Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Blood transfusion risks and alternative strategies in pediatric patients

Although the safety of the blood supply has been greatly improved, there still remain both infectious and noninfectious risks to the patient. The incidence of noninfectious transfusion reactions is greater than that of infectious complications. Furthermore, the mortality associated with noninfectious risks is significantly higher. In fact, noninfectious risks account for 87–100% of fatal complications of transfusions. It is concerning to note that the majority of pediatric reports relate to human error such as overtransfusion and lack of knowledge of special requirements in the neonatal age group. The second most frequent category is acute transfusion reactions, majority of which are allergic in nature. It is estimated that the incidence of adverse outcome is 18:100 000 red blood cells issued for children aged less than 18 years and 37:100 000 for infants. The comparable adult incidence is 13:100 000. In order to decrease the risks associated with transfusion of blood products, various blood‐conservation strategies can be utilized. Modalities such as acute normovolemic hemodilution, hypervolemic hemodilution, deliberate hypotension, antifibrinolytics, intraoperative blood salvage, and autologous blood donation are discussed and the pediatric literature is reviewed. A discussion of transfusion triggers, and algorithms as well as current research into alternatives to blood transfusions concludes this review.
Recovering evolutionary trees through harmonic greedy triplets

We give a greedy learning algorithm for reconstructing an evolutionary tree based on a harmonic average on triplets of taxa. This algorithm runs in polynomial time in the input size. Using the Jukes-Cantor model of evolution, our algorithm is mathematically proven to require sample sequences of only polynomial lengths in the number of taxa in order to recover the correct tree topology with high probability. In addition to recovering the topology, the algorithm also estimates the tree edge lengths with high accuracy. Our theoretical analysis is supported by simulated experiments, in which the algorithm has demonstrated high success rates, in reconstructing a large tree from short sequences.
Iron regulates nitric oxide synthase activity by controlling nuclear transcription

Recently, it was reported that nitric oxide (NO) directly controls intracellular iron metabolism by activating iron regulatory protein (IRP), a cytoplasmic protein that regulates ferritin translation. To determine whether intracellular iron levels themselves affect NO synthase (NOS), we studied the effect of iron on cytokine-inducible NOS activity and mRNA expression in the murine macrophage cell line J774A.1. We show here that NOS activity is decreased by about 50% in homogenates obtained from cells treated with interferon gamma plus lipopolysaccharide (IFN-gamma/LPS) in the presence of 50 microM ferric iron [Fe(3+)] as compared with extracts from cells treated with IFN- gamma/LPS alone. Conversely, addition of the iron chelator desferrioxamine (100 microM) at the time of stimulation with IFN- gamma/LPS increases NOS activity up to 2.5-fold in J774 cells. These effects of changing the cellular iron state cannot be attributed to a general alteration of the IFN-gamma/LPS signal, since IFN-gamma/LPS- mediated major histocompatibility complex class II antigen expression is unaffected. Furthermore, neither was the intracellular availability of the NOS cofactor tetrahydrobiopterin altered by treatment with Fe(3+) or desferrioxamine, nor do these compounds interfere with the activity of the hemoprotein NOS in vitro. We demonstrate that the mRNA levels for NOS are profoundly increased by treatment with desferrioxamine and reduced by Fe(3+). The half-life of NOS mRNA appeared not to be significantly altered by administration of ferric ion, and NOS mRNA stability was only slightly prolonged by desferrioxamine treatment. Nuclear run-off experiments demonstrate that nuclear transcription of cytokine-inducible NOS mRNA is strongly increased by desferrioxamine whereas it is decreased by Fe(3+). Thus, this transcriptional response appears to account quantitatively for the changes in enzyme activity. Our results suggest the existence of a regulatory loop between iron metabolism and the NO/NOS pathway.
Circuit Design Method of Rate Increase in Operational Amplifiers Based on the MH2XA031 Array Chip and CBJT Technological Routes

It has been revealed that in the conditions of small-scale production of discrete-analog filters on switched capacitors and ADC-drivers, it is most advisable to design high-speed operational amplifiers (OAs) based on the CBJT technological route and the MH2XA031 array chip, which allows operation in conditions of low temperatures and exposure to radiation. It has been established that most commercially produced $O A s$ provide an average value of the slew rate (SR, up to $200 \div 300 \mathrm{~V} / \mu \mathrm{s}$). This is largely due to the limitations of the technologies used, and most importantly, to the irrational design of circuits. We study the maximum performance parameters of a CBJT OA with one integrating capacitor, which ensures the stability of the $O A$, and a differentiating transient correction circuit, which is implemented by connecting additional small capacitors to the original circuit. In this case, the $S R$ of the $O A$ increases by more than 500 times (up to $4000 \mathrm{~V} / \mu \mathrm{s}$).
A hybrid position/force control approach for identification of deformation models of skin and underlying tissues

In this paper, the focus is on the design of two biomechanical models representing the skin as well as the underlying tissues behavior and properties during a robotized harvesting process. The first model is quasi-static (i.e., without considering velocity) in the pressure direction of the tool: it is principally issued from the work of d'Aulignac et al. and some interesting properties are exhibited from it. The second model is new and takes into account velocity and lubrication in the motion direction of the tool. The goal of this study is to improve skin harvesting process in robotized reconstructive surgery, by automatically selecting the force applied on the donor area and tuning the gain factors of the control law prior to harvesting. It requires extracting relevant parameters such as skin thickness and stiffness, friction coefficient, etc. that characterize the biomechanical properties of the skin and underlying tissues of each patient and of different harvesting surfaces on a given patient (thigh, skull, buttocks, .). Due to the surgical constraint, the in vivo procedure should be performed in the operating room before starting the operation with the robot itself thanks to a suitable hybrid position/force controller. A survey about soft tissue modeling is presented. Mathematical models are discussed along with identification protocols, and two models are chosen that meet our requirements. Finally, experimental results are presented on foam and human skin.
Prognostic importance of emotional support for elderly patients hospitalized with heart failure.

BACKGROUND Several studies have indicated that a variety of social relationships are important predictors of morbidity and mortality in patients with coronary artery disease, but little attention has been focused on the prognostic importance of these factors in the growing population of elderly patients with heart failure. To address this issue, we sought to determine whether emotional support is associated with fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular events in elderly patients hospitalized with heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS We reviewed the medical records of 292 subjects aged > or =65 years who were hospitalized with clinical heart failure and were part of the New Haven, Conn, cohort of the Established Population for the Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly, a longitudinal, community-based study of aging that included a comprehensive assessment of psychosocial support. In the unadjusted analysis, lack of emotional support was significantly associated with the 1-year risk of fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular outcomes [odds ratio, 2.4; 95% confidence interval, 1.1 to 4.9]. After adjustment for demographic factors, clinical severity, comorbidity and functional status, social ties, and instrumental support, the absence of emotional support remained associated with a significantly higher risk (odds ratio, 3.2; 95% confidence interval, 1.4 to 7.8). The test for interaction between emotional support and sex was significant (P=.01). In the fully adjusted model, the odds ratio for women was 8.2 (95% confidence interval, 2.5 to 27.2) compared with 1.0 (95% confidence interval, 0.3 to 3.3) for men. CONCLUSIONS Among elderly patients hospitalized with clinical heart failure, the absence of emotional support, measured before admission, is a strong, independent predictor of the occurrence of fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular events in the year after admission. In this cohort, the association is restricted to women.
The Association between Job Positions, Work Experience and Career Satisfaction: The Case of Malaysian's Academic Staff

This study aims to investigate on the association between the human capital and the subjective career success among Malaysian’s academic university staff. Career success is viewed as comprising two components; an objective career success and a subjective career success. Knowledge of career success helps individuals developed appropriate strategies for career development, whereas, at the organization levels, knowledge of the career success helps a manager to design and implement effective career systems. It was discovered that both dimensions of human capital (work experience and job position) were not significant to subjective career success (career satisfaction). Perhaps, there might be some reasons that can best explain on such phenomena that cause low career satisfaction, which is unarguably best known to the academician themselves. Future research should focus on the investigation into the causes which can possibly draw a full picture of the overall situations in the scope of research in career success.
Securing Critical Infrastructure: A Denoising Data-Driven Approach for Intrusion Detection in ICS Network

The centralized and vulnerable nature of the industrial control system (ICS) communication network makes it an attractive target for malicious actors aiming to infiltrate and exploit vulnerabilities. These threat actors seek to cause disruptions, compromise sensitive data, and potentially sabotage critical industrial processes. Existing methods for threat detection assume an ideal scenario where there exists no noise/disturbance to threat detection and classification, neglecting to account for the inherent noise and complexity present in real-world industrial processing environments. In reality, the deployment of these models may introduce performance degradation leading to sub-optimal model performance. In response to the identified issue, this study presents a security framework that proactively addresses the challenges posed by noise and provides a robust mechanism for detecting malicious activities from routine industrial network operations. The proposed framework can be deployed at the supervision network segment of ICS to analyze incoming network traffic signals, to effectively distinguish an attack from normal operation amdist noise. Our proposed approach undergoes experimental simulations to validate its effectiveness, and is compared with state-of-the-art based on key performance metrics. Simulation results show that our approach is robust in reconstructing noisy traffic signals with a minimal mean square error of 0.12 and an overall accuracy of 99.6%, outperforming existing methods.
A Flexible Parental Engaged Consent Model for the Secondary Use of Their Infant’s Physiological Data in the Neonatal Intensive Care Context

The secondary use of health data, especially the use of physiological data for research holds many opportunities for improving the current understanding of neonatal conditions. As a neonate is unable to provide their consent regarding participation in research studies, a substitute decision maker (SDM) must provide parental or legal guardian consent. However it has been well documented that there are many emotional, mental and physical challenges associated with the parental consent process in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). It is proposed that a flexible parental engaged consent model could help alleviate some of these issues by providing parents with the ability to choose and change their clinical engagement level preference for their infant’s participation in research at their convenience at any point in time. In this paper, an extension to Service based Multidimensional Temporal Data Mining Framework (STDMn0) to allow for the functionality of flexible patient or surrogate consent is presented based on the use of a flexible consent model initially proposed by Heath [1]. This functionality is demonstrated via an example implementation for a generic retrospective research study in the NICU setting.
Palm Print Recognition using Zernike Moments

ABSTRACT This paper proposes an automated system for recognizing palmprints for biometric identification of individuals. Complex Zernike moments are constructed using a set of complex polynomials which form a complete orthogonal basis set defined on the unit disc. Palmprint images are projected onto the basis set resulting in a set of complex signals. The magnitude of the complex value is computed and a scalar value is derived from it by computing the mean of the vector elements. Classification is done by subtracting the test samples from the mean of the training set. The data set consists of 80 images divided into 4 classes. Accuracy obtained is comparable to the best results reported in literature General Terms Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision Keywords Zernike moment, Palmprint recognition, Texture classification 1. INTRODUCTION Biometrics refers to automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and behavioral characteristics, which are nowadays used extensively for personal identification worldwide. Different physical traits like face, iris, fingerprint, palmprint, retina etc. fall under the perview of biometrics. Palmprint recognition involves identifying an individual by the principal lines, wrinkles, ridges on the surface of the palm. The basis for using palmprints lies in the fact that no two individuals have exactly the same palmprint pattern, moreover palmprints remain more or less stable throughout the lifetime and are easily obtainable using standard imaging techniques. Challenges in palmprint recognition are related to building a reliable data model from randomly oriented irregular lines that enable high amount of accuracies in security based systems and applications. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for palm print recognition by utilizing complex Zernike moments. The organization of the paper is as follows: section 2 provides an overview of the related works, section 3 outlines the proposed approach, section 4 details the experimentations done and results obtained, section 5 analyses the current work vis-a-vis contemporary works, section 6 brings up the overall conclusions and future scopes.
"Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modelling" by Boris Wyssusek - a Critical Response

I read with great interest and excitement Boris Wyssusek’s critical review of the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) modeling ontology and its philosophical foundations. The review articulates carefully Bunge’s position on ontology and how the BWW ontology sharply deviates from it. I agree with most of Wyssusek’s criticisms leveled against Wand and Weber’s interpretation and ontologically Wand and Weber’s position is untenable and not in line with Bunge’s original definition of ontology and its scientific intentions. I even wonder whether Wand and Weber want to be recognized as ardent proponents of Bunge’s Diamat ontology. In business schools where they mostly work this is not a position which is esteemed or easily understood—it can even be dangerous!
Cerebral Infarction After Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Contributes to Poor Outcome by Vasospasm-Dependent and -Independent Effects

Background and Purpose— The pathogenesis of delayed cerebral ischemia after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage remains incompletely understood. It is generally assumed that it is caused by angiographic vasospasm. Our aim was to clarify the relationship among angiographic vasospasm, neurological worsening, cerebral infarction, and poor outcome and to investigate whether cerebral infarction also contributes to poor outcome by vasospasm-independent effects. Methods— This exploratory analysis used data from 413 patients included in the Clazosentan to Overcome Neurological Ischemia and Infarction Occurring After Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (CONSCIOUS-1) trial. We studied the incidence of neurological worsening, cerebral infarction, and poor outcome in patients with and without angiographic vasospasm. Path analysis implemented by structural equation modeling was performed to determine direct and indirect path coefficients. Results— Of the 194 patients with moderate to severe vasospasm, 43% had neurological worsening of any cause, 20% had cerebral infarction, and 46% poor outcome. Path coefficients for direct effects on poor outcome were 0.20 for World Federation of Neurological Surgeons Grade 4 to 5, 0.13 for history of hypertension, 0.19 for angiographic vasospasm, 0.16 for neurological worsening, and 0.11 for new cerebral infarction. Cerebral infarction contributed to poor outcome by vasospasm-dependent and -independent effects. Conclusions— Our data show that the majority of patients with moderate to severe angiographic vasospasm did not have neurological worsening of any cause or cerebral infarction. Besides, cerebral infarction also has a direct effect on outcome independent of angiographic vasospasm. This suggests that other coexisting factors might be involved in the pathogenesis of delayed cerebral ischemia, which should also be an important research target to improve outcome after subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Generalized DC-link voltage balancing control method for multilevel inverters

This paper presents a general dc-link voltage balancing control method for multilevel inverters based on a generalized space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) scheme, with no requirements for additional auxiliary-power circuits. The SVPWM scheme generates all the available switching states and switching sequences based on two simple mappings, and calculates the duty cycles simply as for a two-level SVPWM, thus independent of the level of the inverter. The optimal switching sequence and optimal duty cycles for dc-link voltage balancing control are provided in the paper. Because all the measured signals are instantaneous values, the dc-link voltage balancing control method in the paper is suitable for any load without any assumption on the output current waveforms. The dc-link voltage balancing control in the paper is effective even when the capacitances of the dc-link capacitors of the multilevel inverter are not strictly equal or the voltage of the dc source of the multilevel inverter is fluctuating. Simulation results for a five-level inverter are given.
Factor Structure of Preferences for Job Attributes among Japanese Workers

The present study examined the factor structure of job attributes as related to job selection among 596 Japanese workers. Subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire in which they rated the importance of 22 job attributes on a 5-point scale. Three factors were extracted by principal factor analysis and the factors were rotated by a normalized varimax criterion. The factors were defined as established facilities, future prospects, and utility of specialty factors. Factor scores were compared among amounts of management experience and gender, i.e., divided into 4 groups. There were some significant differences among those amounts of experience and gender in two factors: nonmanagerial workers rated the established facilities as more important than did managerial workers and female clerks rated the future prospects as less important than did male workers.
THE EVOLUTION OF RESISTANCE TO HERBIVORY IN IPOMOEA PURPUREA. I. ATTEMPTS TO DETECT SELECTION

In this study, we looked for evidence of directional or stabilizing/disruptive selection on plant size and on the level of damage (resistance) caused by four types of herbivores in the annual morning glory Ipomoea purpurea. Selection was estimated by standard phenotypic regression analysis and by regression on breeding values. The phenotypic regression analysis revealed directional selection for all five characters (i.e., plant size and resistance to four types of herbivores) and indicated that plant size and resistance to corn‐earworm damage were subject to stabilizing selection. By contrast, the analysis using breeding values revealed directional selection only for plant size and resistance to corn earworms, while none of the characters examined indicated stabilizing or disruptive selection. These results suggest that intermediate levels of damage in I. purpurea are, in general, not maintained by stabilizing selection. Rather, they may reflect either 1) a transient state that exists while directional selection pushes the population toward complete resistance (or, in one case, total absence of resistance) or 2) the evolution of susceptibility to damage by genetic drift.
Physical Performance Is Associated with Working Memory in Older People with Mild to Severe Cognitive Impairment

Background. Physical performances and cognition are positively related in cognitively healthy people. The aim of this study was to examine whether physical performances are related to specific cognitive functioning in older people with mild to severe cognitive impairment. Methods. This cross-sectional study included 134 people with a mild to severe cognitive impairment (mean age 82 years). Multiple linear regression was performed, after controlling for covariates and the level of global cognition, with the performances on mobility, strength, aerobic fitness, and balance as predictors and working memory and episodic memory as dependent variables. Results. The full models explain 49–57% of the variance in working memory and 40–43% of episodic memory. Strength, aerobic fitness, and balance are significantly associated with working memory, explaining 3–7% of its variance, irrespective of the severity of the cognitive impairment. Physical performance is not related to episodic memory in older people with mild to severe cognitive impairment. Conclusions. Physical performance is associated with working memory in older people with cognitive impairment. Future studies should investigate whether physical exercise for increased physical performance can improve cognitive functioning. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov NTR1482.
Transfection of single‐stranded hepatitis A virus RNA activates MHC class I pathway

Although infection of single‐stranded RNA viruses can enhance expression of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I genes, the mechanism underlying this process remains unclear. Recent studies have indicated that exposure of non‐immune cells to double‐stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA) of viral origin can directly increase the expression of MHC class I and related molecules without immune cell interaction. In this report, we show that transfection of single‐stranded hepatitis A virus RNA into cultured hepatocytes results in the induction of genes for MHC class I, LMP2 and transporter for antigen processing (TAP1), in addition to the generation of viral proteins. We suggest that this stimulatory effect is due to the double‐stranded RNA formed during replication of single‐stranded viral RNA, and involves both double‐stranded, RNA‐dependent protein kinase PKR and the secretion of IFNβ.