Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radiological versus surgical implantation of first catheter for peritoneal dialysis: a randomized non-inferiority trial.

BACKGROUND The success of peritoneal dialysis (PD) is dependent on timely and adequate PD catheter access. In many centres, including our own, PD catheter insertion technique has evolved by laparoscopic surgery. An alternative method of catheter insertion is performed by radiologists using a percutaneous modified Seldinger technique under fluoroscopic guidance. However, there are no clinical trials comparing these two methods of catheter insertion. METHODS From 1 April 1999 to 30 August 2004, we randomly assigned 113 pre-dialysis patients to receive PD catheter insertion using fluoroscopic guidance under local anaesthesia by radiologists or insertion using laparoscopy under general anaesthesia by a surgeon. The primary endpoint was the occurrence of dialysis catheter complications (complication-free catheter survival) by Day 365, a composite endpoint that included complications secondary to mechanical and infectious causes. Secondary endpoints were the occurrence of catheter removal (overall catheter survival) and death from any cause (patient survival) by Day 365, procedure pain, procedure time, procedure room utilization time, length of inpatient admission and direct hospital costs. Results were analysed by univariate and multivariate methods and by Kaplan-Meier survival curves. RESULTS Complication-free catheter survival was significantly higher at 42.5% [95% confidence interval (CI) 29.3-55] in the radiological group compared with 18.1% (95% CI 8.9-29.8) in the laparoscopic group (P-value = 0.03). Excess complications in the laparoscopic group included peritonitis, peritoneal dialysate leaks and umbilical herniae. One-year overall catheter survival and 1-year subject survival were not different between the groups. Hospital costs were significantly higher in the laparoscopic group by almost a factor of two. CONCLUSIONS Radiological insertion of first PD catheters using fluoroscopy is a clinically non-inferior and cost-effective alternative to surgical laparoscopic insertion.
Cultivating Diversity and Competency in STEM: Challenges and Remedies for Removing Virtual Barriers to Constructing Diverse Higher Education Communities of Success

The need to increase the number of college graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines is a national issue. As the demographics of the United States’ population grow increasingly more diverse, the recognition that students of color are disproportionately under-represented among those individuals successful at completing STEM degrees requires exigent and sustained intervention. Although a range of efforts and funding have been committed to increasing the success of under-represented minority (URM) students at primarily white, or majority, institutions, widespread progress has been slow. Simultaneously, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions have demonstrated disproportionate successes in graduating URM students with STEM degrees and those that proceed to completing graduate-level degrees in the sciences. The differential successes of particular institutions with promoting the achievement of diverse individuals in obtaining academic STEM degrees suggest that with committed and strategic leadership, advancements in creating academic communities that promote the success of a diverse range of students in STEM can be achieved in part through assessing and mitigating environmental barriers that impede success at majority institutions. In this paper, we address issues related to the engagement of URM students in majority settings and describe some efforts that have shown success for promoting diversity in STEM and highlight continuing issues and factors associated with cultivating diversity in academic STEM disciplines at majority institutions. Recommended efforts include addressing academic assistance, professional and cultural socialization issues and institutional environmental factors that are associated with success or lack thereof for URMs in STEM.
Universal Testing and Treatment as an HIV Prevention Strategy: Research Questions and Methods

Achieving high coverage of antiretroviral treatment (ART) in resource-poor settings will become increasingly difficult unless HIV incidence can be reduced substantially. Universal voluntary counselling and testing followed by immediate initiation of ART for all those diagnosed HIV-positive (universal testing and treatment, UTT) has the potential to reduce HIV incidence dramatically but would be very challenging and costly to deliver in the short term. Early modelling work in this field has been criticised for making unduly optimistic assumptions about the uptake and coverage of interventions. In future work, it is important that model parameters are realistic and based where possible on empirical data. Rigorous research evidence is needed before the UTT approach could be considered for wide-scale implementation. This paper reviews the main areas that need to be explored. We consider in turn research questions related to the provision of services for universal testing, services for immediate treatment of HIV-positives and the population-level impact of UTT, and the research methods that could be used to address these questions. Ideally, initial feasibility studies should be carried out to investigate the acceptability, feasibility and uptake of UTT services. If these studies produce promising results, there would be a strong case for a cluster-randomised trial to measure the impact of a UTT intervention on HIV incidence, and we consider the main design features of such a trial.
The Open Biomedical Annotator

The range of publicly available biomedical data is enormous and is expanding fast. This expansion means that researchers now face a hurdle to extracting the data they need from the large numbers of data that are available. Biomedical researchers have turned to ontologies and terminologies to structure and annotate their data with ontology concepts for better search and retrieval. However, this annotation process cannot be easily automated and often requires expert curators. Plus, there is a lack of easy-to-use systems that facilitate the use of ontologies for annotation. This paper presents the Open Biomedical Annotator (OBA), an ontology-based Web service that annotates public datasets with biomedical ontology concepts based on their textual metadata (www.bioontology.org). The biomedical community can use the annotator service to tag datasets automatically with ontology terms (from UMLS and NCBO BioPortal ontologies). Such annotations facilitate translational discoveries by integrating annotated data. [1]
Security Models and Proofs for Key Establishment Protocols

In this thesis we study the problem of secure key establishment, motivated by the construction of secure channels protocols to protect information transmitted over an open network. In the past, the purported security of a key establishment protocol was justified if it could be shown to withstand popular attack scenarios by heuristic analysis. Since this approach does not account for all possible attacks, the security guarantees are limited and often insufficient. This thesis examines the provable security approach to the analysis of key establishment protocols. We present the security models and definitions developed in 2001 and 2002 by Canetti and Krawczyk, critique the appropriateness of the models, and provide several security proofs under the definitions. In addition, we consider the importance of the key compromise impersonation resilience property in the context of these models. We list some open problems that were encountered in the study.
Modeling Attacks In Wireless Sensor Networks

Compromises in sensor networks are a serious problem, but no ge eral framework exists for modeling compromises. Sensors may be static or mo bile, and are often deployed in groups for reliability [1, 2, 3]. One must ensure th integrity of both data reports and that of data in transit [4, 5, 6, 7]. When two sensors d not share a preloaded key, they may establish a path key using an intermediary. The resilience of a key establishment scheme is inversely related to the number of path ke ys it creates. Previous schemes [8, 9, 10, 11, 1, 2, 12] have analyzed ran om attack, in which attackers randomly compromise sensors. A selective attack [2, 3], however, chooses targets to maximize the benefits of attack. An adversary targ e in a certain region will target sensors in it. Similarly, an adversary may target sen sors that hold the largest numbers of uncompromised keys, to maximize the number of key compromises at the next attack step. As shown in [3], selective attacks are dead lier than random attacks. To compromise50% of the communication links among uncompromised sensors in a 10,000-node network under RKP, one must compromise 230 sen sors under random attack but only 160 under selective attack. Under SKRP, the a ttacker must compromise 200 sensors under random attack, but only 125 sensors under s elective attack. An attacker who wants to compromise links between all neighb oring sensor pairs can, at each step, target the sensor st whose compromise reveals the largest number of unknown pairwise keys. The attacker gains all preloaded k eys atst, and all path keys mediated by st. Let [sj , sk] represent the path key between sj andsk, and let M(si) = {[si11 , si12 ], [si21 , si22 ], · · · } be the set of path keys mediated by si.
Challenges and New Technologies for Addressing Security in High Performance Distributed Environments

This paper discusses security implications of some of the latest technologies in distributed high-performance systems. Rapid developments in gigabit-per-second networks, network host interface architectures, and message-passing communications systems are among these, all posing challenges to traditional distributed security models. Recently, a number of novel approaches for increased communications efficiency have been introduced in various application environments. The security assurance characteristics of these approaches are often disregarded or evaluated without sufficient depth, rendering them suspect in secure applications. The goal of this paper is to point out important new networking technologies, reveal the challenges and obstacles they impose to security, and propose protection and assurance mechanisms that need be taken into consideration before these technologies are widely accepted in practice. This paper reviews three components of an integrated high-performance distributed environment: System Area Networks (SAN), network host interfaces, and protocols for internetworking multiple SANs. The approaches and techniques leading to high communication efficiency are outlined and their affects on networked system security are investigated in turn. Solutions for increasing the level of trust in the reviewed distributed systems are proposed. These solutions can be implemented at the lowest software layers of the communications systems which achieves a higher degree of security mechanism effectiveness and at the same time introduces a minimal processing overhead. Furthermore, not all data traffic in a given system need be concerned with security issues; therefore, such traffic should accept minimal performance degradation resulting from the increased assurance of secure traffic in the same system.
Effectiveness of influenza vaccine in the community-dwelling elderly.

BACKGROUND Reliable estimates of the effectiveness of influenza vaccine among persons 65 years of age and older are important for informed vaccination policies and programs. Short-term studies may provide misleading pictures of long-term benefits, and residual confounding may have biased past results. This study examined the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in seniors over the long term while addressing potential bias and residual confounding in the results. METHODS Data were pooled from 18 cohorts of community-dwelling elderly members of one U.S. health maintenance organization (HMO) for 1990-1991 through 1999-2000 and of two other HMOs for 1996-1997 through 1999-2000. Logistic regression was used to estimate the effectiveness of the vaccine for the prevention of hospitalization for pneumonia or influenza and death after adjustment for important covariates. Additional analyses explored for evidence of bias and the potential effect of residual confounding. RESULTS There were 713,872 person-seasons of observation. Most high-risk medical conditions that were measured were more prevalent among vaccinated than among unvaccinated persons. Vaccination was associated with a 27% reduction in the risk of hospitalization for pneumonia or influenza (adjusted odds ratio, 0.73; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.68 to 0.77) and a 48% reduction in the risk of death (adjusted odds ratio, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.50 to 0.55). Estimates were generally stable across age and risk subgroups. In the sensitivity analyses, we modeled the effect of a hypothetical unmeasured confounder that would have caused overestimation of vaccine effectiveness in the main analysis; vaccination was still associated with statistically significant--though lower--reductions in the risks of both hospitalization and death. CONCLUSIONS During 10 seasons, influenza vaccination was associated with significant reductions in the risk of hospitalization for pneumonia or influenza and in the risk of death among community-dwelling elderly persons. Vaccine delivery to this high-priority group should be improved.
CLASSIFICATION OF BRAIN TUMORS USING PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS AND PNN CLASSIFIER

— There are several number of diseases which are entering in human life due to modern lifestyle, unhealthy food. Also there is no control on fast food eatables. If medical field can take help of several technological aspects, then it will give fine results. Use of automated techniques can give efficient diagnosis. Considering one of the dangerous disease like brain tumor, accurate prediction about tumor malignancy is necessary. We are going to use several Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI’s) for training and testing purpose. Classification of tumor is done using two methods Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifier. PCA can be used for Feature extraction of MRI images. Features which we are going to calculate are nothing but Mean, Deviation, Eigen Vectors and Euclidean Distance. We are going to take several number of MR images which includes abnormal images. Features mentioned above corresponding to these images are calculated and with the help of these features we are going to train PNN classifier. When test image comes at the input side, features corresponding to that image are calculated and compared with training dataset and based on similarity between the features, tumor classification is done.
Free Triiodothyronine Concentrations Are Inversely Associated with Microalbuminuria

Thyroid function and microalbuminuria are both associated with vascular disease and endothelial damage. However, whether thyroid function is associated with microalbuminuria is not well established. The objective was to explore the relationship between thyroid hormones and microalbuminuria in Chinese population. A community-based cross-sectional study was performed among 3,346 Chinese adults (aged ≥ 40 years). Serum free triiodothyronine (FT3), free thyroxine (FT4), and TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) were determined by chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay. A single-void first morning urine sample was obtained for urinary albumin-creatinine ratio measurement. The prevalence of microalbuminuria decreased according to FT3 quartiles (13.2, 9.5, 8.6, and 8.2%, P for trend = 0.0005). A fully adjusted logistic regression analysis showed that high FT3 levels were associated with low prevalent microalbuminuria. The adjusted odds ratios for microalbuminuria were 0.61 (95% CI, 0.43–0.87, P = 0.007) when comparing the highest with the lowest quartile of FT3. The exclusion of participants with abnormal FT3 did not appreciably change the results (OR = 0.69, 95% CI, 0.49–0.98, P = 0.02). We concluded that serum FT3 levels, even within the normal range, were inversely associated with microalbuminuria in middle-aged and elderly Chinese adults. FT3 concentrations might play a role in the pathogenesis of microalbuminuria.
KMEANS-ICA BASED AUTOMATIC METHOD FOR EOG DENOISING IN MULTI-CHANNEL EEG RECORDINGS

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings are contaminated by different internal and external noises and interferences. Therefore, they should be manipulated in order to restore them from these artifacts that could be eye blinks, electrocardiogram (ECG) and many others. Recent research is mainly oriented toward implementing methods in order to remove ocular artifacts whose frequency band overlap with the EEG frequency of interest. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has already shown to be an effective way for removing the activity of these artifacts. However, when implementing an ICA-based method, the key relies on how to identify the ocular artifact components. Based on the components characteristics, different features such as correlation coefficients, distribution ratio, and maximum value have been identified in order to recognize in an automatic way the artifactual components and their subtraction from the original space to get ocular artifacts free EEG signals. Artifactual components were identified using an adaptive thresholding by means of K-means clustering. Qualitative and quantitative techniques of evaluation are presented and give promising results. The classification accuracy based on the correlation feature reached 99.54%.
Continuity, freeness, and filtrations

The role played by continuous morphisms in propositional modal logic is investigated: it turns out that they are strictly related to filtrations and to suitable variants of the notion of a free algebra. We also employ continuous morphisms in incremental constructions of (standard) finitely generated free 𝕊4-algebras.
Testing by Contract - Combining Unit Testing and Design by Contract

In modern software development a lot of time is spent on testing. Nevertheless it is commonly agreed that testing is almost never done well enough. This paper presents a new approach to software testing called Testing by Contract . The new approach builds on top of a couple of well-known techniques especially Design by Contract as known from Eiffel and Unit testing as known from Extreme Programming . The basic idea is to reuse the assertions written as part of Design by Contract in Unit test cases. To provide test data the idea of a Testable interface is presented. The interface uses the notion of equivalence partitioning. The paper sketches how a concrete tool for Testing by Contract could be build. The main argument for using Testing by Contract is that if the programmer provides an implementation of the Testable interface together with pre-and post-conditions and class-invariants, a number of test cases and test result come for free. This paper is work in progress and the development of a prototype of a Testing by Contract tool has been started, but no results are available yet.
The interpreted system model of knowledge, belief, desire and intention

We present a new model of knowledge, belief, desire and intention, called the interpreted KBDI-system model (or KBDI-model for short). The key point of the interpreted KBDI-system model is that we express an agent's knowledge, belief, desire and intention as a set of runs (computing paths), which is exactly a system in the interpreted system model, a well-known agent model due to Halpern and his colleagues. Our KBDI-model is computationally grounded in that we are able to associate a KBDI-model with a computer program, and formulas, involving agents' knowledge, belief, desire (goal) and intention, can be understood as properties of program computations. We present a sound and complete proof system with respect to our KBDI-model and explore how symbolic model checking techniques can be applied to model checking multi-agent systems with KBDI-models.
Design and interpretation of studies: relevant concepts from the past and some extensions

DRC: I ﬁrst heard Bill Cochran lecture in 1956 and, about that time, greatly beneﬁted fromhis pre-publication comments on a draft of a book on experimental design. I recall also amemorable meeting of the Royal Statistical Society at which the precursor (Cochran, 1965)of the present paper was given for discussion.NW: As a Ph.D. student, I was fortunate to get to know Bill Cochran as an excellent teacherand researcher. His way of teaching was typically most illuminating for me. He was involvedin many diﬀerent types of empirical studies and he shared his experiences openly with thestudents. He would talk with joy about successes but would also report on disappointingdevelopments that had led to diﬃcult, unsolved problems. I regarded him as the heart ofour department. He stressed the positive features of his colleagues and he remembered thenames of all the students as well as what he had discussed with them before. This couldconcern statistical questions or personal experiences. He was kind and modest, typicallyfull of energy, and always ready to listen and talk. I learned a lot from him not only aboutstatistics.
Agricultural innovation and resilience in a long-lived early farming community: the 1,500-year sequence at Neolithic to early Chalcolithic Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia

Abstract Intensive archaeobotanical investigations at Çatalhöyük have created a unique opportunity to explore change and continuity in plant use through the ca 1,500-year Neolithic to early Chalcolithic sequence of an early established farming community. The combination of crops and herd animals in the earliest (Aceramic) part of the sequence reflects a distinct and diverse central Anatolian ‘package’ at the end of the eighth millennium cal. BC. Here we report evidence for near continual adjustment of cropping regimes through time at Çatalhöyük, featuring recruitment of minor crops or crop contaminants to become major staples. We use panarchy theory to frame an understanding of Çatalhöyük's long-term sustainability, arguing that its resilience was a function of three key factors: its diverse initial crop spectrum, which acted as an archive for later innovations; its modular social structure, enabling small-scale experimentation and innovation in cropping at the household level; and its agglomerated social morphology, allowing successful developments to be scaled up across the wider community. This case study in long-term sustainability through flexible, changeable cropping strategies is significant not only for understanding so-called boom and bust cycles elsewhere but also for informing wider agro-ecological understanding of sustainable development in central Anatolia and beyond.