Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Acute STroke Registry and Analysis of Lausanne (ASTRAL): Design and Baseline Analysis of an Ischemic Stroke Registry Including Acute Multimodal Imaging

Background and Purpose— Stroke registries are valuable tools for obtaining information about stroke epidemiology and management. The Acute STroke Registry and Analysis of Lausanne (ASTRAL) prospectively collects epidemiological, clinical, laboratory and multimodal brain imaging data of acute ischemic stroke patients in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV). Here, we provide design and methods used to create ASTRAL and present baseline data of our patients (2003 to 2008). Methods— All consecutive patients admitted to CHUV between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008 with acute ischemic stroke within 24 hours of symptom onset were included in ASTRAL. Patients arriving beyond 24 hours, with transient ischemic attack, intracerebral hemorrhage, subarachnoidal hemorrhage, or cerebral sinus venous thrombosis, were excluded. Recurrent ischemic strokes were registered as new events. Results— Between 2003 and 2008, 1633 patients and 1742 events were registered in ASTRAL. There was a preponderance of males, even in the elderly. Cardioembolic stroke was the most frequent type of stroke. Most strokes were of minor severity (National Institute of Health Stroke Scale [NIHSS] score ≤4 in 40.8% of patients). Cardioembolic stroke and dissections presented with the most severe clinical picture. There was a significant number of patients with unknown onset stroke, including wake-up stroke (n=568, 33.1%). Median time from last-well time to hospital arrival was 142 minutes for known onset and 759 minutes for unknown-onset stroke. The rate of intravenous or intraarterial thrombolysis between 2003 and 2008 increased from 10.8% to 20.8% in patients admitted within 24 hours of last-well time. Acute brain imaging was performed in 1695 patients (97.3%) within 24 hours. In 1358 patients (78%) who underwent acute computed tomography angiography, 717 patients (52.8%) had significant abnormalities. Of the 1068 supratentorial stroke patients who underwent acute perfusion computed tomography (61.3%), focal hypoperfusion was demonstrated in 786 patients (73.6%). Conclusions— This hospital-based prospective registry of consecutive acute ischemic strokes incorporates demographic, clinical, metabolic, acute perfusion, and arterial imaging. It is characterized by a high proportion of minor and unknown-onset strokes, short onset-to-admission time for known-onset patients, rapidly increasing thrombolysis rates, and significant vascular and perfusion imaging abnormalities in the majority of patients.
[Polymethylmethacrylate-vertebroplasty. A new and effective method of pain treatment in vertebral compression].

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Percutaneous polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) vertebroplasty is increasingly used in the treatment of back pain related to compression of the vertebral bodies. After the procedure immediate mobilization of the patient is possible. The purpose of the study was to examine the change in quality of life of patients with vertebral collapse achieved by vertebroplasty during a six-month period. PATIENTS AND METHODS 28 patients with osteolytic metastases (mean age 59,7 +/- 7,8 years, 2,1:1male/female ratio) and 38 patients with osteoporotic vertebral collapse (mean age 73 +/- 6 years, 1:3,5male/female ratio ) of the thoracal and lumbar spine were treated with PMMA vertebroplasty and analysed prospectively. After admission, before, six weeks and 6 months after discharge from the hospital patients answered the Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability (OLBPD) questionnaire for assessment of treatment-related changes in disability. RESULTS Immediately and 6 months after treatment 83 % of tumor patients and 92 % of ostoporotic patients had significant pain reduction. Extravasation of PMMA beyond the vertebral margins were observed in 26 % of the patients. No treatment-related clinical or neurological complications were observed. CONCLUSION PMMA vertebroplasty is an efficacious and safe method of pain relief for patients with osteolytic metastases or osteoporotic compression with good long-term results.
Effective pedestrian detection using SVDD-based criterion for region integration

Pedestrian detection is one of the most important techniques for surveillance applications. This paper proposes an effective method for pedestrian detection in low-contrast images. The main characteristic of the proposed method is a two-stage moving object extraction. In the first stage, the watershed algorithm is used to extract multiple regions of moving objects. In the second stage, a novel criterion is introduced to integrate the segmented moving object regions. Specifically, the criterion is calculated on the basis of the distance from a center of the support vector data description (SVDD), where its hypersphere is constructed by using pedestrian features. By monitoring this SVDD-based criterion for the region integration, the segmented regions are appropriately integrated based on pedestrian features. This two-stage approach can extract the moving objects in low-contrast images and improve the performance of the pedestrian detection. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Conductivity Improvement of Silver Nanowire Transparent Electrodes by Surface Plasma Treatment

High aspect ratio silver nanowires (Ag NWs) were successfully synthesized by CuCl2-mediated synthesis. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-Ray diffraction were employed to investigate the morphology and structure of the Ag products, respectively. Suspensions of Ag NW in ethanol were coated on glass substrates by Meyer rod coating to fabricate transparent conducting electrodes (TCE’s). The electrodes were then plasma treated at a power of 75 W. The effects of increasing plasma treatment time and oxygen exposure on the sheet resistance of the transparent electrodes were investigated. A sheet resistance of 8 Ω/sq with an optical transmittance of 80 % at 550nm was obtained for an electrode with a nanowire density of 0.18 mg/cm2 after 5 mins of plasma (Ar) exposure.
In vitro detection of enterococcal vancomycin resistance

By using agar dilution as the standard method, we determined the ability of broth microdilution, disk diffusion, and an automated system (AMS Vitek) to detect three different levels of vancomycin resistance among six enterococcal isolates. Enterococcus gallinarum AIB-38 and AIB-39 exhibited low-level resistance (MIC, 16 to 32 micrograms/ml) that was detected only by agar and broth dilution methods. E. faecalis V583, E. faecium AIB-42, and E. faecalis AIB-41 showed moderately high-level resistance (MIC, 128 to 256 micrograms/ml) that was detected by dilution methods but not by disk diffusion unless prolonged incubation or an inoculum 10-fold greater than the standard was used. Similarly, this level of resistance was detected by AMS Vitek only when an inoculum 10-fold larger than recommended was used. The high resistance demonstrated by E. faecium AIB-40 (MIC, 2,048 micrograms/ml) was readily detected by all methods studied. Variation in the ability of different methods to detect vancomycin resistance among enterococci complicates monitoring the incidence of these organisms and could result in very major susceptibility reporting errors.
Reduced predictable information in brain signals in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common developmental disorder characterized by communication difficulties and impaired social interaction. Recent results suggest altered brain dynamics as a potential cause of symptoms in ASD. Here, we aim to describe potential information-processing consequences of these alterations by measuring active information storage (AIS)—a key quantity in the theory of distributed computation in biological networks. AIS is defined as the mutual information between the past state of a process and its next measurement. It measures the amount of stored information that is used for computation of the next time step of a process. AIS is high for rich but predictable dynamics. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals in 10 ASD patients and 14 matched control subjects in a visual task. After a beamformer source analysis, 12 task-relevant sources were obtained. For these sources, stationary baseline activity was analyzed using AIS. Our results showed a decrease of AIS values in the hippocampus of ASD patients in comparison with controls, meaning that brain signals in ASD were either less predictable, reduced in their dynamic richness or both. Our study suggests the usefulness of AIS to detect an abnormal type of dynamics in ASD. The observed changes in AIS are compatible with Bayesian theories of reduced use or precision of priors in ASD.
Cytotoxicity and Proapoptotic Effects of Allium atroviolaceum Flower Extract by Modulating Cell Cycle Arrest and Caspase-Dependent and p53-Independent Pathway in Breast Cancer Cell Lines

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women and despite significant advances in therapy, it remains a critical health problem worldwide. Allium atroviolaceum is an herbaceous plant, with limited information about the therapeutic capability. We aimed to study the anticancer effect of flower extract and the mechanisms of action in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231. The extract inhibits the proliferation of the cells in a time- and dose-dependent manner. The underlying mechanism involved the stimulation of S and G2/M phase arrest in MCF-7 and S phase arrest in MDA-MB-231 associated with decreased level of Cdk1, in a p53-independent pathway. Furthermore, the extract induces apoptosis in both cell lines, as indicated by the percentage of sub-G0 population, the morphological changes observed by phase contrast and fluorescent microscopy, and increase in Annexin-V-positive cells. The apoptosis induction was related to downregulation of Bcl-2 and also likely to be caspase-dependent. Moreover, the combination of the extract and tamoxifen exhibits synergistic effect, suggesting that it can complement current chemotherapy. LC-MS analysis displayed 17 major compounds in the extract which might be responsible for the observed effects. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential applications of Allium atroviolaceum extract as an anticancer drug for breast cancer treatment.
Asymptomatic and symptomatic cryptosporidiosis: their acute effect on weight gain in Peruvian children.

This study investigated whether a child's first infection with Cryptosporidium parvum had an acute effect on weight gain. Specifically, the authors compared monthly rates of weight gain between C. parvum-infected and noninfected children. Over a 2-year period (1989-1991), a cohort of Peruvian children aged 0-3 months at recruitment were followed twice weekly for assessment of daily diarrheal status, weekly for C. parvum stool examinations, and monthly for anthropometric measurements. Data on 207 children permitted the authors to examine the effect of C. parvum infection on weight gain. During the 2-year study period, 45% (94/207) of the children became infected with C. parvum for the first time. Weight gain intervals in 57 of the 94 infected children met criteria for analysis. Of these, 63 percent (36/57) were asymptomatic (i.e., had no diarrhea). On average, children with symptomatic cryptosporidiosis gained (i.e., grew) 342 g less (95% confidence interval 167-517) during the first month of infection than did children without diarrhea who were not yet infected. The effect of asymptomatic cryptosporidiosis was less severe: On average, children with asymptomatic infection gained 162 g less (95% confidence interval 27-297) during the first month of infection than did children without diarrhea who were not yet infected. Symptomatic cryptosporidiosis retarded weight gain more than did asymptomatic cryptosporidiosis, but the latter was twice as common. Since asymptomatic cryptosporidiosis is more prevalent, it may have more of an overall adverse effect on child growth in the community than symptomatic cryptosporidiosis.
A Framework for Worst-Case and Stochastic Safety Verification Using Barrier Certificates

This paper presents a methodology for safety verification of continuous and hybrid systems in the worst-case and stochastic settings. In the worst-case setting, a function of state termed barrier certificate is used to certify that all trajectories of the system starting from a given initial set do not enter an unsafe region. No explicit computation of reachable sets is required in the construction of barrier certificates, which makes it possible to handle nonlinearity, uncertainty, and constraints directly within this framework. In the stochastic setting, our method computes an upper bound on the probability that a trajectory of the system reaches the unsafe set, a bound whose validity is proven by the existence of a barrier certificate. For polynomial systems, barrier certificates can be constructed using convex optimization, and hence the method is computationally tractable. Some examples are provided to illustrate the use of the method.
Evolving Symmetric and Modular Neural Network Controllers for Multilegged Robots

Controllers for multilegged robots are characterized by modularity and symmetry. However, the controller symmetries necessary for generating appropriate gaits are often difficult to determine analytically. This paper utilizes a nature-inspired approach called Evolution of Network Symmetry and mOdularity (ENSO) to evolve such controllers automatically. It uses group theory to mutate symmetry systematically, making it more effective than mutating symmetry randomly. This approach was evaluated by evolving modular neural network controllers for a quadruped robot in physically realistic simulations. On flat ground, the resulting controllers are as effective as those having hand-designed symmetries. However, they are significantly faster when evolved on inclined ground, where the appropriate symmetries are difficult to determine manually. The group-theoretic symmetry mutations of ENSO are also significantly more effective at evolving such controllers than random symmetry mutations. Thus, ENSO is a promising approach for evolving modular and symmetric controllers for multilegged robots, as well as solutions to distributed control problems in general.
Phase II study of belotecan, a camptothecin analogue, in combination with carboplatin for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer

Belotecan (CKD602; Camtobell, Chong Keun Dang Corp., Seoul, Korea) is a recently developed camptothecin derivative with antitumor properties. This phase II study was designed to evaluate the toxicity and efficacy of belotecan combined with carboplatin in patients with recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC).
Adsorption of Zinc and Chromium ions from Aqueous Solution onto Sugarcane Bagasse

The adsorption of Zn(II) and Cr(VI) ions from aqueous solution by activated sugarcane bagasse (ASB), EDTA modified sugarcane bagasse (MSB) and unmodified sugarcane bagasse (USB) was studied at varying particle sizes, metal ion concentrations, adsorbent dose, contact time, temperature and pH. Batch adsorption studies were used. The three common adsorption equations Temkin, Freundlich and Langmuir adsorption isotherms were used. It was found that the adsorption capacity depends on particle sizes, metal ions concentrations, adsorbent dose, contact time, temperature and pH. The amount of metal ions adsorbed decreased in the other ASB > MSB > USB. The highest percentage of metal adsorbed was achieved using the adsorbent dosage of 0.9 g, particle size of 125 mm passed, pH of 6 - 8, temperature of 60 o C, contact time of 120 min and at an initial concentration of 100 mg/L metal ion. The percentage adsorbed was higher in Cr(VI) ions than Zn(II) ions for ASB > MSB > USB. Zn(II) ions percentage adsorbed increased from 65.30 to 68.92%, 68.26 to 74.91% and 82.89 to 91.48% for USB, MSD and ASB respectively while that of Cr(VI) ions increased from 63.80 to 68.10%, 68.43 to 76.54% and 85.94 to 95.48% for USB, MSD and ASB respectively when the initial adsorbate concentration was increased from 20 to 100 mg/L. Adsorption of Zn(II) and Cr(VI) metal ions onto USB, MSD and ASB with correlation coefficient (R 2 ) values ranged between 0.8939 - 0.9989, 0.7955 - 0.9683 and 0.9120 - 0.9981 for Freundlich, Temkin and
To Float or Not to Float: How Interactions between Light and Dissolved Inorganic Carbon Species Determine the Buoyancy of Stratiotes aloides

Structural diversity formed by dense, floating Stratiotes aloides stands, generates hotspots of biodiversity of flora and fauna in wetlands. However, only part of the populations become emergent and provide this important facilitation. Since it has been hypothesised that its buoyancy depends on the rates of underwater photosynthesis, we investigated the role of dissolved CO2 availability and PAR on photosynthesis, biomass production and buoyancy in a controlled greenhouse experiment. Photosynthesis and growth were strongly influenced by both PAR and CO2 availability. At low PAR, plants formed less biomass and produced no emergent leaves, even when CO2 was abundant. At low CO2 levels, S. aloides switched to HCO3 - use, resulting in a lower photosynthetic O2 production, decreased emergent leaf formation and increased CaCO3 precipitation on its leaves, all of which impaired buoyancy. At high PAR, low CO2 availability resulted in slower colonisation of the water layer, whereas CO2 availability did not influence PAR-limited plants. Our study shows that site conditions, rather than the sole abundance of potentially facilitating species, may strongly determine whether or not they form the structure necessary to act as a facilitator for biodiversity in aquatic environments.
Throttling Automatic Vectorization: When Less is More

SIMD vectors are widely adopted in modern general purpose processors as they can boost performance and energy efficiency for certain applications. Compiler-based automatic vectorization is one approach for generating codethat makes efficient use of the SIMD units, and has the benefit of avoiding hand development and platform-specific optimizations. The Superword-Level Parallelism (SLP) vectorization algorithm is the most well-known implementation of automatic vectorization when starting from straight-line scalar code, and is implemented in several major compilers. The existing SLP algorithm greedily packs scalar instructions into vectors starting from stores and traversing the data dependence graph upwards until it reaches loads or non-vectorizable instructions. Choosing whether to vectorize is a one-off decision for the whole graph that has been generated. This, however, is sub-optimal because the graph may contain code that is harmful to vectorization due to the need to move data from scalar registers into vectors. The decision does not consider the potential benefits of throttling the graph by removing this harmful code. In this work we propose asolution to overcome this limitation by introducing Throttled SLP (TSLP), a novel vectorization algorithm that finds the optimal graph to vectorize, forcing vectorization to stop earlier whenever this is beneficial. Our experiments show that TSLP improves performance across a number of kernels extractedfrom widely-used benchmark suites, decreasing execution time compared to SLP by 9% on average and up to 14% in the best case.
Regulation of alveolar macrophage production of chemoattractants by leukotriene B4 and prostaglandin E2.

Alveolar macrophages (AM) appear to influence the recruitment of neutrophils into the lung by the elaboration of both lipid and peptide chemotactic molecules for neutrophils. Little is known about the mechanisms that regulate production or release of chemotactic molecules by AM or the interaction between these classes of chemotactic molecules. We investigated the hypothesis that the lipid mediator leukotriene B4 (LTB4) has an in vitro regulatory action on the production of chemotactic proteins by AM. In these experiments, the chemotactic activity in AM culture supernatants was measured in a modified Boyden chamber. LTB4 treatment increased AM production of chemotactic activity in excess of what might be attributed to the amount of LTB4 measured in the culture supernatant after the incubation period. This effect was magnified by in vivo administration of endotoxin prior to AM harvesting. Pretreatment with LTB4 caused a sustained 250% increase in AM production of chemotactic activity, yet only negligible amounts of LTB4 were measured by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry in the LTB4-pretreated AM culture supernatants, indicating that LTB4 alone did not account for the chemotactic activity observed in our studies. A chemotactic peptide in LTB4-treated AM culture supernatant could be isolated and separated from LTB4 by molecular sieve chromatography. Purified column fractions contained 80% of the chemotactic activity of endotoxin-stimulated AM culture supernatant and had a molecular mass of 10,000 D. In contrast to LTB4, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) suppressed chemotactic activity production by endotoxin-stimulated AM by 70%. Pretreatment with PGE2 was not effective; PGE2 had to be present in the AM culture medium during endotoxin exposure in order to exert a suppressive effect. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A diary study to open up the black box of overtime work among university faculty members.

OBJECTIVES This study aimed at opening up the black box of overtime work among university faculty members by providing information on (i) when faculty members work overtime, (ii) what activities are undertaken during overtime, and (iii) how overtime is experienced. METHODS Data were collected among 120 Dutch faculty members who completed a general questionnaire (addressing general overtime hours, work characteristics, and well-being) and a 9-day diary study (with information on daily overtime hours, activities, and experiences). Analyses of variance were used to analyze the data. RESULTS Overtime was very prevalent among faculty members, high overtime workers being nonfatigued, engaged employees with positive work characteristics. Overtime was unevenly distributed over the week, being common on Sunday and Monday and uncommon on Friday and Saturday. Overtime activities during the weekend differed from those during the workweek, relatively much time being spent on research during weekend overtime. Overtime activities were experienced differently than activities during regular hours, overtime work being experienced as less effortful and less stressful than regular workhours and weekend overtime being less pleasurable than regular hours and evening overtime. CONCLUSIONS This detailed day-to-day mapping and evaluation of overtime work contributes to a better understanding of overtime work by demonstrating meaningful patterns of overtime over the (work)week and meaningful associations between overtime activities and time-contingent experiences. It is suggested that worktime control plays an important role in explaining the results.
A new stopping criterion for linear perturbed asynchronous iterations

A new stopping criterion is proposed for asynchronous linear fixed point methods in finite precision. The case of absolute error is considered. The originality of this stopping criterion relies on the fact that all tests are made within the same macroiteration. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. MSC: 65F10; 65G05; 65Y05; 68Q22; 68Q10