Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The pathophysiology of thrombocytopenia in chronic liver disease

Thrombocytopenia is the most common hematological abnormality encountered in patients with chronic liver disease (CLD). In addition to being an indicator of advanced disease and poor prognosis, it frequently prevents crucial interventions. Historically, thrombocytopenia has been attributed to hypersplenism, which is the increased pooling of platelets in a spleen enlarged by congestive splenomegaly secondary to portal hypertension. Over the past decade, however, there have been significant advances in the understanding of thrombopoiesis, which, in turn, has led to an improved understanding of thrombocytopenia in cirrhosis. Multiple factors contribute to the development of thrombocytopenia and these can broadly be divided into those that cause decreased production, splenic sequestration, and increased destruction. Depressed thrombopoietin levels in CLD, together with direct bone marrow suppression, result in a reduced rate of platelet production. Thrombopoietin regulates both platelet production and maturation and is impaired in CLD. Bone marrow suppression can be caused by viruses, alcohol, iron overload, and medications. Splenic sequestration results from hypersplenism. The increased rate of platelet destruction in cirrhosis also occurs through a number of pathways: increased shear stress, increased fibrinolysis, bacterial translocation, and infection result in an increased rate of platelet aggregation, while autoimmune disease and raised titers of antiplatelet immunoglobulin result in the immunologic destruction of platelets. An in-depth understanding of the complex pathophysiology of the thrombocytopenia of CLD is crucial when considering treatment strategies. This review outlines the recent advances in our understanding of thrombocytopenia in cirrhosis and CLD.
Rape, Incest, and Sexual Harassment: A Guide for Helping Survivors

Preface The Issues Raised by Victimization Introduction and Perspectives Understanding Victimization Helping Approaches The Immediate Aftermath of Sexual Abuse Posttraumatic Phases Medical Intervention Legal Intervention Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse Promoting Recovery Emotional Aftereffects Counseling Models Individual Considerations Appendix I: Types of Professional Counselors Appendix II: The Victim Booklet Bibliography Name Index Subject Index
Trial without Error: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Human Intervention

AI systems are increasingly applied to complex tasks that involve interaction with humans. During training, such systems are potentially dangerous, as they haven't yet learned to avoid actions that could cause serious harm. How can an AI system explore and learn without making a single mistake that harms humans or otherwise causes serious damage? For model-free reinforcement learning, having a human "in the loop" and ready to intervene is currently the only way to prevent all catastrophes. We formalize human intervention for RL and show how to reduce the human labor required by training a supervised learner to imitate the human's intervention decisions. We evaluate this scheme on Atari games, with a Deep RL agent being overseen by a human for four hours. When the class of catastrophes is simple, we are able to prevent all catastrophes without affecting the agent's learning (whereas an RL baseline fails due to catastrophic forgetting). However, this scheme is less successful when catastrophes are more complex: it reduces but does not eliminate catastrophes and the supervised learner fails on adversarial examples found by the agent. Extrapolating to more challenging environments, we show that our implementation would not scale (due to the infeasible amount of human labor required). We outline extensions of the scheme that are necessary if we are to train model-free agents without a single catastrophe.
The effect of coach and player injury knowledge, attitudes and beliefs on adherence to the FIFA 11+ programme in female youth soccer

Background Injury knowledge and beliefs influence uptake of prevention programmes, but the relationship between knowledge, beliefs and adherence remains unclear. Aim To describe injury knowledge and beliefs among youth female soccer coaches and players, and to identify the relationship between these factors, different delivery strategies of the FIFA 11+ programme and adherence. Methods A subcohort analysis from a cluster-randomised controlled trial of 31 female soccer teams (coaches n=29, players (ages 13–18) n=258). Preseason and postseason questionnaires were used to assess knowledge and beliefs. Teams recorded FIFA 11+ adherence during the season. Results At baseline, 62.8% (95% CI 48.4% to 77.3%) of coaches and 75.8% (95% CI 71.5% to 80.1%) of players considered ‘inadequate warm-up’ a risk factor for injury. There was no effect of delivery method (OR=1.1; 95% CI 0.8 to 1.5) or adherence (OR=1.0; 95% CI 0.9 to 1.1) on this belief. At baseline, 13.8% (95% CI 1.3% to 26.4%) of coaches believed a warm-up could prevent muscle injuries, but none believed it could prevent knee and ankle injuries. For players, 9.7% (95% CI 6.1% to 13.3%), 4.7% (95% CI 2.1% to 7.3%) and 4.7% (95% CI 2.1% to 7.3%) believed a warm-up would prevent muscle, knee and ankle injuries, respectively. Years of playing experience were negatively associated with high adherence for coaches (OR=0.93; 0.88 to 0.99) and players (OR=0.92; 0.85 to 0.98). Conclusions There were gaps in injury knowledge and beliefs, which differed for coaches and players. Beliefs did not significantly affect adherence to the FIFA 11+, suggesting additional motivational factors should be considered.
Malnutrition and Risk of Malnutrition in Patients With Stroke: Prevalence During Hospital Stay

Background:Although various studies have shown high prevalence of malnutrition in hospitalized patients with stroke, recent studies on how the nutritional status of patients with acute stroke develops during the first weeks of hospital stay are scarce. Information is lacking concerning the identification of patients with stroke who are at risk of malnutrition during an acute hospital stay, because these patients may have a significant chance to improve their nutritional status. Purpose:This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of malnutrition and risk of malnutrition of patients with acute stroke during the first 10 days of hospitalization. Methods:A prospective, descriptive study was conducted in a neurological department of a university hospital in The Netherlands. Seventy-three patients with acute stroke were included, of which 23 patients could be followed up after 10 days. The nutritional status was determined with the Mini Nutritional Assessment at admission and after 10 days. Results:At admission, 5% of the patients (n = 73) were malnourished, 14% were at risk of malnutrition, and 81% were well nourished. Of the patients who could be followed up (n = 23), at admission, no patients were malnourished, 9% were at risk of malnutrition, and 91% were well nourished; whereas 10 days later, 26% of these patients were malnourished, 39% were at risk of malnutrition, and 35% were well nourished. This means that, within the followed-up group, the proportion of patients with malnutrition or risk of malnutrition increased significantly during hospital stay from 9% to 65%. Conclusions:Our study shows that the prevalence of malnutrition and risk of malnutrition in patients with acute stroke increases strongly during the first 10 days of admission. Therefore, screening of the nutritional status of these patients throughout this period is highly recommended to enable timely nutritional intervention and nutritional management of these patients.
Cerebral Volumetric Analysis Over Time in Children With Malformations of Cortical Development: A Quantitative Investigation

Malformations of cortical development are common neurological disorders characterized by disruptions in the normal development of cerebral gray and white matter during fetal life. We performed a quantitative, partly longitudinal investigation of cerebral volumes in a cohort of children with cortical malformations to investigate how their anatomical abnormalities change over time. Cortical malformation subjects showed volumetric curves that were comparable with those reported for healthy individuals, and reached peak cerebral volume, gray matter volume, and white matter volume at ages similar to those reported for healthy children. Volumes of heterotopic gray matter, however, demonstrated increases that were out of proportion to changes in cortical volume or caudate nucleus volume, suggesting that misplaced gray matter can have a unique pattern of maturation. Our findings demonstrate that overall brain growth in children with cortical malformations appears to mirror that of the healthy population, although malformed regions can show distinct growth patterns.
A Demand-Aware Transmission Optimization Control Scheme Based on Multichannel Coordination

The application of VANET can be divided into two types: security and non-security. Non secure applications are primarily used to provide entertainment information. Security applications will provide emergency information to the driver in advance. Therefore, the delay and reliability of communication are strictly required for security applications. In this paper, we proposed a kind of demand-aware medium access control protocol based on multichannel cooperative cooperation in vehicular ad hoc networks. First, the algorithm uses the roadside unit to broadcast the security query packets. The node sends the emergency information through the slot that reserved in advance. According to the demand of the security data to divide time slot dynamically, each node will be coordinated by RSU in order to reduce the collision probability and safety data packet delay. The simulation results show that the medium access control protocol proposed in this paper can improve the network throughout and reduce the end-to-end transmission delay compared with the traditional 802.11p protocol.
Pilot Design for MIMO OFDM Systems With Virtual Carriers

We consider the problem of pilot design for channel estimation in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in the presence of virtual carriers. The design criterion is the average mean-square error (MSE) of the least square (LS) estimates of the channel frequency response over the data carriers. To maximize bandwidth efficiency, the number of pilots is set to its minimum which is equal to the number of unknown channel coefficients. Both the phase shift orthogonal and disjoint pilot schemes are investigated. For a given pilot placement, a closed-form expression for the pilot power distribution for the disjoint scheme is provided. It is found that the optimal power distribution allocates less power to the pilots that are close to the virtual carriers. Pilot placement is obtained using an exhaustive search. The latter is too complex in systems with large number of subcarriers. A suboptimum pilot placement design for the disjoint pilot scheme is presented. It is shown that, unlike fully loaded systems where the two pilot design schemes have similar performance, in the presence of virtual carriers the optimal disjoint scheme not only has lower complexity but also yields more accurate channel estimation and bit error rate performance.
Central Neural States Relating Sex and Pain

Contents: Series Foreword Preface List of Abbreviations I Requirement for Motivational State Concepts A Physics, Brain, and Behavior B Motivation in Its Generalized and Specific Aspects C Motivation for Females to Seek Males D Hypothalamic and Preoptic Mechanisms Involved in Two Types of Motivational Change E Summary II Ascending Arousal Systems Activated A Ascending Reticular Activating Systems B Structure of Arousal States C Application to Sexual Behavior D Clinical Observations on Human Awareness and Arousal E Mood F Summary III Descending Systems: The Importance of Opioid Peptides and Analgesia A Opioid Peptides in Pain and Analgesia B Analgesia Induced by Stress and Environmental Variables C Hormonal Control of the Enkephalin Gene: One Paradox and Three Solutions D Intimate Relations among Inhibitory Systems E Hypothalamic Projections F Gender Differences in Analgesia G Pain and Sex: Similarity of Reproductive Behavior and Analgesia - Ascending and Descending Pathways H Summary IV Inferences and Arguments A Gene/Behavior Relationships: Application to Opioid Peptides B Biological Importance of the Relations among Sex, Arousal, and Analgesia References Index
Modeling of Fiber-reinforced Phenolic Foam

A statistical predictive model is developed that describes the compression properties of phenolic foam reinforced with glass fibers. An analysis of variance is applied to determine the behavior of composite phenolic foam. The material variables used in the study are fiber length, fiber weight fraction and weight percentage of blowing agent. The responses analyzed are density, compressive modulus, and strength. The foam cell size distribution as a function of density is also studied. Comparison of the experimental results with statistical data indicates that the elastic properties of glass—fiber-reinforced phenolic foam do not depend on the fiber lengths used. Also, the results showed that the density and morphology of composite foam exhibit a strong influence on the responses of the model. The statistical approach has utility for predicting the effects of material variables on elastic properties of foams.
Innovations in shock wave lithotripsy technology: updates in experimental studies.

PURPOSE We developed innovations in shock wave lithotripsy (SWL) technology. MATERIALS AND METHODS Two technical upgrades were implemented in an original unmodified HM-3 lithotriptor (Dornier Medical Systems, Inc., Kennesaw, Georgia). First, a single unit ellipsoidal reflector insert was used to modify the profile of lithotriptor shock wave (LSW) to decrease the propensity of tissue injury in SWL. Second, a piezoelectric annular array (PEAA) generator (f = 230 kHz and F = 150 mm) was used to produce an auxiliary shock wave of approximately 13 MPa in peak pressure (at 4 kV output voltage) to intensify the collapse of LSW induced bubbles near the target stone for improved comminution efficiency. RESULTS Consistent rupture of a vessel phantom made of single cellulose hollow fiber (i.d. = 0.2 mm) was produced after 30 shocks by the original HM-3 reflector at 20 kV. In comparison no vessel rupture could be produced after 200 shocks using the upgraded reflector at 22 kV or the PEAA generator at 4 kV. Using cylindrical BegoStone phantoms (Bego USA, Smithfield, Rhode Island) stone comminution efficiencies (mean +/- sd) after 1,500 shocks produced by the original and upgraded HM-3 reflectors, and the combined PEAA/upgraded HM-3 system, were 81.3% +/- 3.5%, 90.1% +/- 4.3% and 95.2% +/- 3.3%, respectively (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS Optimization of the pulse profile and sequence of LSW can significantly improve stone comminution while simultaneously decreasing the propensity of tissue injury during in vitro SWL. This novel concept and associated technologies may be used to upgrade other existing lithotriptors and to design new shock wave lithotriptors for improved performance and safety.
Inducing Gazetteer for Chinese Named Entity Recognition Based on Local High-Frequent Strings

Gazetteers, or entity dictionaries, are important for named entity recognition (NER). Although the dictionaries extracted automatically by the previous methods from a corpus, web or Wikipedia are very huge, they also misses some entities, especially the domain-specific entities. We present a novel method of automatic entity dictionary induction, which is able to construct a dictionary more specific to the processing text at a much lower computational cost than the previous methods. It extracts the local high-frequent strings in a document as candidate entities, and filters the invalid candidates with the accessor variety (AV) as our entity criterion. The experiments show that the obtained dictionary can effectively improve the performance of a high-precision baseline of NER.
Low-Density Lipoprotein Enhances Platelet Secretion Via Integrin-αIIbβ3–Mediated Signaling

Abstract —LDL is known to increase the sensitivity of human platelets for agonists and to induce aggregation and secretion independently at high concentrations, but its mechanism of action is largely obscure. To clarify how LDL increases platelet sensitivity, cells were incubated in lipoprotein-poor plasma and treated with collagen at a concentration that induced ≈20% secretion of 14C-serotonin. Preincubation with LDL (30 minutes at 37°C) enhanced secretion in a dose-dependent manner to 60±14% at a concentration of 2 g LDL protein/L. Similar stimulation by LDL was seen when secretion was induced by the thrombin receptor–activating peptide. This enhancement was strongly reduced (1) in the presence of monoclonal antibody PAC1 against activated αIIbβ3, a polyclonal antibody against αIIb, and in the presence of the fibrinogen peptides GRGDS and HHLGGAKQAGDV; (2) in αIIbβ3-deficient platelets; and (3) after dissociation of αIIbβ3. In contrast, binding of 125I-LDL to normal platelets in the presence of PAC1, anti-αIIb, GRGDS, and HHLGGAKQAGDV, and to αIIbβ3-deficient platelets was normal. LDL increased the surface expression of fibrinogen in lipoprotein-poor plasma and fibrinogen-free medium, suggesting that extracellular and granular fibrinogen bind to αIIbβ3 after platelet-LDL interaction. Platelets deficient in fibrinogen (<0.5% of normal) or von Willebrand Factor (<1% of normal) but containing normal amounts of other ligands for αIIbβ3 preserved responsiveness to LDL, indicating that occupancy of αIIbβ3 was not restricted to fibrinogen. Inhibition of protein kinase C (bisindolylmaleimide) diminished fibrinogen binding and sensitization by LDL; inhibition of tyrosine kinases (herbimycin A) left fibrinogen binding unchanged but diminished sensitization by LDL. We conclude that an increased concentration of LDL, such as observed in homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, sensitizes platelets to stimulation by collagen and thrombin receptor–activating peptide via ligand-induced outside-in signaling through integrin-αIIbβ3.
Zinc status relates to hematological deficits in middle-aged women.

OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to investigate zinc (Zn) status and the effects of Zn supplementation in relation to iron deficiency anemia in middle-aged women. It is important to define the role of Zn in hematologic abnormalities and to determine the frequency of Zn deficiency. METHODS Fifty-two Japanese women, selected from a health examination survey on 6200 women, had hemoglobin concentrations below 12.0 g/dl, total iron binding capacity (TIBC) below 390 micrograms/dl and fairly normocytemia. These 52 were divided into three groups and we then compared the hematological status before and after iron (group A) or Zn (group B) or iron plus Zn (group C) supplementation. RESULTS After treatment, concentrations of hemoglobin (Hb) increased slightly in groups A and B, but not statistically significant. In group C, Hb levels were significantly increased from 10.8 +/- 1.1 to 12.8 +/- 1.1 g/dl. Furthermore, numbers of RBC and reticulocytes, and concentrations of albumin were also increased significantly. Increased values over 1.0 g/dl of hemoglobin levels were noted in four women (26.6%) in group A, three women (14.2%) in group B and 13 women (81.2%) in group C. CONCLUSION Zn status to some extent can account for hematological abnormalities in middle-aged women. At least 5.0% of middle-aged Japanese women may have Zn deficiency. Normocytic anemia with low TIBC levels may serve as a good indicator of a marginal Zn deficiency.
ChaLearn multi-modal gesture recognition 2013: grand challenge and workshop summary

We organized a Grand Challenge and Workshop on Multi-Modal Gesture Recognition. The MMGR Grand Challenge focused on the recognition of continuous natural gestures from multi-modal data (including RGB, Depth, user mask, Skeletal model, and audio). We made available a large labeled video database of 13,858 gestures from a lexicon of 20 Italian gesture categories recorded with a KinectTM camera. More than 54 teams participated in the challenge and a final error rate of 12% was achieved by the winner of the competition. Winners of the competition published their work in the workshop of the Challenge. The MMGR Workshop was held at ICMI conference 2013, Sidney. A total of 9 relevant papers with basis on multi-modal gesture recognition were accepted for presentation. This includes multi-modal descriptors, multi-class learning strategies for segmentation and classification in temporal data, as well as relevant applications in the field, including multi-modal Social Signal Processing and multi-modal Human Computer Interfaces. Five relevant invited speakers participated in the workshop: Profs. Leonid Signal from Disney Research, Antonis Argyros from FORTH, Institute of Computer Science, Cristian Sminchisescu from Lund University, Richard Bowden from University of Surrey, and Stan Sclaroff from Boston University. They summarized their research in the field and discussed past, current, and future challenges in Multi-Modal Gesture Recognition.
Early Adversity and Mental Health Outcomes: Linking Extremely Low Birth Weight, Neuroendocrine Dysregulation, and Internalizing Behaviours

Salivary cortisol and electrocardiogram data was collected at baseline and after a stressanticipation task in extremely low birth weight (ELBW; < 1000 grams) survivors and normal birth weight (NBW) controls, in order to examine the moderating influence of emotion regulation on the relationship between being born at ELBW and internalizing problems in adulthood. The stress manipulation was an adapted Trier Social Stress Task. The participants were told they would have three minutes to create a speech on one of three predetermined topics (i.e., gun control, same sex marriage, or abortion). After three minutes passed, the particpants were told that there would be no speech. All participants showed a decrease in salivary cortisol levels throughout the day, and an increase in heart rate during the stress anticipation task. When a median split was used to create high and low stress reactive cortisol and heart rate groups, an interaction was found between birth status (ELBW vs. NBW) and group (High vs. Low Stress Reactive Cortisol) on self-reported internalizing problems (anxiety, depression, withdrawal). Those born at ELBW who had high stress reactive cortisol self-reported significantly higher levels of internalizing problems compared to ELBWs with low stress reactive cortisol. Those born at NBW did not differ on self-reported internalizing problems based on their stress reactive cortisol levels. When the moderating effect was probed with a linear regression analysis, the ELBW group was driving the relation between stress reactive cortisol levels and internalizing problems. Taken together, the results suggest that emotion regulation, as indexed by the neuroendocrine system, is moderating the relation between being born at ELBW and internalizing problems in adulthood. This is indicative of a differential susceptibility of risk and