found in data describing traffic in one region might not be valid for other regions. All this makes traffic accident analysis and modelling a task suitable for data mining and machine learning approaches that develop models based on actual real-world data. In this study, we investigate a data set describing traffic accidents in Ethiopia and use a machine learning method based on artificial evolution and fuzzy systems to mine symbolic description of selected features of the data set.
Body and Mind: Mindfulness Helps Consumers to Compensate for Prior Food Intake by Enhancing the Responsiveness to Physiological Cues

External cues regularly override physiological cues in food consumption resulting in mindless eating. In a series of experiments, this study shows that mindfulness, an enhanced attention state, improves consumers’ reliance on physiological cues across consumption episodes. Consumers who are chronically high in mindfulness (study 1) or who receive a short mindfulness training that focuses attention on the body (study 2) compensate more for previous food intake in their subsequent consumption. Moreover, after a mindful body meditation, consumers are more aware of physiological cues that develop after consumption (study 3), rather than of the amount they have previously eaten (study 4). Furthermore, we argue and show that the focus of mindfulness matters: mindfulness trainings that focus attention on the environment or on the body similarly elicit state mindfulness, but only mindful attention with a focus on the body stimulates compensation for previous consumption and awareness of satiety cues. Finally, practicing mindfulness and specifically paying mindful attention to body sensations is related to a more constant body weight in a sample of the general population (study 5).