Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endotracheal intubation: the role of sterility.

BACKGROUND There is a paucity of data regarding whether sterile handling of endotracheal tubes (ETTs) impacts the incidence and prevalence of pneumonia in the emergency, urgent, or elective clinical scenarios. Intensive care units employ infection control and reduction schemes to reduce pneumonia rates. METHODS A MEDLINE search of the English-language literature for the last 30 years was performed using the keywords "endotracheal intubation," "intubation," "pneumonia," "sinusitis," "tracheobronchitis," "nosocomial infection," and "infection. " Data were limited to those papers addressing the role of sterile handling or passage of ETTs, infection with antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms, antibiotic prophylaxis, and the role of virulence determinants in supporting invasive infection. Also, a convenience sample of a single author's patients requiring tracheal intubation was undertaken. Data were acquired on tube handling, success of insertion, and subsequent occurrence of pneumonia. RESULTS Virtually no data exist on the impact of sterile ETT handling, but unsterile manipulation of the ETT prior to insertion is common (112 of 154 intubation events). Within the limited patient sample, no conclusions may be drawn regarding the impact of unsterile handling on pneumonia rates, although sinusitis after nasotracheal intubation clearly increases the incidence of pneumonia. Biofilm generation as a facilitator of bacterial colonization of artificial airway surfaces is a ubiquitous virulence determinant that is not ameliorated by antibiotic administration. CONCLUSIONS Unsterile ETT handling and insertion techniques are not clearly associated with pneumonia induction, but physiologically sound approaches that retard biofilm production may decrease pneumonia rates.
A DSM for a Modeling RESTful Sensor Web Network

Entering the era of Internet of Things, the use of Wireless Sensor Network and Sensor Web elements becomes a daily phenomenon. Information systems which must ensure that an increasing number of devices access and analyze the data collected from the wireless sensor nodes, have become complex and difficult to maintain. Due to the discrete nature of computer based systems, where the relationship between action and response may not be proportional, there is a huge risk when control is concerned. Design of unique sensor network that will meet the imposed needs sometimes is a serious task usually involving experts from different areas of the problem, design and implementation domains. On the other hand the introduction of novel technologies and techniques, like DomainSpecific Modeling and RESTful service technology, in sensor networks design, raises the importance of problem domain. The involvement of such a wide variety of stakeholders, together with the nature of computer based systems and the constantly changing methods and technologies, sometimes leads to overall project failure mainly because of the lack of a mutually agreed high level domain specific model. In this paper, the specification of meta-model for RESTful Sensor Web Network modeling together with accompanying language editor, are described. The verification and validation of its functionality is performed based on suitable examples of sensor network design models.
Microinjection of glutamate into dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus excites gallbladder motility through NMDA receptor – nitric oxide – cGMP pathway

Abstract We have reported that both glutamate and nitric oxide (NO) participated in the regulation of gallbladder motility in dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus (DMV). The aim of this study is to investigate the type of receptor in DMV that mediates the excitatory effect of glutamate on gallbladder motility and the correlation between the glutamate and NO. A frog bladder connected with a force transducer was inserted into the gallbladder to record the change of gallbladder pressure. Glutamate (65 mmol L−1, 100 nL) microinjected into DMV significantly increased the strength of gallbladder phasic contraction. This effect was abolished by ketamine (180 mmol L−1, 100 nL), the specific N‐methyl‐d‐aspartic acid (NMDA) receptor antagonist, but was not influenced by 6‐cyaon‐7‐nitroquinoxaline‐2,3‐(1H,4H)‐dione (CNQX) (180 mmol L−1, 100 nL), the non‐NMDA ionotropic receptor antagonist. NG‐nitro‐l‐arginine‐emthyl (l‐NAME) (1 mol L−1, 100 nL), the nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor, reversed the excitatory effect of glutamate on gallbladder motility. Microinjection of sodium nitroprusside (SNP), the NO donor, into DMV enhanced the gallbladder motility, and this effect was not modulated by ketamine. Microinjection of NMDA (5 mmol L−1, 100 nL) increased the strength of gallbladder phasic contraction, and this effect was attenuated by methylene blue (100 mmol L−1, 100 nL), the soluble guanylate cyclase inhibitor. These results suggest that glutamate regulate the gallbladder motility through the NMDA receptor – NO – cGMP pathway in DMV.
Cost-Effectiveness of the ‘One4All’ HIV Linkage Intervention in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China

Background In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, an estimated 80% of newly-identified antiretroviral therapy (ART)-eligible patients are not engaged in ART. Delayed ART uptake ultimately translates into high rates of HIV morbidity, mortality, and transmission. To enhance HIV testing receipt and subsequent treatment uptake in Guangxi, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) executed a cluster-randomized trial to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a streamlined HIV testing algorithm (the One4All intervention) in 12 county-level hospitals. Objective To determine the incremental cost-effectiveness of the One4All intervention delivered at county hospitals in Guangxi, China, compared to the current standard of care (SOC). Perspective Health System. Time Horizon 1-, 5-and 25-years. Methods We adapted a dynamic, compartmental HIV transmission model to simulate HIV transmission and progression in Guangxi, China and identify the economic impact and health benefits of implementing the One4All intervention in all Guangxi hospitals. The One4All intervention algorithm entails rapid point-of-care HIV screening, CD4 and viral load testing of individuals presenting for HIV screening, with same-day results and linkage to counselling. We populated the model with data from the One4All trial (CTN-0056), China CDC HIV registry and published reports. Model outcomes were HIV incidence, mortality, costs, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of the One4All intervention compared to SOC. Results The One4All testing intervention was more costly than SOC (CNY 2,182 vs. CNY 846), but facilitated earlier ART access, resulting in delayed disease progression and mortality. Over a 25-year time horizon, we estimated that introducing One4All in Guangxi would result in 802 averted HIV cases and 1629 averted deaths at an ICER of CNY 11,678 per QALY gained. Sensitivity analysis revealed that One4All remained cost-effective at even minimal levels of effectiveness. Results were robust to changes to a range of parameters characterizing the HIV epidemic over time. Conclusions The One4All HIV testing strategy was highly cost-effective by WHO standards, and should be prioritized for widespread implementation in Guangxi, China. Integrating the intervention within a broader combination prevention strategy would enhance the public health response to HIV/AIDS in Guangxi.
Improving Testing Efficiency through Component Harvesting

Although code and component search engines have improved significantly in recent years, and the number of reusable components accessible over the Internet has increased dramatically, the “not invented here syndrome” and other human factors are still standing in the way of a significant increase in the levels of software reuse. However, it is still possible to use components discovered via search engines on the Internet to improve the efficiency of the development process, even if they are not embedded into final products. By providing an efficient way of obtaining multiple alternative implementations of a given piece of functionally, component search engines greatly reduce the effort involved in using “multi-version programming” and “back-to-back” testing techniques to enhance the testing process. These techniques have been proven effective in improving testing efficiency, but the effort involved in creating the multiple versions has hitherto been prohibitive. After explaining how these ideas can be combined with test-driven component harvesting approaches, the paper outlines some test hypothesis that can be used to evaluate their practical usability.
Using Filtered Second Order Co-occurrence Matrix to Improve the Traditional Co-occurrence Model

Using co-occurrence statistics to measure word similarities/relatedness has applications in many areas of natural language processing. Our experiment results also indicate that two words with zero co-occurrence statistics could still be related. In this paper, we present two algorithms, both of which were evaluated on 80 synonym test questions from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and 50 synonym test questions from a collection of tests for students of English as a Second Language (ESL). The evaluation results show that the first algorithm improves the performance of co-occurrence based applications significantly; and the second ensemble algorithm (which incorporates the first algorithm) achieves the best results on the synonym questions of both tests. Keyword: Co-occurrence, Word similarity, Word relatedness, Synonym test, PMI
A novel multiscale nonlinear diffusion method for ultrasonic speckle reduction

A novel approach for ultrasonic speckle reduction based on a multiscale nonlinear diffusion (MND) is presented. In this approach, speckle is removed by nonlinear adaptive filtering of the individual bandpass levels of the multiscale Laplacian pyramid. The nonlinear adaptive filtering is implemented by a nonlinear diffusion process. The proposed MND method can reduce speckle noise significantly while preserving sharp image details. Moreover, selective amplification of image details is possible. The superiority of the proposed MND over the conventional nonlinear diffusion and a state-of-the-art wavelet-based speckle reduction technique is demonstrated by applying them on synthetic and real ultrasound B-mode images.
Adaptive Thresholding based on SOM Technique for Semi-Automatic NPC Image Segmentation

This paper studies Self-Organizing Map (SOM) based adaptive thresholding technique for semi-automatic image segmentation. CT images of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma are considered in the study. The thresholds are determined from histogram of a topological map created from SOM method. With this proposed technique, initial tumor pixel must be manually selected. Pixels which are in the same threshold level are considered as tumor pixels. The experimental results showed that our proposed technique is effective for NPC image segmentation. In addition, it can properly handle tumor heterogeneity generally found in the NPC images.
17 b -Estradiol inhibition of NADPH oxidase expression in human endothelial cells

We investigated the hypothesis that the antiatherosclerotic effect of 17 b -estradiol (E 2 ) is due to a shift in the nitric oxide (NO)/superoxide (O 2 2 ) balance in the vessel wall, thereby increasing the bioavailability of NO. In human umbilical vein cultured endothelial cells, E 2 (1–100 nmol/l), but not 17 a estradiol, caused a time- and concentration-dependent decrease in expression of the NADPH oxidase subunit gp91phox (up to 60% inhibition at both the mRNA and protein level). This effect was prevented by coincuba-tion with the estrogen receptor antagonists tamoxifen and ICI 182,780 (1 m mol/l each). Within the same concentration range, E 2 also up-regulated endothelial nitric oxide synthase expression ( ; twofold). More-over, preincubation of the cells with E 2 or a gp91phox antisense oligonucleotide signiﬁcantly decreased their capacity to generate O 2 2 on phorbol ester stimulation (i.e., assembly of the active NADPH oxidase complex). Blockade of NO synthase activity, on the other hand, had no effect on phorbol ester-stimulated O 2 2 formation. In addition, E 2 (100 nmol/l) inhibited the increase in adhesion molecule and chemokine expression in cells exposed to cyclic strain. Cyclic strain enhanced endothelial O 2 2 formation, thereby offsetting the inhibitory effect of NO on the expression of these gene products. E 2 thus seems to act as an antioxidant at the genomic level which by improving the NO/O 2 2 balance normalizes expression of proatherosclerotic gene products in endothelial cells. —Wagner, A. H. , Schroeter, M. R. , Hecker, M. 17 b -Estradiol inhibition of NADPH oxidase expression in human endothelial cells. FASEB J. 15, 2121–2130 (2001)
Linking Statistical and Ecological Theory: Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity as a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process

Neutral models which assume ecological equivalence between species provide null models for community assembly. In Hubbell's unified neutral theory of biodiversity (UNTB), many local communities are connected to a single metacommunity through differing immigration rates. Our ability to fit the full multisite UNTB has hitherto been limited by the lack of a computationally tractable and accurate algorithm. We show that a large class of neutral models with this mainland-island structure but differing local community dynamics converge in the large population limit to the hierarchical Dirichlet process. Using this approximation we developed an efficient Bayesian fitting strategy for the multisite UNTB. We can also use this approach to distinguish between neutral local community assembly given a nonneutral metacommunity distribution and the full UNTB where the metacommunity too assembles neutrally. We applied this fitting strategy to both tropical trees and a data set comprising 570 $\,$851 sequences from 278 human gut microbiomes. The tropical tree data set was consistent with the UNTB but for the human gut neutrality was rejected at the whole community level. However, when we applied the algorithm to gut microbial species within the same taxon at different levels of taxonomic resolution, we found that species abundances within some genera were almost consistent with local community assembly. This was not true at higher taxonomic ranks. This suggests that the gut microbiota is more strongly niche constrained than macroscopic organisms, with different groups adopting different functional roles, but within those groups diversity may at least partially be maintained by neutrality. We also observed a negative correlation between body mass index and immigration rates within the family Ruminococcaceae. This provides a novel interpretation of the impact of obesity on the human microbiome as a relative increase in the importance of local growth versus external immigration within this key group of carbohydrate degrading organisms.
On Finding Frequent Patterns in Directed Acyclic Graphs

Given a directed acyclic graph with labeled vertices, we consider the problem of finding the most common label sequences ("traces") among all paths in the graph (of some maximum length m). Since the number of paths can be huge, we propose novel algorithms whose time complexity depends only on the size of the graph, and on the relative frequency epsilon of the most frequent traces. In addition, we apply techniques from streaming algorithms to achieve space usage that depends only on epsilon, and not on the number of distinct traces. The abstract problem considered models a variety of tasks concerning finding frequent patterns in event sequences. Our motivation comes from working with a data set of 2 million RFID readings from baggage trolleys at Copenhagen Airport. The question of finding frequent passenger movement patterns is mapped to the above problem. We report on experimental findings for this data set.
Assessing Data Relevance For Automated Generation Of A Clinical Summary

Clinicians perform many tasks in their daily work requiring summarization of clinical data. However, as technology makes more data available, the challenges of data overload become ever more significant. As interoperable data exchange between hospitals becomes more common, there is an increased need for tools to summarize information. Our goal is to develop automated tools to aid clinical data summarization. Structured interviews were conducted on physicians to identify information from an electronic health record they considered relevant to explaining the patients medical history. Desirable data types were systematically evaluated using qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess data categories and patterns of data use. We report here on the implications of these results for the design of automated tools for summarization of patient history.
Central Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism: Genetic Complexity of a Complex Disease

Central hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (CHH) is an emerging pathological condition frequently associated with overweight, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and midline defects. The genetic mechanisms involve mutations in at least twenty-four genes regulating GnRH neuronal migration, secretion, and activity. So far, the mechanisms underlying CHH, both in prepubertal and in adulthood onset forms, remain unknown in most of the cases. Indeed, all detected gene variants may explain a small proportion of the affected patients (43%), indicating that other genes or epigenetic mechanisms are involved in the onset of CHH. The aim of this review is to summarize the current knowledge on genetic background of CHH, organizing the large amount of data present in the literature in a clear and concise manner, to produce a useful guide available for researchers and clinicians.
Calmodulin dynamically regulates the trafficking of the metabotropic glutamate receptor mGluR5

Metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) 1–8 are G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that modulate excitatory neurotransmission, neurotransmitter release, and synaptic plasticity. PKC regulates many aspects of mGluR function, including protein–protein interactions, Ca2+ signaling, and receptor desensitization. However, the mechanisms by which PKC regulates mGluR function are poorly understood. We have now identified calmodulin (CaM) as a dynamic regulator of mGluR5 trafficking. We show that the major PKC phosphorylation site on the intracellular C terminus of mGluR5 is serine 901 (S901), and phosphorylation of this residue is up-regulated in response to both receptor and PKC activation. In addition, S901 phosphorylation inhibits mGluR5 binding to CaM, decreasing mGluR5 surface expression. Furthermore, blocking PKC phosphorylation of mGluR5 on S901 dramatically affects mGluR5 signaling by prolonging Ca2+ oscillations. Thus, our data demonstrate that mGluR5 activation triggers phosphorylation of S901, thereby directly linking PKC phosphorylation, CaM binding, receptor trafficking, and downstream signaling.
A Novel Bounding Sphere Scheme to Compute Intersection of Subdivision Surfaces

A novel bounding sphere hierarchy is presented to track the potential intersection area of the subdivision surfaces, so the large number of facets should not humble the intersection computation. The compact local patches, which are regular vertex grids, are very helpful to construct and verify the bounding spheres of different levels. Some illustrative results are given to verify the feasibility of the scheme.
A Lightweight Inference Method for Image Classification

We demonstrate a two phase classification method, first of individual pixels, then of fixed regions of pixels for scene classification—the task of assigning posteriors that characterize an entire image. This can be realized with a probabilistic graphical model (PGM), without the characteristic segmentation and aggregation tasks characteristic of visual object recognition. Instead the spatial aspects of the reasoning task are determined separately by a segmented partition of the image that is fixed before feature extraction. The partition generates histograms of pixel classifications treated as virtual evidence to the PGM. We implement a sampling method to learn the PGM using virtual evidence. Tests on a provisional dataset show good (+70%) classification accuracy among most all classes.
Sensorless manipulation using massively parallel microfabricated actuator arrays

This paper investigates manipulation tasks with arrays of microelectromechanical structures (MEMS). We develop a geometric model for the mechanics of microactuators and a theory of sensorless, parallel manipulation, and we describe efficient algorithms for their evaluation. The theory of limit surfaces offers a purely geometric characterization of microscale contacts between actuator and moving object, which can be used to efficiently predict the motion of the object on an actuator array. It is shown how simple actuator control strategies can be used to uniquely align a part up to symmetry without sensor feedback. This theory is applicable to a wide range of microactuator arrays. Our actuators are oscillating structures of single-crystal silicon fabricated in a IC-compatible process. Calculations show that these actuators are strong enough to levitate and move, for example, a piece of paper. <<ETX>>
SVM - Neighbor based candidate working set selection applied on text-categorization

Computational complexity is one of the most important issues in any machine-learning algorithm. A novel working set selection mechanism is proposed to improve Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning. Implementation is based on the Keerthi et al.'s SMO algorithm, but our approach is one-class classification. When selecting samples for the optimization process, much effort is spent to find the most violating pair. The training time strongly depends on the selection of these variables. By choosing the neighbor samples of the updating pair (current working set) one can reach the optimal solution much faster. This one-class classification approach will be applied to a text categorization problem using the pointwise total correlation for term indexing.
Late Quaternary right-lateral slip rates of faults adjacent to the lake Qinghai, northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau

By combining terrace riser offsets with terrace ages dated by 14 C, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and 10 Be techniques, we determine average slip rates of 1.1 ± 0.3 mm/yr and 1.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr for the Elashan and Riyueshan faults, two north-northwest–trending, right-lateral, strike-slip faults west and east of the lake Qinghai in the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau. These faults are conjugate to the major easterly trending, left-lateral Altyn Tagh, Haiyuan-Qilianshan, and Kunlun faults, and they contribute to the subdivision of the region between the Haiyuan-Qilianshan and Kunlun faults into small blocks tens to ∼100 km in dimension. The relatively low slip rates in this region reflect distributed deformation. The total right-lateral offsets of geological contacts are ∼9–12 km along the Elashan fault and ∼11–12 km for the northern segment of the Riyueshan fault. If long-term slip rates were constant during late Cenozoic time, dates of initiation of dextral movement would be 9 or 10 ± 3 Ma for the two strike-slip faults, concurrent with onsets or acceleration of tectonic deformation in Cenozoic basins nearby. Our study highlights a stage of tectonic deformation in the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau beginning since ca. 8–12 Ma, tens of millions of years after the collision between India and Eurasia began.