Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of bilateral tubotubal anastomosis in a large outpatient population

STUDY QUESTION Is bilateral tubotubal anastomosis a successful treatment in an outpatient patient population? SUMMARY ANSWER For women wanting children after tubal sterilization, bilateral tubotubal anastomosis is an effective outpatient treatment. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY With the current emphasis in reproductive medicine on high technology procedures, the effectiveness of female surgical sterilization reversal is often overlooked. Previous clinical studies of tubal sterilization reversal have been mostly retrospective analyses of small patient populations. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION A cohort of women who underwent outpatient bilateral tubotubal anastomosis from January 2000 to June 2013 was followed prospectively until December 2014 to determine the proportions of women undergoing the procedure who became pregnant and who had live births. Data were collected at the time of pregnancy. Differences in pregnancy rates and live birth rates associated with age, race and sterilization method were evaluated. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS A total of 6692 women, aged 20–51 years, underwent outpatient bilateral tubotubal anastomosis. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE The crude overall pregnancy rate was 69%. The crude overall birth rate was 35%. Results varied according to age at sterilization reversal and the method of sterilization. Women under 30 years of age at reversal of ring/clip sterilizations had an 88% pregnancy rate and 62% birth rate. Pregnancy and birth rates declined as age increased at sterilization reversal. Coagulation sterilization reversals resulted in the lowest rates of pregnancies and births. Ligation/resection reversals had intermediate success rates. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION Limitations of our study include probable underreporting of pregnancies based on patient-initiated reports; possible errors in the reporting of pregnancies or early miscarriages that may have been based solely on home pregnancy tests; and probable over-reporting of the diagnosis of ectopic pregnancies. We identified age and sterilization method as being associated with subsequent pregnancy, however, in order to be considered predictive, the associations would need to be validated in an independent second prospectively studied group of representative patients. Finally, we also included patients in the study population who had additional surgical procedures performed at the time of tubotubal anastomosis (e.g. uterine myomectomy, fimbrioplasty, ovarian cystectomy and adhesiolysis), factors that could result in differences in pregnancy statistics in our study versus other patient populations. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS The results of this study can help inform patients and clinicians about this low technology alternative to IVF. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S) None. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER N/A.
An Overview of Innovative Techniques to Improve Cervical Cancer Screening

Although current cytomorphology-based cervical cancer screening has reduced the incidence of cervical cancer, Papsmears are associated with high false positive and false negative rates. This has spurred the search for new technologies to improve current screening. New methodologies are automation of Pap-smear analysis, addition of new biological or molecular markers to traditional cytology or using these new markers to replace the current screening method. In this overview we will summarize data on cervical cancer epidemiology and etiology and the current cervical cancer screening approach. Available data on new screening approaches, such as quantitative cytochemistry, detection of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and hypermethylation analysis will be reviewed.We discuss the potential of these approaches to replace or augment current screening. When available, data on cost– effectiveness of certain approaches will be provided. In short, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) DNA detection stands closest to implementation in nation-wide screening programs of all markers reviewed. However, specificity is low in women aged <35 years and the psychological effects of knowledge of HPV positivity in absence of cervical (pre) malignant disease are important drawbacks. In our opinion the results of large clinical trials should be awaited before proceeding to implement HPV DNA detection. New technologies based on molecular changes associated with cervical carcinogenesis might result in comparable sensitivity, but improved specificity. Hypermethylation analysis is likely to be more objective to identify patients with high grade squamous intra-epithelial lesions (HSIL) or invasive cancer with a higher specificity than current cytomorphology based screening.
Analysis of DNA Microarray Data using Association Rules: A Selective Study

DNA microarrays allow the measurement of expression levels for a large number of genes, perhaps all genes of an organism, within a number of different experimental samples. It is very much important to extract biologically meaningful information from this huge amount of expression data to know the current state of the cell because most cellular processes are regulated by changes in gene expression. Association rule mining techniques are helpful to find association relationship between genes. Numerous association rule mining algorithms have been developed to analyze and associate this huge amount of gene expression data. This paper focuses on some of the popular association rule mining algorithms developed to analyze gene expression data. Keywords—DNA Microarray, Gene expression, Association rule
The Provision of Information Technology Security Considerations by Legal Prescripts : South African Case

The purpose of this paper is to establish whether IT security considerations are provided for, in the case of South Africa, by legal prescripts on each computer-based Information Systems’ component. A descriptive research approach was employed to accomplish the aim of this paper. Findings are that avoidance IT security consideration is the least covered by legal prescripts, while the deterrence IT security consideration is comprehensively covered by legal prescripts. While legal prescripts related to deterrence IT security consideration are almost similar, they prescribe different punishments for the same violation. A further study is needed to establish whether IT security considerations not covered by legal prescripts are mitigated by other means, and a different further study to determine the efficacy of deterrence without detection is also needed. A consolidated IT security legal prescript might deliver a better remedy to prevailing disjointedness and duplications. This paper develops a rubric or model that guides a comprehensive and systemic assessment of IT security considerations, and provides an evaluation of IT related legal prescripts of South Africa. Index Terms – IT Security, Legal Prescripts, Security Considerations, Computer-Based Information Systems
Natural history of cerebral vein thrombosis: a systematic review.

UNLABELLED Cerebral vein thrombosis (CVT) has been considered, until a few years ago, an uncommon disease with significant long-term morbidity and high mortality rate. New noninvasive diagnostic techniques have increased the frequency with which this disease is diagnosed; despite this, there continues to be little data on its natural history. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the mortality rate, the rate of disability at long-term follow-up, and the incidence of recurrence after a first episode of CVT; to determine clinical and radiologic predictors of death and dependence; and to identify possible risk factors for recurrence. ( DATA SOURCE MEDLINE and EMBASE databases, reference lists of selected articles and authors' libraries.) Nineteen studies were identified. Mortality rate during peri-hospitalization period is 5.6% (range, 0%-15.2%) and 9.4% (range, 0%-39%) at the end of follow-up period. Eighty-eight percent of surviving patients recover completely or have only a mild functional or cognitive deficit. Two thirds of patients with CVT recanalized within the first few months after presentation, and 2.8% (range, 0%-11.7%) had objectively confirmed recurrence. We conclude that patients with CVT have a low risk of death and that most patients have a good long-term prognosis.
Cost-based adaptive concurrency control in the cloud

The recent advent of Cloud computing has strongly influenced thedeployment of large-scale applications. Currently, Cloud environmentsmainly focus on high scalability and availability of these applications. Consistency, in contrast, is relaxed and weak consistency is commonlyconsidered to be sufficient. However, an increasing number of applications are no longer satisfied with weak consistency. Strong consistency, in turn, decreases availability and is costly to enforce from both a performance and infrastructure point of view. On the other hand, weak consistency may lead to high costs due to the access to inconsistent data. In this technical report, we introduce a novel approach called cost based concurrency control (C3). Essentially, C3 allows to dynamically and adaptively switch at runtime between different consistency levels of transactions in a Cloud environment based on the costs incurring during execution. These costs are determined by infrastructure costs for running a transaction in a certain consistency level (called consistency costs) and, optionally, by additional application-specific costs for compensating the effects of accessing inconsistent data (called inconsistency costs). C3 jointly supports transactions of different consistency levels and enforces the inherent consistency guarantees of each protocol. We first analyze the consistency costs of concurrency control protocols; second, we specify a set of rules that allow to dynamically select the best consistency level with the goal of minimizing the overall costs; third, we provide a protocol that enforces the correct execution of all transactions in a transaction mix. We have evaluated C3 on top of amazon’s EC2. The results show that C3 leads to a reduction of the overall transaction costs compared to a fixed consistency level.
Instability of Contingencies of Self-Worth: The Role of Approach-Avoidance Temperament

Self-esteem has multiple facets and individuals can derive their feelings of self-worth from specific domains in life (i.e., competition, approval of others, virtue; Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). Additionally, research on self-esteem suggests that it evolved as a social monitoring system, known as the sociometer (Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995). The function of the sociometer is to alert individuals to changes in their relational value to others, which in turn influences their self-esteem, and ultimately their behavior (Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995; Park & Crocker, 2008). A better understanding of the connection between self-evaluations and behavior can be gained by considering how individuals derive their feelings of self-worth. While people are motivated to succeed and avoid failure, this may particularly be true in the domains from which people derive their feelings of self-worth. Additionally, approach-avoidance motivation may further influence the relationship between evaluations in contingent domains, self-esteem, and behavioral outcomes. The present study expands this research by investigating how approach-avoidance motivation affects the relationship between contingencies of self-worth, self-esteem, and behavioral outcomes. Therefore, I hypothesized that individuals with low self-esteem and avoidance motivation would shift away from a domain that receives negative feedback. Those with high self-esteem and approach motivation, however, would increase the value placed on a domain after receiving negative feedback and positive feedback. Results suggest that avoidantly motivated individuals’ self-worth became increasingly contingent upon other’s approval no matter the feedback they received.
A rule-based approach for improving Kinect Skeletal Tracking system with an application on standard Muay Thai maneuvers

The release of Xbox 360 Kinect has made a triumph impression of computer vision technology and open a new world of gaming experience. Behind this leading success is an intelligent recognition system. The fundamental process is the transformation of depth images into skeleton data. Though this system is not without its flaws. Kinect Skeletal Tracking system fails when it comes to rapidly moving sequences of postures, when parts of body are out of the line of sight of the camera or when the postures are not in natural human forms. Such movements can be found in standard Muay Thai maneuvers. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve the rate of skeleton recognition in such scenarios. With the Kinect recognition system alone, the accuracy of skeleton recognitions of all 24 standard Muay Thai maneuvers is 51%. After applying our proposed algorithm, we are able to bring the accuracy up 26%. On average, our proposed algorithm along with the Kinect recognition system yields accuracy of 77% on average standard Muay Thai maneuvers.
On the Multiple Access Channel with Asymmetric Noisy State Information at the Encoders

We consider the problem of reliable communication over multiple-access channels (MAC) where the channel is driven by an independent and identically distributed state process and the encoders and the decoder are provided with various degrees of asymmetric noisy channel state information (CSI). For the case where the encoders observe causal, asymmetric noisy CSI and the decoder observes complete CSI, we provide inner and outer bounds to the capacity region, which are tight for the sum-rate capacity. We then observe that, under a Markov assumption, similar capacity results also hold in the case where the receiver observes noisy CSI. Furthermore, we provide a single letter characterization for the capacity region when the CSI at the encoders are asymmetric deterministic functions of the CSI at the decoder and the encoders have non-causal noisy CSI (its causal version is recently solved in \cite{como-yuksel}). When the encoders observe asymmetric noisy CSI with asymmetric delays and the decoder observes complete CSI, we provide a single letter characterization for the capacity region. Finally, we consider a cooperative scenario with common and private messages, with asymmetric noisy CSI at the encoders and complete CSI at the decoder. We provide a single letter expression for the capacity region for such channels. For the cooperative scenario, we also note that as soon as the common message encoder does not have access to CSI, then in any noisy setup, covering the cases where no CSI or noisy CSI at the decoder, it is possible to obtain a single letter characterization for the capacity region. The main component in these results is a generalization of a converse coding approach, recently introduced in [1] for the MAC with asymmetric quantized CSI at the encoders and herein considerably extended and adapted for the noisy CSI setup.
On the Role of Social Interaction in Individual Agency

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.
A Transmit Beamforming Technique for Mimo Cognitive Radios

In the present paper one of the main problems of cognitive radios, that is how to allow the secondary (cognitive) users to exploit the unused resources by primary users, is faced by introducing multiple antennas at the cognitive terminals. Under the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI), a transmit beamforming scheme based on a linear algorithm is proposed for the exploitation of the degrees of freedom offered by the spatial diversity. A closed form expression for the achievable rate obtainable by employing two antennas is derived and numerical results regarding the effects of different fading channels are provided.
Exposome informatics: considerations for the design of future biomedical research information systems

The environment's contribution to health has been conceptualized as the exposome. Biomedical research interest in environmental exposures as a determinant of physiopathological processes is rising as such data increasingly become available. The panoply of miniaturized sensing devices now accessible and affordable for individuals to use to monitor a widening range of parameters opens up a new world of research data. Biomedical informatics (BMI) must provide a coherent framework for dealing with multi-scale population data including the phenome, the genome, the exposome, and their interconnections. The combination of these more continuous, comprehensive, and personalized data sources requires new research and development approaches to data management, analysis, and visualization. This article analyzes the implications of a new paradigm for the discipline of BMI, one that recognizes genome, phenome, and exposome data and their intricate interactions as the basis for biomedical research now and for clinical care in the near future.
Automatically Recognizing Stock Patterns Using RPCL Neural Networks

Stock patterns are those that occur frequently in stock time series, containing valuable forecasting information. In this paper, an approach to extract patterns and features from stock price time series is introduced. Thereafter, we employ two ANN-based methods to conduct clustering analyses upon the extracted samples, which are the self-organizing map (SOM) and the competitive learning. Besides, and we introduce an improved version of the rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL), and furthermore conduct a comparative study between the clustering performances of the improved RPCL and the SOM. Experimental results show that a better clustering performance can be achieved by the former.
A recommendation engine for Wikipedia articles based on constrained training data

We consider the problem of generating recommendations for Wikipedia articles based on constrained data. Modern recommendation systems commonly use a combination of collaborative filtering techniques and content-based methods to predict new items of interest for a user. We focus our problem on generating recommendations via contentbased analysis using only a small set of liked articles as training data and no other information about user preferences or other users in the system. We find that our methods are promising for users with many likes, but that our algorithms do not generalize well to more constrained data. Concretely, other methods are needed to produce good results when a user has a small set of likes.
Prices, Land Tenure Institutions, and Geography: A Matching Analysis of Farmland Abandonment in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe

This paper uses remote sensing data from 1989 to 2000 to examine the impacts of price liberalization, land tenure, and biophysical characteristics on farmland abandonment in the border region of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Using regression analysis and matching estimators, we find that differences in biophysical characteristics, rather than in tenure systems, best explain the variation in abandonment rates within Poland. The difference in abandonment rates between Poland and Slovakia partially results from differences in land reform strategy, and abandonment in Ukraine takes a unique trajectory because of the incompleteness of the land reform and the lack of outside opportunities for residents. (JEL Q15, R14)
A modified current mirror circuit for the biasing of GAAS biFET RFIC power amplifiers

This paper presents a modified current mirror topology derived from the well known two-VBE bipolar-only circuit structure used in RFIC power amplifiers. The novelty behind the proposed modified structure is that it uses a simple diode-based switching mechanism in order to maintain better bias current regulation, hence better RF gain regulation, as the reference voltage is lowered to values that are very close to the two-VBE cut-off point commonly associated with a bipolar-only voltage regulator typically found in this type of current mirror. This improved regulation is helpful in some specific GaAs BiFET power amplifier applications where the reference voltage supplied to the current mirror is guaranteed to a minimum value of ~ 2.8 V, but requiring necessarily a bipolar-only voltage regulator structure within the current mirror in order to achieve specific dynamic biasing, control triggering or pre-distortion functions.
TOM Effects During Quiet and Turbulent Times

This paper investigates the turn-of-the-month effects presence on stock markets from 32 countries during two periods of time: a relative quiet one from January 2000 to December 2006 and a turbulent one from January 2000 to October 2013. We found some significant changes that occurred from the quiet to the turbulent times and some differences between emerging and developed markets.
Conception and evaluation of access selection algorithms for cooperative beyond 3G systems

As wireless technology evolve, we are seeing a tendency toward cooperative composite networks in which the diversity user demands can be properly met. The radio resource management (RRM) in such a network paradigm is a fascinating field of study and finding a cost-effective RRM solution is one of the greatest challenge faced by scientists today. This paper proposes an investigation of the access selection (AS) algorithms for the multi-access networks, aiming to indicate possible solutions based on actual radio resource consumptions and requirements. We assume that different radio access networks (RANs) are run by a single operator or a set of cooperative operators for which a proper inter-RAN signaling architecture is installed.
Evaluating the viability of process replication reliability for exascale systems

As high-end computing machines continue to grow in size, issues such as fault tolerance and reliability limit application scalability. Current techniques to ensure progress across faults, like checkpoint-restart, are increasingly problematic at these scales due to excessive overheads predicted to more than double an application's time to solution. Replicated computing techniques, particularly state machine replication, long used in distributed and mission critical systems, have been suggested as an alternative to checkpoint-restart. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of using state machine replication as the primary fault tolerance mechanism for upcoming exascale systems. We use a combination of modeling, empirical analysis, and simulation to study the costs and benefits of this approach in comparison to check-point/restart on a wide range of system parameters. These results, which cover different failure distributions, hardware mean time to failures, and I/O bandwidths, show that state machine replication is a potentially useful technique for meeting the fault tolerance demands of HPC applications on future exascale platforms.