Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hepatocellular Carcinoma Confirmation, Treatment, and Survival in Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Registries, 1992‐2008

Approaches to the diagnosis and management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are improving survival. In the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results‐13 registries, HCC stage, histological confirmation, and first‐course surgery were examined. Among 21,390 HCC cases diagnosed with follow‐up of vital status during 1998‐2008, there were 4,727 (22%) with reported first‐course invasive liver surgery, local tumor destruction, or both. The proportion with reported liver surgery or ablation was 39% among localized stage cases and only 4% among distant/unstaged cases. Though 70% of cases had histologically confirmed diagnoses, the proportion with confirmed diagnoses was higher among cases with reported invasive surgery (99%), compared to cases receiving ablation (81%) or no reported therapy (65%). Incidence rates of histologically unconfirmed HCC increased faster than those of confirmed HCC from 1992 to 2008 (8% versus 3% per year). Two encouraging findings were that incidence rates of localized‐stage HCC increased faster than rates of regional‐ and distant‐stage HCC combined (8% versus 4% per year), and that incidence rates of reported first‐course surgery or tumor destruction increased faster than incidence rates of HCC without such therapy (11% versus 7%). Between 1975‐1977 and 1998‐2007, 5‐year cause‐specific HCC survival increased from just 3% to 18%. Survival was 84% among transplant recipients, 53% among cases receiving radiofrequency ablation at early stage, 47% among cases undergoing resection, and 35% among cases receiving local tumor destruction. Asian or Pacific Islander cases had significantly better 5‐year survival (23%) than white (18%), Hispanic (15%), or black cases (12%). Conclusion: HCC survival is improving, because more cases are diagnosed and treated at early stages. Additional progress may be possible with continued use of clinical surveillance to follow individuals at risk for HCC, enabling early intervention. (HEPATOLOGY 2012;)
Using Verilog LOGISCOPE to analyze student programs

It is difficult to give an in-depth evaluation of student programs to the point of checking every line of code due to the amount of time checking would take. Solutions to this difficulty may involve only checking to see if the program executes correctly (dynamic analysis), glancing over the program to see if appropriate documentation is present (static analysis), and glancing over the code for any problems (static analysis). Automated solutions are difficult to construct. One commercial solution is Verilog LOGISCOPE which offers a limited number of licenses free to educators. LOGISCOPE is a static analysis checker capable of taking hundreds of individual measurements of a program, such as lines of code, McCabe's cyclomatic complexity, and number of operators. It also shows the control flow graph of a program which is a depiction of the statements, if structures, and looping structures in a program. LOGISCOPE enables the complexity and quality of a program to be analyzed yielding valuable feedback to both students and educators. It allows visualization of the measurements taken through the control flow graphs and Kiveat diagrams. The operation of LOGISCOPE is shown by using typical student programs taken from the introductory computing course at Texas Tech University. Then the results of analyzing several programs from the same class are given to show the diversity of results. Finally, how LOGISCOPE can be used in education to help students improve their programming and help instructors evaluate programs better is considered.
Amethocaine versus EMLA for successful intravenous cannulation in a children’s emergency department: a randomised controlled study

Background: Topical anaesthetics reduce the pain of venous cannulation. The emergency department at the Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland uses EMLA (an eutectic mixture of 25 mg/g lidocaine and 25 mg/g prilocaine) for topical anaesthesia. Amethocaine has recently been shown to be a more effective topical anaesthetic. It is suggested that, because amethocaine does not vasoconstrict veins, it may increase the success of cannulation. Aim: The primary aim was to determine if amethocaine improves the success of cannulation compared with EMLA. The secondary aim was to determine if amethocaine is a more effective topical anaesthetic in a children’s emergency department. Methods: A parallel, randomised, double-blind controlled study was performed in children aged 3 months to 15 years who were offered topical anaesthesia for venous cannulation. Caregivers gave verbal consent at triage, followed by written consent. Children were randomised into amethocaine or EMLA groups. Those who went on to have an intravenous cannula were analysed on an intention-to-treat basis. The primary outcome was a successful first attempt at cannulation. A convenience cohort was also observed for distress using a visual analogue scale and the Faces, Legs, Activity, Cry and Consolability Score. Results: From November 2006 to June 2007, 2837 children were enrolled and 809 were known to have had intravenous cannulation. 679 complete data and consent forms were returned. There was no significant difference between the first attempt success rates (75.8% amethocaine vs 73.9% EMLA) or between pain scores for the 65 observed cannulations. Conclusion: Amethocaine is not more successful than EMLA for first attempt intravenous cannulation in a children’s emergency department. Trial registration number: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Register ACTRN12606000409572.
Currently recommended BK virus (BKV) plasma viral load cutoff of ≥4 log10/mL underestimates the diagnosis of BKV‐associated nephropathy: a single transplant center experience

BK virus (BKV)‐associated nephropathy (BKVAN) is a major cause of renal dysfunction and graft loss in renal transplant recipients. Monitoring plasma BK viral load (BKVL) is the recommended screening tool to predict BKVAN. American Society of Transplantation (AST) guidelines define a BKVL of ≥4 log10/mL (10,000 copies) as presumptive BKVAN and recommend reduction in immunosuppression. We evaluated the clinical sensitivity of the quantitative BKV DNA assay in predicting risk for BKVAN using the AST‐recommended BKVL cutoff.
Branhamella catarrhalis: an organism gaining respect as a pathogen

Branhamella catarrhalis was formerly regarded as a common, essentially harmless inhabitant of the pharynx. This misapprehension was caused, in part, by confusion with another pharyngeal resident, Neisseria cinerea. The two organisms can now be differentiated by the positive reactions of B. catarrhalis in tests for nitrate reduction and hydrolysis of tributyrin and DNase. B. catarrhalis is currently recognized as the third most frequent cause of acute otitis media and acute sinusitis in young children. It often causes acute exacerbations of chronic bronchopulmonary disease in older or immunocompromised adults and is incriminated occasionally in meningitis, endocarditis, bacteremia, conjunctivitis, keratitis, and urogenital infections. Virulence-associated factors, such as pili, capsules, outer membrane vesicles, iron acquisition proteins, histamine-synthesizing ability, resistance to the bactericidal action of normal human serum, and binding to the C1q complement component, have been identified in some strains. beta-Lactamase producing strains, first detected in 1976, have risen to approximately 75% worldwide. Thus far, however, practically all American strains of B. catarrhalis remain susceptible to alternative antibiotics. A possible selective advantage of recent isolates is their reportedly heightened tendency for adherence to oropharyngeal cells from patients with chronic bronchopulmonary disease.
Integrating a Usability Engineering Process into a Consisting Risk Management

Abstract The complexity of medical devices and its user interactions increases. A growing number of incident reports are assumed to be associated primarily with user errors. This development is tackled through current modifications in standards, such as ISO 13485:2016 and legislations, such as the Medical Device Regulation. Both intensify the focus on use errors significantly. The aim of this paper was the development of a process orientated approach integrating usability engineering into a consisting risk management based on a classic V-model. An appropriate procedure was worked out. For each development step, risk and usability activities were cumulated. Thus, the present paper might help medical device manufacturers to reflect their risk management and usability management processes to find synergies. Prospectively, a step-by-step guide for the integration of risk management and usability engineering based on this approach should be developed.
Checking Safety by Inductive Generalization of Counterexamples to Induction

Scaling verification to large circuits requires some form of abstraction relative to the asserted property. We describe a safety analysis of finite-state systems that generalizes from counterexamples to the inductiveness of the safety specification to inductive invariants. It thus abstracts the system's state space relative to the property. The analysis either strengthens a safety specification to be inductive or discovers a counterexample to its correctness. The analysis is easily made parallel. We provide experimental data showing how the analysis time decreases with the number of processes on several hard problems.
OECD International Futures Project on “The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda”. Health Biotechnology to 2030

This is a report commissioned by the OECD. Innogen was asked to write a scenario report for the OECD International Futures Programme to consider the pathways that health biotechnologies could follow, the future trajectory of the bio-economy primarily in the context of human health and the likely societal, economic and policy impacts of these projected outcomes, focusing on the period 2015 to 2030 . We chose as a starting point a world health care system that, from the perspective of potential impacts of biotechnology, has been mainly under the influence of the innovation model of the multinational drug companies. To date the scope and inventiveness of this model has been constrained by the expensive and lengthy regulatory systems that act as a barrier to entry for small companies that could challenge the industry status quo and our report focuses on the need for regulatory change as a prelude to the emergence of a new, more radically innovative, health care sector. In the absence of such change our scenario predicts a health care sector that is increasingly populated by pharmaceutical commodity producers, research and development focused on incremental, piecemeal change, lack of both public and private sector funding, dysfunctional competition within and between companies and adversarial relationships with regulators. A radical change scenario on the other hand “Networked Health Care” would depend on regulatory agencies collaborating, as an integral component of the innovation system, in the proactive development of new, smarter regulatory approaches to the generation of benefits based on fundamental discoveries in life sciences. Our report describes the pre-conditions needed to lead to the more positive scenario and the roles of key actors in promoting or resisting such changes.
Characterization of the cytotoxic potential of graphene nanoplatelets in lung cells

Graphene is one of the carbon allotropes. Its physical and chemical characteristics provide unique properties: high surface area, exceptional electrical and thermal conductivities, high mechanical strength, ability to biofunctionalization and mass production. All these qualities make graphene widely applicable and, therefore, it is necessary to thoroughly investigate their possible adverse effects in the context of human health. This study evaluated the cytotoxic potential of graphene nanoplatelets in lung cells (cell line A549). The cells were cultured in vitro and exposed to various concentrations of graphene nanoplatelets (5, 10, 25, 50, 100μg/ml) for 24h. Cell viability, assessed by WST-8 assay, did not decrease after exposure to graphene nanoplatelets, however, an increase in cell proliferation for the lowest concentration was observed. ROS production as well as cell cycle dynamics of A549 cells were not affected by graphene nanoplatelets exposure. Cellular uptake of the graphene nanoplatelets, evaluated by changes in light side scatter by flow cytometry, increased significantly for the highest concentration (100μg/ml). In addition, there was no induction of apoptosis in A549 cells after 24 hours of exposure to the graphene nanoplatelets. Overall, these results suggest that graphene nanoplatelets do not induce toxicity in cell line A549.
Doping in sports: Knowledge and attitudes among parents of Austrian junior athletes

Strategies for doping prevention are based on prior identification of opportunities for intervention. There is no current research focusing on the potential role in doping prevention, which might be played by the parents of junior elite athletes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes toward doping among parents of Austrian junior athletes and to analyze factors potentially influencing these beliefs. In this study, two questionnaires were distributed to 1818 student athletes, each with instructions that these surveys were to be completed by their parents (ntotal = 3636). Parents filled in questionnaires at home without observation. Responses from 883 parents were included in this analysis. Compared to female parents, male parents demonstrated significantly better knowledge about doping and its side effects and were more likely to be influenced by their own sporting careers and amounts of sports activities per week. Parental sex did not demonstrate a significant influence on responses reflecting attitudes toward doping. Additional research is needed to compare these results with young athletes' knowledge and attitudes to determine if and to what degree parental attitudes and beliefs influence the behavior and attitudes of their children.
Intrinsic and Circuit Properties Favor Coincidence Detection for Decoding Oscillatory Input

In the insect olfactory system the antennal lobe generates oscillatory synchronization of its output as a framework for coincidence detection by its target, the mushroom body (MB). The intrinsic neurons of the MB (Kenyon cells, KCs) are thus a good model system in which to investigate the functional relevance of oscillations and neural synchronization. We combine electrophysiological and modeling approaches to examine how intrinsic and circuit properties might contribute to the preference of KCs for coincident input and how their decoding of olfactory information is affected by the absence of oscillatory synchronization in their input. We show that voltage-dependent subthreshold properties of KCs bring about a supralinear summation of their inputs, favoring responses to coincident EPSPs. Abolishing oscillatory synchronization weakens the preference of KCs for coincident input and causes a large reduction in their odor specificity. Finally, we find that a decoding strategy that is based on coincidence detection enhances both noise tolerance and input discriminability by KCs.
Reducing Test Cases with Causality Partitions

Automatic test case generation using symbolic execution suffers from the problem of path explosion: the number of paths to be explored may grow exponentially with the scale of a program. We believe that different paths may exhibit some similar program behaviors, thus it is unnecessary to explore all of the paths to generate test cases. In this paper, a novel model of program causality is proposed to extract all kinds of influences among statements of a program, which consists of four types of program dependencies. Then, a heuristic approach based on program causality is developed to selectively explore program paths in symbolic execution. We have implemented a prototype of our approach within the symbolic execution engine of Java Pathfinder. Experiments on six public benchmarks show that our approach can significantly reduce the number of explored paths and the symbolic execution time so that to improve the performance of test case generation. Keywords-Symbolic Execution; Causality Partition; Test Case Generation;
Improved Time Complexities for Learning Boolean Networks

Existing algorithms for learning Boolean networks (BNs) have time complexities of at least O(N · n 0:7(k+1) ), where n is the number of variables, N is the number of samples and k is the number of inputs in Boolean functions. Some recent studies propose more efficient methods with O(N · n 2 ) time complexities. However, these methods can only be used to learn monotonic BNs, and their performances are not satisfactory when the sample size is small. In this paper, we mathematically prove that OR/AND BNs, where the variables are related with logical OR/AND operations, can be found with the time complexity of O(k·(N +logn)·n 2 ), if there are enough noiseless training samples randomly generated from a uniform distribution. We also demonstrate that our method can successfully learn most BNs, whose variables are not related with exclusive OR and Boolean equality operations, with the same order of time complexity for learning OR/AND BNs, indicating our method has good efficiency for learning general BNs other than monotonic BNs. When the datasets are noisy, our method can still successfully identify most BNs with the same efficiency. When compared with two existing methods with the same settings, our method achieves a better comprehensive performance than both of them, especially for small training sample sizes. More importantly, our method can be used to learn all BNs. However, of the two methods that are compared, one can only be used to learn monotonic BNs, and the other one has a much worse time complexity than our method. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that Boolean networks can be learned with improved time complexities.
A Systematic Review of the Relationship between Blood Loss and Clinical Signs

Introduction This systematic review examines the relationship between blood loss and clinical signs and explores its use to trigger clinical interventions in the management of obstetric haemorrhage. Methods A systematic review of the literature was carried out using a comprehensive search strategy to identify studies presenting data on the relationship of clinical signs & symptoms and blood loss. Methodological quality was assessed using the STROBE checklist and the general guidelines of MOOSE. Results 30 studies were included and five were performed in women with pregnancy-related haemorrhage (other studies were carried in non-obstetric populations). Heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure (SBP) and shock index were the parameters most frequently studied. An association between blood loss and HR changes was observed in 22 out of 24 studies, and between blood loss and SBP was observed in 17 out of 23 studies. An association was found in all papers reporting on the relationship of shock index and blood loss. Seven studies have used Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves to determine the accuracy of clinical signs in predicting blood loss. In those studies the AUC ranged from 0.56 to 0.74 for HR, from 0.56 to 0.79 for SBP and from 0.77 to 0.84 for shock index. In some studies, HR, SBP and shock index were associated with increased mortality. Conclusion We found a substantial variability in the relationship between blood loss and clinical signs, making it difficult to establish specific cut-off points for clinical signs that could be used as triggers for clinical interventions. However, the shock index can be an accurate indicator of compensatory changes in the cardiovascular system due to blood loss. Considering that most of the evidence included in this systematic review is derived from studies in non-obstetric populations, further research on the use of the shock index in obstetric populations is needed.
Resistance Mechanisms, Epidemiology, and Approaches to Screening for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus in the Health Care Setting

ABSTRACT Infections attributable to vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) strains have become increasingly prevalent over the past decade. Prompt identification of colonized patients combined with effective multifaceted infection control practices can reduce the transmission of VRE and aid in the prevention of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Increasingly, the clinical microbiology laboratory is being asked to support infection control efforts through the early identification of potential patient or environmental reservoirs. This review discusses the factors that contribute to the rise of VRE as an important health care-associated pathogen, the utility of laboratory screening and various infection control strategies, and the available laboratory methods to identify VRE in clinical specimens.
MASA syndrome in twin brothers: case report of sixteen-year clinical follow up

MASA syndrome (OMIM 303350) is a rare X-linked recessive neurologic disorder, also called CRASH syndrome, spastic paraplegia 1 and Gareis-Mason syndrome. The acronym MASA describes four major signs: Mental retardation, Aphasia, Shuffl ing gait and Adducted thumbs. A more suitable name for this syndrome is L1 syndrome because the disorder has been associated with mutations in the neuronal cell adhesion molecule L1 (L1CAM) gene. The syndrome has severe symptoms in males, while females are carriers because only one X chromosome is aff ected. The aim of this report is to show similarities and diff erences in clinical manifestations between twins with the L1CAM gene mutation and to emphasize the importance of genetic counseling. Our patients were dizygotic twins born prematurely at 35 weeks of gestation. Pregnancy was complicated with early bleeding and gestational diabetes. Immediately after birth, hypertonia of lower extremities was observed in both twins. Sixteen-year clinical follow up showed spastic paraparetic form with shuffl ing gait, clumsiness, delayed speech development, lower intellectual functioning at the level of mild to moderate mental retardation, primary nocturnal enuresis, behavioral and sleep disorder (more pronounced in the second twin). Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain showed complete agenesis of the corpus callosum, complete lack of the anterior commissure, and internal hydrocephalus. Electroencephalograms showed nonspecifi c slower dysrhythmic changes. Kidney ultrasound showed mild dilatation in the channel system of both kidneys in both twins. Ophthalmologic examination was normal. Molecular genetic testing identifi ed homozygous intron 26 L1CAM gene IVS26-12G→A mutation in both twins. The mother is carrier of the same heterozygous mutations. In conclusion, our patients, fraternal twins, show similar clinical changes typical of the MASA syndrome. After identifying the specifi c genetic mutations, this family has become eligible for genetic counseling and informative for prenatal diagnosis.