Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BRCA1/2 and TP53 mutation status associates with PD-1 and PD-L1 expression in ovarian cancer

Checkpoint molecules such as programmed cell death protein-1 (PD-1) and its ligand PD-L1 are critically required for tumor immune escape. The objective of this study was to investigate tumoral PD-1 and PD-L1 mRNA-expression in a cohort of ovarian cancer (OC) patients in relation to tumor mutations. We analyzed mRNA expression of PD-1, PD-L1 and IFNG by quantitative real-time PCR in tissue of 170 patients with low grade-serous (LGSOC), high-grade serous (HGSOC), endometrioid and clear cell OC compared to 28 non-diseased tissues (ovaries and fallopian tubes) in relation to tumor protein 53 (TP53) and breast cancer gene 1/2 (BRCA1/2) mutation status. TP53-mutated OC strongly expressed PD-L1 compared to TP53 wild-type OC (p = 0.028) and BRCA1/2-mutated OC increasingly expressed PD-1 (p = 0.024) and PD-L1 (p = 0.012) compared to BRCA1/2 wild-type OC. For the first time in human, we noted a strong correlation between tumoral IFNG and PD-1 or PD-L1 mRNA-expression, respectively (p < 0.001). OC tissue increasingly expressed PD-1 compared to healthy controls (vs. ovaries: p < 0.001; vs. tubes: p = 0.018). PD-1 and PD-L1 mRNA-expression increased with higher tumor grade (p = 0.008 and p = 0.027, respectively) and younger age (< median age, p = 0.001). Finally, in the major subgroup of our cohort, FIGO stage III/IV HGSOC, high PD-1 and PD-L1 mRNA-expression was associated with reduced progression-free (p = 0.024) and overall survival (p = 0.049) but only in the univariate analysis. Our study suggests that in OC PD-1/PD-L1 mRNA-expression is controlled by IFNγ and affected by TP53 and BRCA1/2 mutations. We suggest that these mutations might serve as potential predictive factors that guide anti-PD1/PD-L1 immunotherapy.
Undetectable or low (<1 ng/ml) postsurgical thyroglobulin values do not rule out metastases in early stage differentiated thyroid cancer patients

Background Differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) work-up is based on (near)total-thyroidectomy plus thyroid remnant ablation (TRA) with 131-radioiodine in many patients, and long-life follow-up. 131I-post therapy whole body scan (pT-WBS) and serum thyroglobulin (Tg) are used in identifying metastatic patients. Some authors have evaluated the possibility of using post-surgical Tg (ps-Tg) values in deciding for or against TRA. The aim of our study was to verify the diagnostic accuracy of 131I-pT-WBS and SPECT/CT imaging (post-therapeutic imaging) compared to serum Tg levels in detecting metastases in early stage of DTC patients. Results Post-therapeutic imaging revealed metastases in 82 out of 570 (14.4%) patients. Metastases were successively confirmed by other diagnostic tools or by histology (sensitivity and PPV = 100%). Seventy-three out of 82 patients (90.2%) showed ps-Tg levels ≤1 ng/ml. In fifty-four per cent of patients, serum Tg levels at TRA remained ≤1 ng/ml. Conclusion In conclusion, ps-Tg levels cannot be used in deciding for or against TRA. In early stage of DTC, post-therapeutic imaging (131I-pT-WBS and SPECT/CT) is an accurate method of detecting metastases, also in patients with stimulated serum Tg values ≤1 ng/ml Methods We retrospectively reviewed the records of 570 consecutive patients affected by pT1-pT3 DTC (F = 450, M = 120), referred to our Nuclear Medicine Units in the last five years to perform TRA after (near)-total-thyroidectomy.All patients underwent TRA 3-4 months after thyroid surgery either in euthyroid or in hypothyroid state. Serum Tg values evaluated in post-surgical period and at TRA were matched with post-therapeutic imaging results.
Staying cool: preadaptation to temperate climates required for colonising tropical alpine-like environments

Abstract Plant species tend to retain their ancestral ecology, responding to temporal, geographic and climatic changes by tracking suitable habitats rather than adapting to novel conditions. Nevertheless, transitions into different environments or biomes still seem to be common. Especially intriguing are the tropical alpine-like areas found on only the highest mountainous regions surrounded by tropical environments. Tropical mountains are hotspots of biodiversity, often with striking degrees of endemism at higher elevations. On these mountains, steep environmental gradients and high habitat heterogeneity within small spaces coincide with astounding species diversity of great conservation value. The analysis presented here shows that the importance of in situ speciation in tropical alpine-like areas has been underestimated. Additionally and contrary to widely held opinion, the impact of dispersal from other regions with alpine-like environments is relatively minor compared to that of immigration from other biomes with a temperate (but not alpine-like) climate. This suggests that establishment in tropical alpine-like regions is favoured by preadaptation to a temperate, especially aseasonal, freezing regime such as the cool temperate climate regions in the Tropics. Furthermore, emigration out of an alpine-like environment is generally rare, suggesting that alpine-like environments – at least tropical ones – are species sinks.
Selective attention integrates sparse and population codes

How visual information is represented in the brain is the crucial question that drives most research in the ﬁeld, and answering it will mean signiﬁcant theoretical and practical advances in the understanding of the brain. Proponents of sparse representations suggest that highly selective, specialized neurons, introduced as cardinal cells by Barlow [1], explicitly code each percept. Energy minimization and information theoretic arguments have been used to justify relatively sparse representations. The main problem with this solution is the combinatorial explosion in the number of units needed to represent all the different possible stimuli. At the same time, one distinct advantage of sparse codes is their capacity to encode multiple stimuli in parallel. Others have suggested distributed/population codes [2]. While these representations have high encoding capacity, they suffer from the source separation problem, not allowing any signiﬁcant degree of parallelism. Interestingly, there is signiﬁcant experimental evidence for both representations in the primate brain, and the brain exhibits behavior consistent with both representations under different conditions. One characteristic of vision is that not all stimuli in the visual ﬁeld can and need to be represented at the same time to a high degree of accuracy [3]. This implies that some selection needs to be made, constrained by some requirements: important stimuli need to be detected as fast as possible, multiple important stimuli must be represented simultaneously, and non-important stimuli can wait, or can even be ignored. The fact that these requirements and their time course match those of visual attention strongly indicates that attention forms the glue between a sparse, fast, and parallel initial representation that supports object detection and a slow, serial, and detailed representations needed for full recognition. Taking cues from behavioral and physiological studies, we propose that the initial representation is sparse, corresponding to the categoric level, that can be represented sparsely due to the fact that the number of biologically relevant categories is very limited. The Selective Tuning (ST) model of (object based) visual attention [4] can be used to recover the spatial location and extent of the visual information that has contributed to a categoric decision. This allows for the selective detailed processing of this information at the expense of other stimuli present in the image. The feedback and selective processing create the detailed
Clinical therapy and management of differentiated thyroid cancer in pregnant women

Differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) is frequently found in mid-aged and young women. DTC has been the second common malignancy diagnosed during pregnancy. The clinical therapy of DTC has involvement of both mother’s health and fetal safety and thus is usually difficult. Currently, there are still controversies in the therapy of DTC in pregnant women. Herein we summarize the advance in the surgical therapy, radioactive iodine therapy and thyroid hormone replacement therapy in pregnancy and after delivery and explore more effective strategies which are beneficial for the mother and fetus, which willprovide more evidence for the selection of strategies for the clinical management of DTC in pregnant women.
Presumably Simple: Monitoring Crowds Using WiFi

Crowd Monitoring is receiving much attention. An increasingly popular technique is to scan for mobile devices, notably smartphones. We take a look at scanning for such devices by recording WiFi packets. Although research on capturing crowd patterns using WiFi detections has been done, there are not many published results when it comes to tracking movements. This is not surprising when realizing that the data provided by WiFi scanners is susceptible to many seemingly erroneous and missed detections, caused by the use of randomized network addresses, overlap between scanners, high variance in WiFi detection ranges, among other sources. In this paper, we investigate various techniques for cleaning up sets of raw detections to sets that can subsequently be used for crowd analytics. To this end, we introduce two different quality metrics to measure the effects of applying the various techniques. We test our approach using a data set collected from 27 WiFi scanners spread across the downtown area of a Dutch city where at that time a 3-day multi-stage festival took place attended by some 130,000 people.
Immune Defense and Host Sociality: A Comparative Study of Swallows and Martins

Sociality is associated with increased risks of parasitism, predation, and social competition, which may interact because social stress can reduce immunity, and parasitized individuals are more likely to fall prey to a predator. A mechanism allowing evolution of sociality in spite of high costs of parasitism is increased investment in antiparasite defenses. Here we show that the impact of parasites on host reproductive success was positively associated with the degree of sociality in the bird family Hirundinidae. However, the cost of parasitism in highly colonial species was countered by high levels of T‐ and B‐cell immune responses. Investment in immune function among colonial species was particularly strong in nestlings, and among social species, this investment was associated with a relatively prolonged period of development, thereby leading to extended exposure to parasites. Thus, highly social species such as certain species of swallows and martins may cope with strong natural selection arising from parasites by heavy investment in immune function at the cost of a long exposure to nest parasites.
Knowledge and skills of child sexual abuse prevention in grade 2 elementary school pupils

Objective To evaluate knowledge and skills of child sexual abuse(CSA) prevention in grade 2 elementary school students,to provide basic information for CSA prevention education in elementary school.Methods Five hundred pupils from 12 classes of grade 2 of 6 schools in Jingzhou and Fuxin cities were surveyed by questionnaire.The questionnaire included the concepts of stranger,good touch and bad touch,strategies to respond to CSA.Results Of 500 pupils,61.2% knew the meaning of stranger;21.8% knew that even someone you like could touch you in a way that feels bad;39.6% knew that if someone touches you in a way that does not feel good,you should keep on telling until someone believes you.About 27.2% of pupils said that they could tell another adult if someone you like touched your privates.If their private parts were tried to be touched by someone,only 11.0% of the pupils answered that there was an adult they could tell who was not a member of their family.Conclusion The pupils lack basic CSA prevention knowledge and skills.It is necessary to promote CSA prevention education in elementary school pupils.
WAAW Csound

This paper describes Web Assembly Audio Worklet (WAAW) Csound, one of the implementations of WebAudio Csound. We begin by introducing the background to this current implementation, stemming from the two first ports of Csound to the web platform using Native Clients and asm.js. The technology of Web Assembly is then introduced and discussed in its more relevant aspects. The AudioWorklet interface of Web Audio API is explored, together with its use in WAAW Csound. We complement this discussion by considering the overarching question of support for multiple platforms, which implement different versions of Web Audio. Some initial examples of the system are presented to illustrate various potential applications. Finally, we complement the paper by discussing current issues that are fundamental for this project and others that rely on the development of a robust support for WASM-based audio computing.
Named Entities troubling your Neural Methods? Build NE-Table: A neural approach for handling Named Entities

Many natural language processing tasks require dealing with Named Entities (NEs) in the texts themselves and sometimes also in external knowledge sources. While this is often easy for humans, recent neural methods that rely on learned word embeddings for NLP tasks have difficulty with it, especially with out of vocabulary or rare NEs. In this paper, we propose a new neural method for this problem, and present empirical evaluations on a structured Question-Answering task, three related Goal-Oriented dialog tasks and a reading-comprehension-based task. They show that our proposed method can be effective in dealing with both in-vocabulary and out of vocabulary (OOV) NEs. We create extended versions of dialog bAbI tasks 1,2 and 4 and Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) versions of the CBT test set which will be made publicly available online.
Real-time motion tracking for dance visualization using Kalman filters

This paper explores an application of Kalman filters for real-time dance visualization within the Unity3d framework. Experiments performed with camera-based motion sensors indicate that Kalman filter implementation can benefit the process of content development for real-time visualization of dance performances. Moreover, we showed that Kalman filters could be used for generating real-time visuals of dance performances. While the scope of this project is limited to dance visualizations our prototype can be extended to become a useful tool for practitioners to identify any movement dysfunctions, and to educate patients with musculoskeletal impairments on their movements.
Influence of Paralleling Dies and Paralleling Half-Bridges on Transient Current Distribution in Multichip Power Modules

This letter addresses the transient current distribution in the multichip half-bridge power modules, where two types of paralleling connections with different current commutation mechanisms are considered: paralleling dies and paralleling half-bridges. It reveals that with paralleling dies, both the high-side and low-side paralleled devices experience a similar transient current imbalance due to the mismatched stray inductance. However, with paralleling half-bridges and with the same mismatched stray inductances, the high-side paralleled devices have much smaller transient current imbalance, the cause of which is found be to the current commutation process. Theoretical analysis based on the circuit modeling and current commutation process elaborates the findings, which are then confirmed by experimental results.
Hybrid Point Cloud Attribute Compression Using Slice-based Layered Structure and Block-based Intra Prediction

Point cloud compression is a key enabler for the emerging applications of immersive visual communication, autonomous driving and smart cities, etc. In this paper, we propose a hybrid point cloud attribute compression scheme built on an original layered data structure. First, a slice partition scheme and a geometry-adaptive k-dimensional tree (k-d tree) method are devised to generate layer structures. Second, we introduce an efficient block-based intra prediction scheme containing to exploit spatial correlations among adjacent points. Third, an adaptive transform scheme based on Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) is Lagrangian optimized to achieve better transform efficiency. The Lagrange multiplier is off-line derived based on the statistics of attribute coding. Last but not least, multiple scan modes are dedicated to improve coding efficiency for entropy coding. Experimental results demonstrate that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art region-adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT) system, and on average a 37.21% BD-rate gain is achieved. Comparing with the test model for category 1 (TMC1) anchors, which were recently published by MPEG-3DG group on 121st MPEG meeting, a 8.81% BD-rate gain is obtained.
Laser eye: a new 3D sensor for active vision

This paper describes a new sensor that combines visual information from a CCD camera with sparse distance measurements from an infra-red laser range-finder. The camera and the range- finder are coupled together in such a way that their optical axes are parallel. A mirror with a different reflectivity for visible and for infra-red light is used to ensure collinearity of effective optical axes of the camera lens and the range-finder. The range is measured for an object in the center of the camera field of view. The Laser Eye is mounted on a robotic head and is used in an active vision system for an autonomous mobile robot (called ARK).
R-Ras Regulates Migration through an Interaction with Filamin A in Melanoma Cells

Background Changes in cell adhesion and migration in the tumor microenvironment are key in the initiation and progression of metastasis. R-Ras is one of several small GTPases that regulate cell adhesion and migration on the extracellular matrix, however the mechanism has not been completely elucidated. Using a yeast two-hybrid approach we sought to identify novel R-Ras binding proteins that might mediate its effects on integrins. Methods and Findings We identified Filamin A (FLNa) as a candidate interacting protein. FLNa is an actin-binding scaffold protein that also binds to integrin β1, β2 and β7 tails and is associated with diverse cell processes including cell migration. Indeed, M2 melanoma cells require FLNa for motility. We further show that R-Ras and FLNa interact in co-immunoprecipitations and pull-down assays. Deletion of FLNa repeat 3 (FLNaΔ3) abrogated this interaction. In M2 melanoma cells active R-Ras co-localized with FLNa but did not co-localize with FLNa lacking repeat 3. Thus, activated R-Ras binds repeat 3 of FLNa. The functional consequence of this interaction was that active R-Ras and FLNa coordinately increased cell migration. In contrast, co-expression of R-Ras and FLNaΔ3 had a significantly reduced effect on migration. While there was enhancement of integrin activation and fibronectin matrix assembly, cell adhesion was not altered. Finally, siRNA knockdown of endogenous R-Ras impaired FLNa-dependent fibronectin matrix assembly. Conclusions These data support a model in which R-Ras functionally associates with FLNa and thereby regulates integrin-dependent migration. Thus in melanoma cells R-Ras and FLNa may cooperatively promote metastasis by enhancing cell migration.
Performance Analysis of Buffer-Aided Relaying System Based on Data and Energy Coupling Queuing Model for Cooperative Communication Networks

We focus on the performance analysis of the buffer-aided relaying system which allows data and energy packets to arrive independently and depart interactively. First, we profile the cooperative relaying system model as a data arrival and energy arrival coupling queuing model. Considering the influence of channel condition on the data departure rate, a new relay transmit protocol which permits exhausting more energy packet to send one data packet in the bad channel environment is proposed. Second, the joint data packet and energy packet handling problem is ascribed to a Coupled Processor Queuing Model which could achieve its steady state transition probability by Quasi-Birth and Death method. Third, the expressions of throughput, delay, and packet drop rate for both data queue and energy queue are also derived. Simulations are demonstrated to verify the analytical results under different data arrival rate, energy arrival rate, and relaying strategy.
Gluteal Loading Versus Sham Exercises to Improve Pain and Dysfunction in Postmenopausal Women with Greater Trochanteric Pain Syndrome: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

OBJECTIVES The aim of the current study was to determine the effects of education with targeted or sham exercise on pain and function in postmenopausal women with greater trochanteric pain syndrome (GTPS). BACKGROUND Conservative management of GTPS is poorly described, and to date, there have been no studies on education with exercise as an intervention for GTPS. Ninety-four postmenopausal women with GTPS were recruited to participate in this study. MATERIALS AND METHODS Participants were randomized to receive one of two 12-week exercise programs (GLoBE vs. sham). Participants received education on avoiding tendon compression with appropriate activity modification. The Victorian Institute of Sport Assessment-Gluteal tendon (VISA-G) was examined at baseline, 12, and 52 weeks. Secondary outcomes included hip pain and function questionnaires (Hip dysfunction and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (HOOS), Oxford Hip Score (OHS), and Lateral Hip Pain questionnaire), a global rating of change in symptom questionnaire, and a quality of life measure (Assessment of Quality of Life [AQoL]-8D). Differences between groups were analyzed using intention to treat with analysis of covariance, per-protocol analysis, and responder analysis. RESULTS Responders to the GLoBE intervention had significantly better VISA-G, HOOS, OHS, and lateral hip pain questionnaire scores compared to responders in the sham group. However, intention to treat analyses showed no between-group differences for the GLoBE intervention and sham exercise groups. Significant improvement in VISA-G score was found for both programs at 12- and 52-weeks time points (p < 0.001). CONCLUSION Lack of treatment effect was found with the addition of an exercise program to a comprehensive education on GTPS management. The improved outcomes of the responders in the GLoBE group indicate that there may be a subgroup of patients with a GTPS diagnosis that benefit from a GLoBE intervention program.
Sensory Processing and Sleep in Typically Developing Infants and Toddlers.

OBJECTIVE To explore the relationship between sensory processing patterns and sleep problems in typically developing infants and toddlers. METHOD A retrospective chart review of 177 infants and toddlers from a community occupational therapy sleep clinic included descriptive and correlational analyses of data from the Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile and Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire. RESULTS More than half of participants (55%) demonstrated a pattern of increased sensory processing in one or more quadrants, with sensitivity being most common (36%). We found small but significant correlations between increased seeking and shorter daytime sleep duration (r=-.24, p=.002) and between increased sensitivity and longer time to settle to sleep (r=.27, p<.001). CONCLUSION This study adds to recent literature linking sensory processing patterns to sleep problems and is the first to demonstrate this relationship in young, typically developing children. Results support the role of occupational therapy in addressing sleep difficulties in children.