Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrical Coupling Between Endothelial Cells and Smooth Muscle Cells in Hamster Feed Arteries: Role in Vasomotor Control

Endothelial cells (ECs) govern smooth muscle cell (SMC) tone via the release of paracrine factors (eg, NO and metabolites of arachidonic acid). We tested the hypothesis that ECs can promote SMC relaxation or contraction via direct electrical coupling. Vessels (resting diameter, 57±3 &mgr;m; length, 4 mm) were isolated, cannulated, and pressurized (75 mm Hg; 37°C). Two microelectrodes were used to simultaneously impale 2 cells (ECs or SMCs) in the vessel wall separated by 500 &mgr;m. Impalements of one EC and one SMC (n=26) displayed equivalent membrane potentials at rest, during spontaneous oscillations, and during hyperpolarization and vasodilation to acetylcholine. Injection of −0.8 nA into an EC caused hyperpolarization (≈5 mV) and relaxation of SMCs (dilation, ≈5 &mgr;m) along the vessel segment. In a reciprocal manner, +0.8 nA caused depolarization (≈2 mV) of SMCs with constriction (≈2 &mgr;m). Current injection into SMCs while recording from ECs produced similar results. We conclude that ECs and SMCs are electrically coupled to each other in these vessels, such that electrical signals conducted along the endothelium can be directly transmitted to the surrounding smooth muscle to evoke vasomotor responses.
Daptomycin for treating infected diabetic foot ulcers: evidence from a randomized, controlled trial comparing daptomycin with vancomycin or semi-synthetic penicillins for complicated skin and skin-structure infections.

OBJECTIVES The predominant pathogens causing diabetic foot infections are Gram-positive cocci, many of which are now resistant to commonly prescribed antibiotics. Daptomycin is a new agent that is active against most Gram-positive pathogens. To compare the effectiveness of daptomycin against semi-synthetic penicillins or vancomycin, we analysed the subset of diabetic patients with an infected ulcer enrolled in two randomized, controlled investigator-blind trials of patients with complicated skin and soft-tissue infections presumptively caused by Gram-positive organisms. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with a diabetic ulcer infection were prospectively stratified to ensure they were equally represented in the treatment groups, then randomized to either daptomycin [4 mg/kg every 24 h intravenously (iv)] or a pre-selected comparator (vancomycin or a semi-synthetic penicillin) for 7-14 days. RESULTS Among 133 patients with a diabetic ulcer infection, 103 were clinically evaluable; 47 received daptomycin and 56 received a comparator. Most infections were monomicrobial, and Staphylococcus aureus was the predominant pathogen. Success rates for patients treated with daptomycin or the comparators were not statistically different for clinical (66% versus 70%, respectively; 95% CI, -14.4, 21.8) or microbiological (overall or by pathogen) outcomes. Both treatments were generally well tolerated, with most adverse events of mild to moderate severity. CONCLUSIONS The clinical and microbiological efficacy and safety of daptomycin were similar to those of commonly used comparator antibiotics for treating infected diabetic foot ulcers caused by Gram-positive pathogens. Daptomycin should be considered for treating these infections, especially those caused by resistant Gram-positive pathogens.
Parameter study and design of wide-band widescan dual-polarized tapered slot antenna arrays

A parameter study of dual-polarized tapered slot antenna (TSA) arrays shows the key features that affect the wide-band and widescan performance of these arrays. The overall performance can be optimized by judiciously choosing a combination of parameters. In particular, it is found that smaller circular slot cavities terminating the bilateral slotline improve the performance near the low end of the operating band, especially when scanning in the H-plane. The opening rate of the tapered slotline mainly determines the mid-band performance and it is possible to choose an opening rate to obtain balanced overall performance in the mid-band. A longer tapered slotline is shown to increase the bandwidth, especially in the lower end of the operating band. Finally, it is shown that the H-plane anomalies are affected by the array element spacing. A design example demonstrates that the results from the parameter study can be used to design a dual-polarized TSA array with about 4.5:1 bandwidth for a scan volume of not less than /spl theta/=45/spl deg/ from broadside in all planes.
Challenges in Using Circulating miRNAs as Cancer Biomarkers

In the last years, circulating miRNAs have emerged as a new class of promising cancer biomarkers. Independent studies have shown the feasibility of using these small RNAs as tools for the diagnosis and prognosis of different types of malignancies as well as for predicting and possibly monitoring treatment response. However, despite an initial enthusiasm for their possible clinical application, widespread inconsistencies have been observed among the studies, and miRNA-based tools still represent the object of research within clinical diagnostic or treatment protocols. The poor overlap of results could be explained, at least in part, by preanalytical and analytical variables and donor-related factors that could generate artefacts, impairing an accurate quantification of circulating miRNAs. In fact, critical issues are represented by nonuniform sample choice, handling, and processing, as well as by blood cell contamination in sample preparation and lack of consensus for data normalization. In this review, we address the potential technical biases and individual-related parameters that can influence circulating miRNA studies' outcome. The exciting potential of circulating miRNAs as cancer biomarkers could confer an important advance in the disease management, but their clinical significance might not be proven without a global consensus of procedures and standardized protocols for their accurate detection.
A new philosophy for a contemporary global profession

If accounting is to remain a professional institution, then change may be needed if it is to reflect its role of stewardship of corporate endeavours. The transition of corporations and the accounting profession to a global orthodoxy has implications for its stewardship role in terms of the values and morals underpinning the lens of the professional viewpoint. As business operations become globalised they transcend the multifarious cultures, religions and values operating in locally geographical areas. Biblical and historical events suggest that general societal values based only on greed and individual utility will fail in the longer term. Therefore the intention of the dialogue in this paper is to raise questions for reflection in relation to the moral values underpinning the integrity and ethical stance of the profession in its new global village. Ideally the business community and the accounting profession would operate in a paradigm of total utilitarianism that is beneficial to the community, not in their present paradigm of individual utilitarianism. One of these questions is the ability of the profession to uphold ethical standards against the global impetus of individual utilitarianism and consumerism. To an extent ethical codes assist, however the self-governance procedures and investigations of the local professional body may be outside their resources or geographical jurisdiction. So, what does the new global profession stand for?
MATERNAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AFFECTING TWIN BIRTHS IN CANADIAN CITIES

Details of 4972 pairs of twins born to mothers resident in 14 large Canadian cities in the years 1952, 1957, 1962, and 1967 were compared to those of a random sample of 4969 single births. Both dizygotic and monozygotic twinning rates, derived by Weinberg's formula, showed increases with both maternal age and with the number of previous livebirths. Dizygotic twinning rates also showed a seasonal variation with an October maximum. Twinning rates were lower in Oriental women, but did not vary between other ethnic groups, or by city of residence, legitimacy, paternal age or maternal history of stillbirths.
Factors for Pain in Patients With Different Grades of Knee Osteoarthritis

Discordance between having pain and radiologic osteoarthritis (OA) is a well‐established fact. It is suggested that this particularly applies to the less severe grades of OA. However, some people with a Kellgren/Lawrence (K/L) grade of 3 or 4 for OA are without pain. This study aimed to identify factors and differences in the factors associated with pain in persons with different grades of knee OA.
Gauss-Markov-Potts Priors for Images in Computer Tomography Resulting to Joint Optimal Reconstruction and segmentation

In many applications of Computed Tomography (CT), we know that the object under the test is composed of a finite number of materials meaning that the images to be reconstructed are composed of a finite number of homogeneous area. To account for this prior knowledge, we propose a family of Gauss-Markov fields with hidden Potts label fields. Then, using these models in a Bayesian inference framework, we are able to jointly reconstruct the image and segment it in an optimal way. In this paper, we first present these prior models, then propose appropriate Bayesian computational methods (MCMC or Variational Bayes) to compute the Joint Maximum A Posteriori (JMAP) or the posterior mean estimators. We finally provide a few results showing the efficiency of the proposed methods for CT with very limited angle and number of projections.
SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR AND THE RISKS OF HIV/AIDS AND OTHER STDs AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A REVIEW

Reproductive health problems present one of the greatest threats facing youth in sub-Saharan Africa today, in addition to political and economic insecurity. Although pre-marital sex is condemned in many African societies, and young, unmarried people, especially young women, are not expected to be sexually active, the gap between expected and actual behaviour is enormous. In particular, there is almost a universal gap between age at first sexual intercourse and age at first marriage across sub-Saharan Africa. A substantial proportion of young girls are sexually active, sometimes with multiple partners. Available evidence indicates more than 50 percent of all mothers in sub-Saharan Africa are in the age group 15-19 years, and in some settings, the youth are initiated into sexual activity as early as age 12 (girls) and 13 (boys). All these have a direct correlation with reproductive health problems, including HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases. Governments in the region should play a leading role in putting the reality of youth sexuality into public consciousness and political agenda. Key Words: Sexual behaviour, activity, sex, HIV, AIDS, young people, sub-Saharan Africa. (Institute of African Studies Research Review: 2003 19(1): 15-26)
Congruencies in Increased Mortality Rates, Years of Potential Life Lost, and Causes of Death Among Public Mental Health Clients in Eight States

Introduction Mortality rates are used as global measures of a population's health status and as indicators for public health efforts and medical treatments. Elevated mortality rates among individuals with mental illness have been reported in various studies, but very little focus has been placed on interstate comparisons and congruency of mortality and causes of death among public mental health clients. Methods Using age-adjusted death rates, standardized mortality ratios, and years of potential life lost, we compared the mortality of public mental health clients in eight states with the mortality of their state general populations. The data used in our study were submitted by public mental health agencies in eight states (Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia) for 1997 through 2000 during the Sixteen-State Study on Mental Health Performance Measures, a multistate study federally funded by the Center for Mental Health Services in collaboration with the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. Results In all eight states, we found that public mental health clients had a higher relative risk of death than the general populations of their states. Deceased public mental health clients had died at much younger ages and lost decades of potential life when compared with their living cohorts nationwide. Clients with major mental illness diagnoses died at younger ages and lost more years of life than people with non-major mental illness diagnoses. Most mental health clients died of natural causes similar to the leading causes of death found nationwide, including heart disease, cancer, and cerebrovascular, respiratory, and lung diseases. Conclusion Mental health and physical health are intertwined; both types of care should be provided and linked together within health care delivery systems. Research to track mortality and primary care should be increased to provide information for additional action, treatment modification, diagnosis-specific risk, and evidence-based practices.
PROTRANK : A BETTER MEASURE FOR PROTEIN ESSENTIALITY

In the last few years, genome-scale protein networks of an increasing number of organisms have been available across databases. Many techniques have been developed to analyze these large-scale networks for inferring biological knowledge. In this paper, we propose a graph theoretic measure ProtRank, inspired from Pagerank originally introduced for web page ranking, for ranking proteins in a protein-protein interaction network. We analyze the correlation between ProtRank and protein essentiality. Our results show that ProtRank, which is a global topological measure, is a better indicator of protein essentiality compared to both the local measure of degree and another global topological measure of betweenness centrality.
PSS: Predictive Energy-Efficient Sensing Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract : Wireless sensor networks are being widely deployed for providing physical measurements to diverse applications that have wide variety of data quality requirements. Energy is a precious resource in such networks as sensor nodes are typically powered by batteries with limited power and high replacement cost. This paper presents PSS: an energy-efficient stochastic sensing framework for wireless sensor platforms. PSS is a node-level framework that utilizes knowledge of the underlying data streams as well as application data quality requirements to conserve energy on a sensor node. PSS employs a stochastic scheduling algorithm to dynamically control the operating modes of the sensor node components. This scheduling algorithm enables an adaptive sampling strategy that aggressively conserves power by adjusting sensing activity to the application requirements. Using experimental results obtained on Power-TOSSIM with a real-world data trace, we demonstrate that our approach reduces energy consumption by 29-36% while providing strong statistical guarantees on data quality.
p53 status is neither a predictive nor a prognostic variable in patients with advanced ovarian cancer treated with a paclitaxel-based regimen.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between p53 status and the clinical outcome of patients with advanced ovarian cancer treated with a paclitaxel-based regimen. PATIENTS AND METHODS The investigation was conducted on 38 patients with FIGO stage III-IV ovarian cancer from whom tumor tissue samples for p53 protein immunostaining were obtained during initial cytoreductive surgery. All these patients subsequently received six cycles of first-line combination chemotherapy with paclitaxel 175 mg/m2 (3-hour infusion) plus carboplatin AUC 6 with or without epidoxorubicin 75 mg/m2. RESULTS Positive p53 immunostaining was detected in tissue samples collected from 24 (63.2%) ovarian cancers. A clinical complete response was obtained in 14 (58.3%) of the 24 patients with positive p53 immunostaining compared to 9 (64.3%) of the 14 patients with negative p53 immunostaining (p = 0.717). A pathological complete response was found in 6 (25.0%) of the former compared to 4 (28.6%) of the latter (p = 0.956). Similarly, survival did not correlate with p53 status (p = 0.1271). DISCUSSION p53 status seems to be neither a predictive nor a prognostic variable in patients with advanced ovarian cancer treated with a paclitaxel-based regimen. These results are consistent with experimental data showing that paclitaxel cytotoxicity in ovarian cancer is likely to be mediated by a p53-independent pathway.
Anatomic Changes of the Spinal Canal and Intervertebral Foramen Associated With Flexion‐Extension Movement

Study Design A cadaveric study was done to analyze the dimensional changes in the spinal canal and intervertebral foramen of the lumbar spine with flexion and extension movements. Objectives To investigate the relationship between flexion and extension movements and morphologic changes in the spinal canal and the intervertebral foramen. Summary of Background Data Previous studies have reported that the dimensions of the spinal canal and the intervertebral foramen may change significantly with motion. The purpose of this study was to assess the quantitative changes in the spinal canal and the intervertebral foramen with segmental flexion‐extension movements. Methods Nineteen fresh cadaveric spines yielding 25 motion segments were used. The lumbar motion segments were frozen and then imaged in axial and sagittal projections by a computed tomography scanner. They were thawed then, and the motion segments were loaded to 5.7 Nm in flexion (13 motion segments) and in extension (12 motion segments) specimens. While in flexion or extension, the specimens again were frozen and imaged by computed tomography scan. The frozen specimens then were sliced using a cryomic‐rotome in the sagittal plane to study the dimensions of the intervertebral foramen. Eighteen other fresh cadaveric spines were sliced sagittally for study in the neutral position. Results The axial computed tomography scans showed that extension significantly decreased the canal area, midsagittal diameter, and subarticular sagittal diameter, whereas flexion had the opposite effects. The sagittal computed tomography scans showed that extension decreased all the foraminal dimensions significantly, whereas flexion increased all the foraminal dimensions significantly. The translational changes were associated with the bulging of the disc and the presence of traction spurs. The cryomicrotome sections showed the cross‐sectional area of the foramen to be 12% greater for the flexion group and 15% smaller for the extension group than the cross‐sectional area of the neutral group. Nerve root compression in the foramen was found to be 21.0% in neutral, 15.4% in flexion, and 33.3% in extension groups. Conclusions This study supports the concept of dynamic spinal stenosis. In addition to static anatomic changes, careful dynamic studies may be required to evaluate better the central canal and the foramen.
Enhanced degradation of mutant huntingtin by rho kinase inhibition is mediated through activation of proteasome and macroautophagy

Enhancing the degradation of mutant protein is one of the most investigated approaches in experimental therapy of the polyglutamine-related disorders such as Huntington disease (HD). Inhibition of rho-associated kinases (ROCKs) reduced the aggregation and levels of mutant huntingtin in cellular models of HD via activation of the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) and macroautophagy. This unique effect makes the Rho/ROCK pathway and its downstream effectors attractive therapeutic targets for polyglutamine-related diseases.
A General Joint Transceiver Design for Multiuser MIMO Channel Equalization

In this paper, joint transmitter receiver filter optimization for channel equalization is investigated for a multiuser multiple input multiple output frequency selective slowly varying channel. Minimum mean square error criterion is used in the equalization under a total transmit power constraint. Because of the simplicity of the optimization of multiple access channel, channel duality is used for the optimization problem and the solution is transformed to the broadcast, interference and MIMO frequency selective channels if required.
EXTRACT ASSOCIATION RULES TO MINIMIZE THE EFFECTS OF DENGUE BY USING A TEXT MINING TECHNIQUE

Nowadays, dengue (vector-borne tropical viral diseases) has been become the greatest scourge of humankind and there consequence has more impact than any other pathogen in shaping the human genome. Generally in Pakistan specifically in Punjab (Pakistan) Dengue is emerging as one of the major public-health problem. Federal & Provincial Health Governments are taking all possible steps on ―War-Footing‖ to recover such type of diseases. They are determines in making special possibilities to face such type of problems in advance. From WWW, digital libraries, World Health Organization (WHO) and other news sources it is estimated that about 2.5 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, live in areas where there is a risk of dengue transmission because Dengue flourishes in urban poor areas, suburbs and the countryside but also affects more affluent neighborhoods in tropical and subtropical countries. As of November 2011, it has killed over 300 people in the last several months and over 14,000 are infected by this mosquito-borne disease. Majority of the people infected are from the Lahore area in Punjab, Pakistan. As a matter of fact, if a virus attacks on somewhere, what will be its next target in geographically aspects, because dengue virus will be spread from one place to other from contaminated water and mosquito. Therefore by using above said data sources, performing some preprocessing techniques such as transformation, filtration, stemming and indexing of the documents and then applying data mining techniques our system will not only helps to identify geographical spreading patterns of the viruses but it also helps to suggest proactively next geographical location where virus has most probability to attach so that government can take remedy measures.
Key Establishment Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper describes the design, prototype implementation and deployment of a key management protocol for sensor networks. In order to exchange protected messages between sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network, secret shared cryptographic keys must be established between the nodes of the network. Several key management schemes have been proposed in the literature, but these schemes are not suitable for real-life deployment. In this paper, we approach the problems of key management protocol differently from other reported results. We first analyzed functionality, feasibility and flexibility of the current key management protocols. Then, we introduce the concept of the Trusted Base Station as the foundation of our new protocol. The results of our implementation and deployment in a real WSN environment show that our theoretical results and claims are supported by the results of practical tests and measurements of operational efficiency.