Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pulp sensibility and vitality tests for diagnosing pulpal health in permanent teeth: a critical review

The aim of this review was to critically appraise the literature related to pulp vitality and sensibility testing in order to determine the diagnostic accuracy of pulp tests with reference to a gold standard or control group. Implications of the results for research and clinical practice are also explored. The MEDLINE (Ovid), MEDLINE (PubMed), Embase and Cochrane databases were searched for English-language clinical trials in humans in which in vivo studies were designed to evaluate or compare the accuracy of selected pulp sensibility and pulp vitality tests in determining the state of pulpal health in permanent teeth. Studies were included only if the results were compared to a control group or to a valid gold or reference standard. Eight studies were identified. Shortcomings in research design were found to influence the findings. The limited number of studies investigating pulp vitality tests was insufficient to answer the research question. It was concluded from this critical appraisal of the literature that laser Doppler flowmetry appeared to be the most accurate method for diagnosing the state of pulpal health and came closest to serving as a gold standard. Pulp vitality tests proved superior to pulp sensibility tests for early and accurate assessments of the pulpal health of traumatized teeth. When accurately used and interpreted, pulp sensibility tests provide valuable diagnostic information, particularly when an electric pulp test is used in combination with either CO2 snow or Endo-Ice.
Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome: Advances in Diagnosis and Treatment

Importance Neonatal abstinence syndrome, which occurs as a result of in utero opioid exposure, affects between 6.0 and 20 newborns per 1000 live US births. There is substantial variability in how neonatal abstinence syndrome is diagnosed and managed. Objective To summarize key studies examining the diagnosis and management (both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic) of neonatal abstinence syndrome published during the past 10 years. Evidence Review PubMed, Web of Science, and CINAHL were searched for articles published between July 1, 2007, and December 31, 2017. Abstracts were screened and included in the review if they pertained to neonatal abstinence syndrome diagnosis or management and were judged by the authors to be clinical trials, cohort studies, or case series. Findings A total of 53 articles were included in the review, including 9 randomized clinical trials, 35 cohort studies, 1 cross-sectional study, and 8 case series—representing a total of 11 905 unique opioid-exposed mother-infant dyads. Thirteen studies were identified that evaluated established or novel neonatal abstinence syndrome assessment methods, such as brief neonatal abstinence syndrome assessment scales or novel objective physiologic measures to predict withdrawal. None of the new techniques that measure infant physiologic parameters are routinely used in clinical practice. The most substantial number of studies of neonatal abstinence syndrome management pertain to nonpharmacologic care—specifically, interventions that promote breastfeeding or encourage parents to room-in with their newborns. Although these nonpharmacologic interventions appear to decrease the need for pharmacologic treatment and result in shorter hospitalizations, the interventions are heterogeneous and there are no high-quality clinical trials to support them. Regarding pharmacologic interventions, only 5 randomized clinical trials with prespecified sample size calculations (4 infant, 1 maternal treatment) have been published. Each of these trials was small (from 26 to 131 participants) and tested different therapies, limiting the extent to which results can be aggregated. There is insufficient evidence to support an association between any diagnostic or treatment approach and differential neurodevelopmental outcomes among infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Conclusions and Relevance Evidence pertaining to the optimal diagnosis and treatment strategies for neonatal abstinence syndrome is based on small or low-quality studies that focus on intermediate outcomes, such as need for pharmacologic treatment or length of hospital stay. Clinical trials are needed to evaluate health and neurodevelopmental outcomes associated with objective diagnostic approaches as well as pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatment modalities.
A review of tinnitus

BACKGROUND Tinnitus is one of the most common otological symptoms. In recent times our understanding of tinnitus has significantly progressed. Tinnitus may be defined as conscious awareness of a sound in the absence of an external auditory stimulus. People with tinnitus almost always seek the attention of their general practitioner, who is best placed to assess, investigate and provide appropriate counselling. OBJECTIVE The aim of this article is to define and provide guidelines on causes, assessment, appropriate investigation and management of tinnitus. DISCUSSION Tinnitus may be categorised as subjective, objective, primary or secondary. The assessment of tinnitus begins by determining which of these types with the patient presents with. All patients with tinnitus warrant formal audiometric assessment, and a proportion will warrant further imaging. Management requires treatment of reversible causes. Those with subjective, bothersome chronic tinnitus require tinnitus-specific therapies.
Alignment of Historical Handwritten Manuscripts Using Siamese Neural Network

Historical manuscript alignment is a widely known problem in historical document analysis, and the attempt of finding the differences between manuscript editions is mainly done by hand. Today, most of the computational tools coming to assist the historians are based on word recognition or spotting. These solutions are partial at best. In this paper, we present a Siamese neural network based system, which automatically identifies whether a pair of images contain the same text without the need of recognizing the text. The user is required to annotate several pages of two manuscripts, and with the assistance of synthetically generated data and affine distortions we can align two manuscripts written by different writers, achieving strong results.
Temporomandibular dysfunction

BACKGROUND Orofacial pain is a common presentation in the primary healthcare setting and temporomandibular dysfunction represents one of the major causes. Its aetiology is multifactorial, caused by both masticatory muscle dysfunction and derangement within the temporomandibular joint. OBJECTIVE The aim of this article is to provide an overview of temporomandibular dysfunction, its management and referral considerations for general practioners. DISCUSSION Temporomandibular joint dysfunction affects a large number of adults. Conservative management involving non-pharmacological and pharmacological therapies is effective in the majority of cases.
Connective tissue growth factor expression after angiotensin II exposure is dependent on transforming growth factor-β signaling via the canonical Smad-dependent pathway in hypertensive induced myocardial fibrosis

Introduction: Transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) and connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) are often described as the initial pro-fibrotic mediators upregulated early in fibrosis models dependent on angiotensin II (Ang-II). In the present study, we explore the mechanistic link between TGF-β and CTGF expression by using a novel TGF-β trap. Materials and methods: NIH/3T3 fibroblasts were subjected to TGF-β with or without TGF-β trap or 1D11 antibody, CTGF or CTGF plus TGF-β for six or 24 hours, and then used for quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) or immunocytochemistry. Male C57BL/6 mice were infused with Ang-II and randomly assigned TGF-β trap for six or 24 hours. Hearts were harvested for histological analyses, qRT-PCR and western blotting. Results: Exogenous TGF-β-induced fibroblasts resulted in significant upregulation of CTGF, TGF-β and type I collagen transcript levels in vitro. Additionally, TGF-β promoted the differentiation of fibroblasts into α-SMA+ myofibroblasts. CTGF expression was reduced by the addition of TGF-β trap or neutralizing antibody, confirming that its expression is dependent on TGF-β signaling. In contrast, exogenous CTGF did not appear to have an effect on fibroblast production of pro-fibrotic transcripts or fibroblast differentiation. Ang-II infusion in vivo led to a significant increase in TGF-β and CTGF mRNA expression at six and 24 hours with corresponding changes in Smad2 phosphorylation (pSmad2), indicative of increased TGF-β signaling. Ang-II animals that received the TGF-β trap demonstrated reduced CTGF mRNA levels and pSmad2 at six hours, suggesting that early CTGF expression is dependent on TGF-β signaling. Conclusions: We demonstrated that CTGF expression is dependent on TGF-β signaling both in vitro and in vivo in a model of myocardial fibrosis. This also suggests that early myocardial CTGF mRNA expression (six hours) after Ang-II exposure is likely dependent on latent TGF-β activation via the canonical Smad-dependent pathway in resident cardiac cells.
Combinatorial Partial Monitoring Game with Linear Feedback and Its Applications

In online learning, a player chooses actions to play and receives reward and feedback from the environment with the goal of maximizing her reward over time. In this paper, we propose the model of combinatorial partial monitoring games with linear feedback, a model which simultaneously addresses limited feedback, infinite outcome space of the environment and exponentially large action space of the player. We present the Global Confidence Bound (GCB) algorithm, which integrates ideas from both combinatorial multi-armed bandits and finite partial monitoring games to handle all the above issues. GCB only requires feedback on a small set of actions and achieves O(T2/3 log T) distribution-independent regret and O(log T) distribution-dependent regret (the latter assuming unique optimal action), where T is the total time steps played. Moreover, the regret bounds only depend linearly on log |χ| rather than |χ|, where χ is the action space. GCB isolates offline optimization tasks from online learning and avoids explicit enumeration of all actions in the online learning part. We demonstrate that our model and algorithm can be applied to a crowdsourcing application leading to both an efficient learning algorithm and low regret, and argue that they can be applied to a wide range of combinatorial applications constrained with limited feedback.
Evaluating Causality of Gut Microbiota in Obesity and Diabetes in Humans

The pathophysiology of obesity and obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is complex and driven by many factors. One of the most recently identified factors in development of these metabolic pathologies is the gut microbiota. The introduction of affordable, high-throughput sequencing technologies has substantially expanded our understanding of the role of the gut microbiome in modulation of host metabolism and (cardio)metabolic disease development. Nevertheless, evidence for a role of the gut microbiome as a causal, driving factor in disease development mainly originates from studies in mouse models: data showing causality in humans are scarce. In this review, we will discuss the quality of evidence supporting a causal role for the gut microbiome in the development of obesity and diabetes, in particular T2DM, in humans. Considering overlap in potential mechanisms, the role of the gut microbiome in type 1 diabetes mellitus will also be addressed. We will elaborate on factors that drive microbiome composition in humans and discuss how alterations in microbial composition or microbial metabolite production contribute to disease development. Challenging aspects in determining causality in humans will be postulated together with strategies that might hold potential to overcome these challenges. Furthermore, we will discuss means to modify gut microbiome composition in humans to help establish causality and discuss systems biology approaches that might hold the key to unravelling the role of the gut microbiome in obesity and T2DM.
Evaluation of Energy Consumption of Replicated Tasks in a Volunteer Computing Environment

High Throughput Computing allows workloads of many thousands of tasks to be performed efficiently over many distributed resources and frees the user from the laborious process of managing task deployment, execution and result collection. However, in many cases the High Throughput Computing system is comprised from volunteer computational resources where tasks may be evicted by the owner of the resource. This has two main disadvantages. First, tasks may take longer to run as they may require multiple deployments before finally obtaining enough time on a resource to complete. Second, the wasted computation time will lead to wasted energy. We may be able to reduce the effect of the first disadvantage here by submitting multiple replicas of the task and take the results from the first one to complete. This, though, could lead to a significant increase in energy consumption. Thus we desire to only ever submit the minimum number of replicas required to run the task in the allocated time whilst simultaneously minimising energy. In this work we evaluate the use of fixed replica counts and Reinforcement Learning on the proportion of task which fail to finish in a given time-frame and the energy consumed by the system.
Transfer of pathogenic and nonpathogenic cytosolic proteins between spinal cord motor neurons in vivo in chimeric mice

Significance This report contains observations of transfer of both pathogenic and nonpathogenic cytosolic proteins between spinal cord motor neurons in intact (noninjected) mice that are genetic chimeras formed by aggregating eight-cell embryos of two strains with different fluorescently marked proteins. Transfer was also observed in cranial nerve motor nuclei known to be affected in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis but not in extraocular cranial nerve nuclei that are spared in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Transfer from motor neurons to neighboring mature gray matter oligodendrocytes implicates oligodendrocytes as the potential mediator of protein transfer. Recent studies have reported spread of pathogenic proteins in the mammalian nervous system, but whether nonpathogenic ones spread is unknown. We initially investigated whether spread of a mutant amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-associated cytosolic superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) protein between motor neurons could be detected in intact chimeric mice. Eight-cell embryos from G85R SOD1YFP and G85R SOD1CFP mice were aggregated, and spinal cords of adult chimeric progeny were examined for motor neurons with cytosolic double fluorescence. By 3 mo of age, we observed extensive double fluorescence, including in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-affected cranial nerve motor nuclei but not in the relatively spared extraocular nuclei. Chimeras of nonpathogenic wtSOD1YFP and G85R SOD1CFP also exhibited double fluorescence. In a third chimera, mitochondrial mCherry did not transfer to G85R SOD1YFP motor neurons, suggesting that neither RNA nor organelles transfer, but mito-mCherry neurons received G85R SOD1YFP. In a chimera of ChAT promoter-EGFP and mito-mCherry, EGFP efficiently transferred to mito-mCherry+ cells. Thus, nonpathogenic cytosolic proteins appear capable of transfer. During study of both the SOD1FP and EGFP chimeras, we observed fluorescence also in small cells neighboring the motor neurons, identified as mature gray matter oligodendrocytes. Double fluorescence in the G85R SOD1FP chimera and observation of the temporal development of fluorescence first in motor neurons and then in these oligodendrocytes suggest that they may be mediators of transfer of cytosolic proteins between motor neurons.
Alcohol use and anxiety: diagnostic and management issues.

“Ms. M” is a 40-year-old Caucasian female who presents with complaints of anxiety and sleep disturbance. She recently went through a difficult divorce after 14 years of marriage, and she has two children, ages 8 and 10. She was trained as a nurse and had stopped working when her first child was born, but she is now working as a school nurse. She reports feeling anxious about everything, including financial issues, the well-being of her children, and her competence at work. She has a great deal of difficulty falling asleep. Approximately 3 months ago, she began to drink wine at night to help her sleep. She has gradually increased her drinking and is currently drinking 2–3 glasses of wine (4 ounces each) per night on average, but on several nights within the past month she drank a 32-ounce bottle of wine by herself. Her father was an alcoholic, and she worries about her drinking. She reports binge drinking during adolescence and in college and recalls having one “blackout. ” After she met her husband 18 years ago, her drinking decreased considerably because he drank alcohol only occasionally and disapproved of her drinking. They kept little alcohol in the house and she drank only socially. She says that since childhood she has felt extremely anxious in social settings and that drinking alcohol always helped to “take the edge off. ” She has several close friends and is involved in her church community.
Presentation of Primary Open Angle Glaucoma (POAG) at Lions Sight First Eye Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.

OBJECTIVE Primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) is the most common type of glaucoma in Africa. We carried out a study to determine the clinical presentation pattern of patients with primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) at a tertiary hospital in Malawi. DESIGN A cross-sectional study. SETTING Lions Sight First Eye Hospital-a major referral and teaching state eye hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. SUBJECTS Study participants were newly diagnosed POAG patients at specialist eye clinic during study period. RESULTS A total of 60 POAG patients were recruited into the study. The mean age was 58.7 years (SD= 16.6, range 18 - 86). There were more male (44, 73.3%) than female (16, 27.7%) patients. The majority of patients (73%) presented one year after onset of visual symptoms. Twenty-six patients (43%) had unilateral blindness (visual acuity < 3/60; WHO classification), while nine patients (15%) presented with bilateral blindness. A vertical cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) of 0.8 or worse was seen in 92 eyes (79%). The mean intraocular pressure (IOP) reading was 35.5 mmHg (SD 13.30). Of the thirty-three eyes that successfully underwent visual field analysis, very advanced defects were recorded in 12 eyes (36%). CONCLUSION This study demonstrates delayed presentation and male predominance among POAG patients at a tertiary eye hospital in Malawi. Glaucoma intervention programmes should aim at identifying patients with treatable glaucoma with particular attention to women.
Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Oil Shale Derived Liquid Fuels

Without mitigation or technology improvements, full-fuel-cycle carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from oil shale derived liquid fuels are likely to be 25 to 75% higher than those from conventional liquid fuels, depending on the details of the process used. The emissions of CO 2 from oil shale derived fuels come from three stages: retorting of shale, upgrading and refining of raw shale oil, and combustion of the finished transportation fuels. Emissions from these stages represent approximately 25-40%, 5-15%, and 50-65% of total fuel-cycle emissions, respectively. The most uncertain source of emissions is the retorting stage, due to variation in emissions with shale quality and retorting technology used. Mitigation options include higher thermal efficiency, minimizing carbonate decomposition, CO 2 sequestration by geologic injection, enhanced oil recovery, mineralization in spent retorts, or the use of non-fossil sources for process heat.
Anonymous Routing to Maximize Delivery Rates in DTNs

In this paper, we seek to address anonymous communications in delay tolerant networks (DTNs). While many different approaches for the internet and ad hoc networks, to the best of our knowledge, only variants of onion-based routing have been tailored for DTNs. Since each type of anonymous routing protocol has its advantages and drawbacks, there is no single anonymous routing protocol for DTNs that can adapt to the different levels of security requirements. In this paper, we first design a set of anonymous routing protocols for DTNs, called anonymous epidemic and zone-based anonymous routing, based on the original anonymous routing protocols for ad hoc networks. Then, we propose a framework of anonymous routing (FAR) for DTNs, which subsumes all the aforementioned protocols. By tuning its parameters, the proposed FAR is able to outperform onion-based, anonymous Epidemic, and zone-based routing.
Geometric localization of thermal fluctuations in red blood cells

Significance Cell shapes are related to their biological function. More generally, membrane morphology plays a role in the segregation and activity of transmembrane proteins. Here we show geometric implications regarding how cellular mechanics plays a role in localizing thermal fluctuations on the membrane. We show theoretically that certain geometric features of curved shells control the spatial distribution of membrane undulations. We experimentally verify this theory using discocyte red blood cells and find that geometry alone is sufficient to account for the observed spatial distribution of fluctuations. Our results, based on statistical physics and membrane elasticity, have general implications for the use of membrane shape to control thermal undulations in a variety of nanostructured materials ranging from cell membranes to graphene sheets. The thermal fluctuations of membranes and nanoscale shells affect their mechanical characteristics. Whereas these fluctuations are well understood for flat membranes, curved shells show anomalous behavior due to the geometric coupling between in-plane elasticity and out-of-plane bending. Using conventional shallow shell theory in combination with equilibrium statistical physics we theoretically demonstrate that thermalized shells containing regions of negative Gaussian curvature naturally develop anomalously large fluctuations. Moreover, the existence of special curves, “singular lines,” leads to a breakdown of linear membrane theory. As a result, these geometric curves effectively partition the cell into regions whose fluctuations are only weakly coupled. We validate these predictions using high-resolution microscopy of human red blood cells (RBCs) as a case study. Our observations show geometry-dependent localization of thermal fluctuations consistent with our theoretical modeling, demonstrating the efficacy in combining shell theory with equilibrium statistical physics for describing the thermalized morphology of cellular membranes.