Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transforming growth factor‐α

In summary, although TGF-alpha was initially found in tumors, a number of later studies, some of them from the author's laboratory, have shown that TGF-alpha should no longer be considered a tumor associated growth factor. Rather, TGF-alpha is a normal physiological ligand for the EGF receptor. Table 2 lists some of the normal cellular sources of TGF-alpha. Our list is incomplete, but we know that TGF-alpha is made in keratinocytes and a number of epithelial cells, including gut and breast epithelial cells. It seems very likely that TGF-alpha is a major growth factor secreted by cells of epithelial origin. Zena Werb's and Russell Ross's groups have shown that activated macrophages make TGF-alpha. We have shown that brain makes TGF-alpha and Jeff Kudlow has found TGF-alpha made in the pituitary. Data from several sources, including David Lee, the author's laboratory, and Zena Werb's laboratory has shown that TGF-alpha is made during embryonic development. Therefore, it is now important to look at TGF-alpha in its normal physiological context. Finally, it should be stressed that, as was mentioned above, TGF-alpha is not necessarily a secreted growth factor 50 amino acids long. There is quite a bit of processing of the larger precursor that may or may not take place. This processing, which determines the ultimate size and location of the molecule, is also likely to influence its physiological action.
A small, cysteine‐rich protein secreted by Fusarium oxysporum during colonization of xylem vessels is required for I‐3‐mediated resistance in tomato

A 12 kDa cysteine‐rich protein is secreted by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici during colonization of tomato xylem vessels. Peptide sequences obtained with mass spectrometry allowed identification of the coding sequence. The gene encodes a 32 kDa protein, designated Six1 for secreted in xylem 1. The central part of Six1 corresponds to the 12 kDa protein found in xylem sap of infected plants. A mutant that had gained virulence on a tomato line with the I‐3 resistance gene was found to have lost the SIX1 gene along with neighbouring sequences. Transformation of this mutant with SIX1 restored avirulence on the I‐3 line. Conversely, deletion of the SIX1 gene in a wild‐type strain results in breaking of I‐3‐mediated resistance. These results suggest that I‐3‐mediated resistance is based on recognition of Six1 secreted in xylem vessels.
Managing Status Epilepticus in the Older Adult

The aim of this systematic review was to describe particularities in epidemiology, outcome, and management modalities in the older adult population with status epilepticus. There is a higher incidence of status epilepticus in the older adult population, and it commonly has a nonconvulsive presentation. Diagnosis in this population may be difficult and requires an unrestricted use of EEG. Short and long term associated-mortality are high, and age over 60 years is an independent factor associated with poor outcome. Stroke (acute or remote symptomatic), miscellaneous metabolic causes, dementia, infections hypoxemia, and brain injury are among the main causes of status epilepticus occurrence in this age category. The use of anticonvulsive agents can be problematic as well. Thus, it is important to take into account the specific aspects related to the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic changes in older critically-ill adults. Beyond these precautions, the management may be identical to that of the younger adult, including prompt initiation of symptomatic and anticonvulsant therapies, and a broad and thorough etiological investigation. Such management strategies may improve the vital and functional prognosis of these patients, while maintaining a high overall quality of care.
Feasibility and acceptability of DVD and telephone coaching-based skills training for carers of people with an eating disorder.

OBJECTIVE The aims of this study were (1) to describe the feasibility and acceptability of this skills-based training for carers of people with eating disorders and (2) to examine whether the anxiety, depression, and expressed emotion involved in the caregiving experience were reduced. METHOD Sixteen carers participated in the study. Assessment measures including the General Health Questionnaire, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Experience of Caregiving Inventory, and the Family Questionnaire were taken before and after the intervention. Feedback and a measure of acceptability measure were also collected. RESULTS Participants expressed high levels of satisfaction with most aspects of the training. Also most of the carers reported that the digital video devices (DVDs) provided sufficient training and were helpful for their stress levels. However, due to the small sample size, the lessening of psychological distress and depression after the intervention, did not reach formal levels of significance according the self-report measures. CONCLUSION The DVDs appear to be an acceptable method of delivering information and skills-based training for carers.
A Radiometric Study of Factors Affecting Drug Output of Jet Nebulizers

Jet nebulizers show an unreasonable variation in drug output and nebulization rates that leads to clinical and regulatory problems. Current evaluation methods appear inadequate for the purpose. Our objective was to evaluate Technetium-99m radiometry to study nebulizer parameters and the factors influencing it quantitatively. Drug output, output rate and residual mass and the effect of excipient, temperature, surface tension, air-jet speed, and equipment brand and aging were studied. Though nebulization of radiolabeled drugs followed first-order kinetics, the rates were significantly different; the heaviest drug (Tc-99m colloid) and Tc-99m salbutamol had the least nebulization. Nebulization rate for the first minute was invariably higher than the mean rate signifying the concentration effect of the solute. Drug residue was 35-75%. Drug output of different nebulizer chamber and air compressor brands was different to the extent of 270% and 180% respectively. ‘Aging’ of fluid chamber, cold drug fluid and obstruction in air-jet resulted in significant reduction in output, while addition of 2% saline as excipient did not change the output rate. Addition of ethyl alcohol resulted in a maximum of 260% enhancement (with Tc-99m salbutamol), while further reduction in surface tension was counterproductive irrespective of the drug used. We conclude that radiometry can provide valuable parametric information on the performance of different jet nebulizers.
Using information theory to search for co-evolving residues in proteins

MOTIVATION Some functionally important protein residues are easily detected since they correspond to conserved columns in a multiple sequence alignment (MSA). However important residues may also mutate, with compensatory mutations occurring elsewhere in the protein, which serve to preserve or restore functionality. It is difficult to distinguish these co-evolving sites from other non-conserved sites. RESULTS We used Mutual Information (MI) to identify co-evolving positions. Using in silico evolved MSAs, we examined the effects of the number of sequences, the size of amino acid alphabet and the mutation rate on two sources of background MI: finite sample size effects and phylogenetic influence. We then assessed the performance of various normalizations of MI in enhancing detection of co-evolving positions and found that normalization by the pair entropy was optimal. Real protein alignments were analyzed and co-evolving isolated pairs were often found to be in contact with each other. AVAILABILITY All data and program files can be found at http://www.biochem. uwo.ca/cgi-bin/CDD/index.cgi
The effect of carbon dioxide flow rate on the euthanasia of laboratory mice

Laboratory rodents are commonly euthanized by exposure to gradually increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). Current recommended flow rates range between 10 and 30% chamber vol/min and result in insensibility before exposure to painful concentrations (<40%). However, this method causes dyspnea, indicated by deep, rapid breathing. In humans dyspnea is associated with a negative affective experience. Sensations of dyspnea may explain why rodents find CO2 concentrations >3% aversive. This study aimed to assess the effect of CO2 flow rates on time between the onset of dyspnea and various measures of insensibility (recumbency, loss of the righting reflex and loss of the pedal withdrawal reflex) to identify flow rates that minimize the potential experience of dyspnea. The results of this study indicate that a flow rate of 50% chamber vol/min, while holding the CO2 cage concentration just below 40%, minimizes the interval between the onset of labored breathing and recumbency. Using a 50% flow rate this interval averaged (±SE) 30.3 ± 2.9 s versus 49.7 ± 2.9 s at 20% chamber vol/min (F3,22 = 7.83, P = 0.0013). Similarily, the interval between the onset of labored breathing and loss of the righting reflex averaged 38.2 ± 2.4 s at a flow rate of 50% versus 59.2 ± 2.4 s at 20% chamber vol/min of CO2 (F3,22 = 13.62, P < 0.0001). We conclude that higher flow rates reduce the duration of dyspnea, but even at the highest flow rate mice experience more than 30 s between the onset of dyspnea and the most conservative estimate of insensibility.
The FDA alert on suicidality and antiepileptic drugs: Fire or false alarm?

In January 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert about an increased risk for suicidality in 199 clinical trials of 11 antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) for three different indications, including epilepsy. An advisory panel voted against a black‐box warning on AED labels, and the FDA has accepted this recommendation. We discuss three potential problems with the alert. First, adverse event data were used rather than systematically collected data. Second, the 11 drugs grouped together as a single class of AEDs have different mechanisms of action and very different relative risks, many of which were not statistically significant and some of which were smaller than one. These facts suggest that they should not be grouped as a class. Third, the risk of adverse effects from uncontrolled seizures almost certainly outweighs the small risk of suicidality. We place our comments in the context of a review of the literature on suicidality and depression in epilepsy and the sparse literature on AEDs and suicidality. We recommend that all patients with epilepsy be routinely evaluated for depression, anxiety, and suicidality, and that future clinical trials include validated instruments to systematically assess these conditions to determine whether the possible signal observed by the FDA is real.
Iterative learning of impedance control

This paper proposes an iterative learning control scheme for impedance control of robotic tasks when the tool endpoint covered by soft and deformable material presses a rigid object or environment at a prescribed periodic force pattern. To this end, an iterative learning control scheme for a class of linear dynamical systems with a negative feedback structure is analyzed and convergence of the proposed learning update law after a sufficient number of repetitions is proved. It is shown that this convergence realizes impedance matching in a sense of electric circuit theory of the feedback system can be expressed as a lumped-parameter electric circuit. The iterative learning control scheme is then applied for a case of impedance control of robotic tasks when the characteristics of reproducing force of the deformable material is nonlinear in its displacement and unknown and the tool mass is uncertain. Simulation results are also presented, which show effectiveness of the proposed learning control scheme.
Reliability Investigation of GaN HEMTs for MMICs Applications

Results obtained during the evaluation of radio frequency (RF) reliability carried out on several devices fabricated with different epi-structure and field-plate geometries will be presented and discussed. Devices without a field-plate structure experienced a more severe degradation when compared to their counterparts while no significant correlation has been observed with respect of the different epi-structure tested. RF stress induced two main changes in the device electrical characteristics, i.e., an increase in drain current dispersion and a reduction in gate-leakage currents. Both of these phenomena can be explained by assuming a density increase of an acceptor trap located beneath the gate contact and in the device barrier layer. Numerical simulations carried out with the aim of supporting the proposed mechanism will also be presented.
Assessing the risk of attack in the management of asthma: a review and proposal for revision of the current control-centred paradigm

Asthma guidelines focus on day-to-day control of symptoms. However, asthma attacks remain common. They continue to cause mortality and considerable morbidity, and are a major financial burden to the UK National Health Service (NHS) and the wider community. Asthma attacks have chronic consequences, being associated with loss of lung function and significant psychological morbidity. In this article we argue that addressing daily symptom control is only one aspect of asthma treatment, and that there should be a more explicit focus on reducing the risk of asthma attacks. Management of future risk by general practitioners is already central to other conditions such as ischaemic heart disease and chronic renal impairment. We therefore propose a revised approach that separately considers the related domains of daily control and future risk of asthma attack. We believe this approach will have advantages over the current ‘stepwise’ approach to asthma management. It should encourage individualised treatment, including non-pharmacological measures, and thus may lead to more efficacious and less harmful management strategies. We speculate that this type of approach has the potential to reduce morbidity and healthcare costs related to asthma attacks.
Bayesian Case Influence Diagnostics for Survival Models

Summary We propose Bayesian case influence diagnostics for complex survival models. We develop case deletion influence diagnostics for both the joint and marginal posterior distributions based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence (K–L divergence). We present a simplified expression for computing the K–L divergence between the posterior with the full data and the posterior based on single case deletion, as well as investigate its relationships to the conditional predictive ordinate. All the computations for the proposed diagnostic measures can be easily done using Markov chain Monte Carlo samples from the full data posterior distribution. We consider the Cox model with a gamma process prior on the cumulative baseline hazard. We also present a theoretical relationship between our case‐deletion diagnostics and diagnostics based on Cox's partial likelihood. A simulated data example and two real data examples are given to demonstrate the methodology.
Defining Characteristics and Related Factors of Decreased Cardiac Tissue Perfusion: Proposal of a New Nursing Diagnosis.

PURPOSE To identify the possible defining characteristics (DCs) and related factors of the nursing diagnosis (ND) decreased cardiac tissue perfusion. METHODS Cross-sectional study using medical charts of adults admitted to an emergency department with the chief complaint of chest pain in a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil. FINDINGS DCs identified: crushing chest pain, elevated markers of myocardial necrosis, ischemic electrocardiogram changes, sweating, nausea, and vomiting. Related factors identified: interruption of arterial blood flow and coronary spasm. CONCLUSION This ND was clinically identified due to significant differences in the DCs of patients with and without the diagnosis. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS The clinical indicators identified in this study can be the starting point for the DCs for this ND.
Cost‐effectiveness of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion versus multiple daily injections of insulin in Type 1 diabetes: a systematic review

Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) is increasingly used in clinical practice for the management of selected patients with Type 1 diabetes. Several cost‐effectiveness studies comparing CSII vs. multiple insulin injections (MDI) have been reported. The aim was systematically to review these analyses and test the hypothesis that CSII is a cost‐effective use of healthcare resources across settings.
The development of relational category knowledge

Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly . Robins eat worms, dogs chase cats, roses love sunshine . These kinds of relations are as much a part of our understanding of the world as are the direct properties of the entities themselves . Relational knowledge is a prominent feature of human categories-indeed, of human cognition in general . Nowhere is this clearer than in our ability to learn relational categories like gift, weapon, predator, or central force system. By relational categories, I mean categories whose meanings consist either of (a) relations with other entities, as in predator or gift, or (b) internal relations among a set of components, as in robbery or central force system . My purpose here is, first, to discuss relational categories and how they are learned, and second, to discuss how children learn relational information about object categories . Relational categories contrast with object categories' (e.g., tiger or cow), whose members share intrinsic features, often including perceptual commonalities. Of course, object categories typically 'contain not only property information but also relational information . For example, that tigers hunt and eat animals is part of our concept of a tiger, along with intrinsic attributes such as their stripes . I return to the role of relational information in ordinary object categories later . For now, I make a strong contrast between object categories and relational categories, to better reveal the dimensions of difference .
A Context Aware System Based on Scent

Conventional context-aware systems normally use accelerometers and gyroscopes, and it is difficult to recognize contexts such as having a meal, or going to the toilet. We propose a new context recognition method based on scent using a wearable scent sensor. Since our algorithm considers the characteristics of scent, it recognizes contexts that find difficult to recognize by conventional sensors. Evaluation results demonstrated that scent sensors identify the context of having a meal with 94\% accuracy and going to the toilet with 97\% accuracy. We also implemented a context-aware life-log system for healthcare.
Social determinants of health predict state incidence of HIV and AIDS: a short report

There are approximately 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the USA. Each year, there are roughly 50,000 new HIV diagnoses. The World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) identified several social determinants of health and health inequity (SDH) including childcare, education, employment, gender equality, health insurance, housing, and income. The CSDH also noted the significant impact the SDH can have on advocacy for social change, social interventions to reduce HIV prevalence, and health monitoring. The current analysis evaluated the predictive ability of five SDH for HIV and AIDS incidence on the state level. The SDH used in the analysis were education, employment, housing, income, and insurance; other SDH were not included because reliable and appropriate state-level data were not available. The results of multiple regression analyses indicate that the use of these five SDH create statistically significant models predicting HIV incidence (adjusted R2 = .54) and AIDS incidence (adjusted R2 = .37) and account for a sizable portion of the variance for each. Stepwise variable selection reduced the necessary SDH to two: (1) education and (2) housing. These models are also statistically significant and account for a notable portion of variance in HIV incidence (adjusted R2 = .55) and AIDS incidence (adjusted R2 = .40). These outcomes demonstrate that state-level SDH, particularly education and housing, offer significant explanatory power regarding HIV and AIDS incidence rates. Congruent with the recommendations of the CSDH, the results of the current analysis suggest that state-sponsored policy and social interventions should consider and target SDH, especially education and housing, in attempts to reduce HIV and AIDS incidence rates.
Elastic light scattering for clinical pathogens identification: application to early screening of Staphylococcus aureus on specific medium

Elastic Light Scattering (ELS) is an innovative technique to identify bacterial pathogens directly on culture plates. Compelling results have already been reported for agri-food applications. Here, we have developed ELS for clinical diagnosis, starting with Staphylococcus aureus early screening. Our goal is to bring a result (positive/negative) after only 6 h of growth to fight surgical-site infections. The method starts with the acquisition of the scattering pattern arising from the interaction between a laser beam and a single bacterial colony growing on a culture medium. Then, the resulting image, considered as the bacterial species signature, is analyzed using statistical learning techniques. We present a custom optical setup able to target bacterial colonies with various sizes (30-500 microns). This system was used to collect a reference dataset of 38 strains of S. aureus and other Staphyloccocus species (5459 images) on ChromIDSAID/ MRSA bi-plates. A validation set from 20 patients has then been acquired and clinically-validated according to chromogenic enzymatic tests. The best correct-identification rate between S. aureus and S. non-aureus (94.7%) has been obtained using a support vector machine classifier trained on a combination of Fourier-Bessel moments and Local- Binary-Patterns extracted features. This statistical model applied to the validation set provided a sensitivity and a specificity of 90.0% and 56.9%, or alternatively, a positive predictive value of 47% and a negative predictive value of 93%. From a clinical point of view, the results head in the right direction and pave the way toward the WHO’s requirements for rapid, low-cost, and automated diagnosis tools.
Transformation Pathway upon Heating of Ti–Fe Alloys Deformed by High‐Pressure Torsion

The current work presents the results of a study of the thermal stability of metastable ω‐Ti(Fe) produced by a high‐pressure torsion process and describes the phase transformations of ω‐Ti(Fe) upon heating. The titanium alloys under study contain between 1 and 7 wt% of iron, the phase transitions are investigated using a combination of in situ high‐temperature X‐ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry. The high‐temperature X‐ray diffraction reveals the phase sequence ω → α' → α + β → β upon heating. The differential scanning calorimetry shows that the first phase transformation is exothermal and that the temperature of this phase transition is independent of the iron concentration within the composition range under study. Subsequent phase transitions are endothermal and the respective transition temperatures depend on the iron concentration. The differences between the phase stabilities conclude from the phase diagram and the phase stabilities observe experimentally are explained by the partial coherence of the α/α′‐Ti and β‐Ti grains.
Negotiation Based Branch & Bound and the Negotiating Salesmen Problem

We introduce a new multiagent negotiation algorithm that explores the space of joint plans of action:NB3. Each negotiator generates a search tree by considering both actions performed by itself and actions performed by others. In order to test the algorithm we present a new variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem, in which there is not one, but many salesmen. The salesmen need to negotiate with each other in order to minimize the distances they have to cover. Finally we present the results of some tests we did with a simple implementation of the algorithm for