Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Empirical joint contact mechanics: A comprehensive review

Empirical joint contact mechanics measurement (EJCM; e.g. contact area or force, surface velocities) enables critical investigations of the relationship between changing joint mechanics and the impact on surface-to-surface interactions. In orthopedic biomechanics, understanding the changes to cartilage contact mechanics following joint pathology or aging is critical due to its suggested role in the increased risk of osteoarthritis (OA), which might be due to changed kinematics and kinetics that alter the contact patterns within a joint. This article reviews and discusses EJCM approaches that have been applied to articulating joints such that readers across different disciplines will be informed of the various measurement and analysis techniques used in this field. The approaches reviewed include classical measurement approaches (radiographic and sectioning, dye staining, casting, surface proximity, and pressure measurement), stereophotogrammetry/motion analysis, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and high-speed videoradiography. Perspectives on approaches to advance this field of EJCM are provided, including the value of considering relative velocity in joints, tractional stress, quantification of joint contact area shape, consideration of normalization techniques, net response (superposition) of multiple input variables, and establishing linkages to regional cartilage health status. EJCM measures continue to provide insights to advance our understanding of cartilage health and degeneration and provide avenues to assess the efficacy and guide future directions of developing interventions (e.g. surgical, biological, rehabilitative) to optimize joint’s health and function long term.
Anti‐Diabetic Effects and Molecular Mechanisms of Amide Alkaloids from Piper longum Based on Network Pharmacology Integrated with Cellular Assays

Piper longum is a well‐known spice and traditional medicine. It was revealed to possess anti‐diabetic activity, but few information about its active component and underlying mechanism could be available. In this study, retrofractamides A (1) and C (2) isolated from P. longum showed potent inhibitory activity against PTP1B. Therefore, the potential mechanism was predicted by network pharmacology and molecular docking. PI3K/AKT was obtained as the most remarkable pathway against type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and AKT1 and GSK3β were yielded as the top two core targets of retrofractamides A (1) and C (2). Molecular docking of compounds with AKT1 and GSK3β showed strong binding affinity between them. Additionally, cellular experiments with a L6 cell model was conducted to further verify the above predictions. Results indicated that retrofractamides A (1) and C (2) exerted anti‐diabetic effect via activating PI3K/AKT pathway, and they promoted glucose consumption, glucose uptake, glycogen synthesis and glycolysis.
Temporal changes of periodontal tissue pathology in a periodontitis animal model

Purpose This study aimed to characterize the early stages of periodontal disease and determine the optimal period for its evaluation in a mouse model. The association between the duration of ligation and its effect on the dentogingival area in mice was evaluated using micro-computed tomography (CT) and histological analysis. Methods Ninety mice were allocated to an untreated control group or a ligation group in which periodontitis was induced by a 6-0 silk ligation around the left second maxillary molar. Mice were sacrificed at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, and 14 days after ligature placement. Alveolar bone destruction was evaluated using micro-CT. Histological analysis was performed to assess the immune-inflammatory processes in the periodontal tissue. Results No significant difference in alveolar bone loss was found compared to the control group until day 3 after ligature placement, and a gradual increase in alveolar bone loss was observed from 4 to 8 days following ligature placement. No significant between-group differences were observed after 8 days. The histological analysis demonstrated that the inflammatory response was evident from day 4. Conclusions Our findings in a mouse model provide experimental evidence that ligature-induced periodontitis models offer a consistent progression of disease with marginal attachment down-growth, inflammatory infiltration, and alveolar bone loss.
Sport Participation for Adults Aged 50 + Years: A Socioecological Analysis

Sport participation can play a key role in older adults’ successful aging as it provides an enjoyable opportunity for leisure-time physical activity. Research focusing on the benefits of sport participation in later life and facilitators for involvement has been increasing in the past several years. Drawing on the socioecological model, this study investigated select socioecological factors that predict older adults’ sport participation from a holistic perspective. An online survey provided quantitative data from 1203 adults aged 50 and older across the United States. Results from logistic regression analyses showed that personal characteristics, individual behavior, environment/policy, and life course effects were significant predictors of sport participation in later life. The findings in this study enhance our understanding of factors related to older adults’ sport participation and are also of value to practitioners seeking to promote sport participation among older adults.
The “new” oligometastatic disease state and associated therapies in non‐small cell lung cancer: A narrative review

Patients with non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) at stage IV have typically been considered incurable. Nonetheless, there is growing evidence that certain patient groups with fewer metastases, or so‐called oligometastatic disease, which may have a more indolent biological nature than widespread metastatic diseases, may survive longer if definitive local treatment is administered to all metastatic sites. According to several retrospective investigations, this subgroup had a better prognosis than other stage IV patients, and the eighth edition of TNM staging was revised to reflect these findings. As a result of rapidly emerging systemic therapies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors and a growing number of targeted therapies, more patients with this uncommon clinical opportunity have been identified and have received greater clinical attention. Currently, there is no established protocol for the management of oligometastatic disease, and the majority of therapeutic decisions are made through multidisciplinary discussion. In addition to systemic treatment, the two primary local therapeutic options for oligometastatic diseases are surgery and radiotherapy. A few phase 2 trials suggest that aggressive local ablative therapy may significantly improve the prognosis of patients with oligometastatic NSCLC. This review summarizes the most recent data on the management of oligometastatic NSCLC, with a focus on the prognostic significance of local ablative therapy in these patients.
Tables of two-sided tolerance factors for a normal distribution

Given a random sample of size N from a normal distribution, we consider tolerance intervals of the form X − ks to X + ks, where X is the sample mean and s is the sample standard deviation. The value of k is chosen so that the interval covers a given proportion P of the population with confidence γ. Exact values of k, computed from numerical integration, are given for N = 2(1)100; P = 0.75, 0.90, 0.95, 0.975, 0.99, 0.995, 0.999; and γ = 0.5, 0.75, 0.90, 0.95, 0.975, 0.99, 0.995. The exact values are compared with the values obtained from an approximation developed by Wald and Wolfowitz (1946).
A Web-Based Program About Sustainable Development Goals Focusing on Digital Learning, Digital Health Literacy, and Nutrition for Professional Development in Ethiopia and Rwanda: Development of a Pedagogical Method

Background East African countries face significant societal challenges related to sustainable development goals but have limited resources to address these problems, including a shortage of nutrition experts and health care workers, limited access to physical and digital infrastructure, and a shortage of advanced educational programs and continuing professional development. Objective This study aimed to develop a web-based program for sustainable development with a focus on digital learning, digital health literacy, and child nutrition, targeting government officials and decision-makers at nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Methods A web-based program—OneLearns (Online Education for Leaders in Nutrition and Sustainability)—uses a question-based learning methodology. This is a research-based pedagogical method developed within the open learning initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, United States. Participants were recruited during the fall of 2020 from ministries of health, education, and agriculture and NGOs that have public health, nutrition, and education in their missions. The program was conducted during the spring of 2021. Results Of the 70 applicants, 25 (36%) were selected and remained active throughout the entire program and filled out a pre- and postassessment questionnaire. After the program, of the 25 applicants, 20 (80%, 95% CI 64%-96%) participants reported that their capacity to drive change related to the sustainable development goals as well as child nutrition in their organizations had increased to large extent or to a very large extent. Furthermore, 17 (68%, 95% CI 50%-86%) and 18 (72%, 95% CI 54%-90%) participants reported that their capacity to drive change related to digital health literacy and digital learning had increased to a large extent and to a very large extent, respectively. Conclusions Digital learning based on a question-based learning methodology was perceived as a useful method for increasing the capacity to drive change regarding sustainable development among government officials and decision-makers at NGOs in Ethiopia and Rwanda.
Real-time and interactive virtual Doppler ultrasound

This paper describes our "virtual" Doppler ultrasound (DUS) system, in which colour DUS (CDUS) images and DUS spectrograms are generated on-the-fly and displayed in real-time in response to position and orientation cues provided by a magnetically tracked handheld probe. As the presence of complex flow often confounds the interpretation of Doppler ultrasound data, this system will serve to be a fundamental tool for training sonographers and gaining insight into the relationship between ambiguous DUS images and complex blood flow dynamics. Recently, we demonstrated that DUS spectra could be realistically simulated in real-time, by coupling a semi-empirical model of the DUS physics to a 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a clinically relevant flow field. Our system is an evolution of this approach where a motion-tracking device is used to continuously update the origin and orientation of a slice passing through a CFD model of a stenosed carotid bifurcation. After calibrating our CFD model onto a physical representation of a human neck, virtual CDUS images from an instantaneous slice are then displayed at a rate of approximately 15 Hz by simulating, on-the-fly, an array of DUS spectra and colour coding the resulting spectral mean velocity using a traditional Doppler colour scale. Mimicking a clinical examination, the operator can freeze the CDUS image on-screen, and a spectrogram corresponding to the selected sample volume location is rendered at a higher frame rate of at least 30 Hz. All this is achieved using an inexpensive desktop workstation and commodity graphics card.
A two-stage method to extract the blurred area

The image may be partially blurred because of defocus, shaking camera or moving object. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to extract the blurred area automatically, which mainly consists of two stages: coarse detection and fine extraction. In the coarse detection, we proposed a block-based blurred/sharp area detection algorithm which roughly divides the image into blurred, sharp and undefined blocks. Both the spatial gradient statistics and the frequential power spectrum are used as blur metrics in the algorithm. For the fine extraction, we introduce an improved lazy snapping which takes blurred and sharp blocks of the coarse detection as the seeds for automatic lazy snapping and thus extracts the blurred area automatically. Experimental results prove that the efficiency of the proposed method.
The M-Value: A Simple Sensitivity Analysis for Bias Due to Missing Data in Treatment Effect Estimates

Abstract Complete-case analyses can be biased if missing data are not missing completely at random. We propose simple sensitivity analyses that apply to complete-case estimates of treatment effects; these analyses use only simple summary data and obviate specifying the precise mechanism of missingness and making distributional assumptions. Bias arises when treatment effects differ between retained and nonretained participants or, among retained participants, the estimate is biased because conditioning on retention has induced a noncausal path between the treatment and outcome. We thus bound the overall treatment effect on the difference scale by specifying: 1) the unobserved treatment effect among nonretained participants; and 2) the strengths of association that unobserved variables have with the exposure and with the outcome among retained participants (“induced confounding associations”). Working with the former sensitivity parameter subsumes certain existing methods of worst-case imputation while also accommodating less-conservative assumptions (e.g., that the treatment is not detrimental on average even among nonretained participants). As an analog to the E-value for confounding, we propose the M-value, which represents, for a specified treatment effect among nonretained participants, the strength of induced confounding associations required to reduce the treatment effect to the null or to any other value. These methods could help characterize the robustness of complete-case analyses to potential bias due to missing data.
ToMExO: A probabilistic tree-structured model for cancer progression

Identifying the interrelations among cancer driver genes and the patterns in which the driver genes get mutated is critical for understanding cancer. In this paper, we study cross-sectional data from cohorts of tumors to identify the cancer-type (or subtype) specific process in which the cancer driver genes accumulate critical mutations. We model this mutation accumulation process using a tree, where each node includes a driver gene or a set of driver genes. A mutation in each node enables its children to have a chance of mutating. This model simultaneously explains the mutual exclusivity patterns observed in mutations in specific cancer genes (by its nodes) and the temporal order of events (by its edges). We introduce a computationally efficient dynamic programming procedure for calculating the likelihood of our noisy datasets and use it to build our Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference algorithm, ToMExO. Together with a set of engineered MCMC moves, our fast likelihood calculations enable us to work with datasets with hundreds of genes and thousands of tumors, which cannot be dealt with using available cancer progression analysis methods. We demonstrate our method’s performance on several synthetic datasets covering various scenarios for cancer progression dynamics. Then, a comparison against two state-of-the-art methods on a moderate-size biological dataset shows the merits of our algorithm in identifying significant and valid patterns. Finally, we present our analyses of several large biological datasets, including colorectal cancer, glioblastoma, and pancreatic cancer. In all the analyses, we validate the results using a set of method-independent metrics testing the causality and significance of the relations identified by ToMExO or competing methods.
A cross-sectional study of cognitive performance in bipolar disorder across the lifespan: the cog-BD project

Abstract Background Neuroprogressive models of the trajectory of cognitive dysfunction in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) have been proposed. However, few studies have explored the relationships among clinical characteristics of BD, cognitive dysfunction, and aging. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional analysis in euthymic participants with the MATRICS Cognitive Consensus Battery, the Trail Making Test B, the Stroop Test, and the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading. Age- and gender-equated control participants without a mental disorder [‘Healthy Controls’ – HC)] were assessed similarly. We compared cognitive performance both globally and in seven domains in four groups: younger BD (age ⩽49 years; n = 70), older BD (age ⩾50 years; n = 48), younger HC (n = 153), and older HC (n = 44). We also compared the BD and HC groups using age as a continuous measure. We controlled for relevant covariates and applied a Bonferroni correction. Results Our results support both an early impairment (‘early hit’) model and an accelerated aging model: impairment in attention/vigilance, processing speed, and executive function/working memory were congruent with the accelerated aging hypothesis whereas impairment in verbal memory was congruent with an early impairment model. BD and HC participants exhibited similar age-related decline in reasoning/problem solving and visuospatial memory. There were no age- or diagnosis-related differences in social cognition. Conclusion Our findings support that different cognitive domains are affected differently by BD and aging. Longitudinal studies are needed to explore trajectories of cognitive performance in BD across the lifespan.
Optimal Approximation of the Second Iterated Integral of Brownian Motion

Abstract In this article, a theorem is proved that describes the optimal approximation (in the L 2(ℙ)-sense) of the second iterated integral of a standard two-dimensional Wiener process, W, by a function of finitely many elements of the Gaussian Hilbert space generated by W. This theorem has some interesting corollaries: First of all, it implies that Euler's method has the optimal rate of strong convergence among all algorithms that depend solely on linear functionals of the Wiener process, W; second, it shows that the approximation of the second iterated integral based on Karhunen–Loève expansion of the Brownian bridge is asymptotically optimal.
Two-dimensional multimode interference in integrated optical structures

In this work we study the two-dimensional (2D) multimode interference and self-imaging in a dielectric optical waveguide. The studied waveguide is assumed to be multimode in both the transverse directions x and y. The conditions required for single and multiple image formations are developed. New types of image are also found. The obtained results are verified using a three-dimensional FDBPM technique. Applications of the 2D interference in waveguides for 2D optical power splitting are also investigated.
Phosphoproteomics for the identification of new mechanisms of cryodamage: the role of SPATA18 in the control of stallion sperm function

Abstract Although recent research has addressed the impact of cryopreservation on the stallion sperm proteome, studies addressing the stallion sperm phosphoproteome are lacking. In the present study, the data set of proteomes of fresh and cryopreserved spermatozoa were reanalyzed, showing that cryopreservation caused significant changes in the phosphoproteome. The phosphoproteins reduced most significantly by cryopreservation were Ca2+ binding tyrosine phosphorylation regulated, protein kinase cAMP-activated catalytic subunit beta (CABYR), mitochondria eating protein (SPATA18), A kinase anchoring protein 4 (AKAP4), A-kinase anchoring protein 3 (AKAP3) and the Family with sequence similarity 71 member B (FAM71B). These proteins belong to the gene ontology (GO) terms sperm fibrous sheath (GO: 0035686), and sperm principal piece (GO: 0097228). The regulatory interactions between kinases and phosphorylation sites on the proteins that were affected most were also investigated, and the potential kinases (based on human orthologs) involved in the regulation of these phosphoproteins identified were: PKCß for SPATA18 and GSK3ß for CABYR. Kinase inhibition assays were also conducted showing that kinases phosphorylating the above-mentioned proteins play an important role in their activity and thus, phosphorylation controls the activity of these proteins and their role in the regulation of the functionality and viability of stallion spermatozoa. In conclusion, the data reported here contribute to the understanding of the fact that the dephosphorylation of certain proteins is a molecular lesion induced by cryopreservation in the stallion spermatozoa. Graphical Abstract
Stability of Direct and Inverse Eigenvalue Problems for Schrödinger Operators on Finite Intervals

We consider the inverse eigenvalue problem for Schrodinger operators on finite intervals. Among others, we show that if the potential is in L p , then the perturbation of the potentials can be estimated by the l p′ -norm of the sequence of the eigenvalue differences only if p ≥ 2. As a consequence, we give estimates if only finite number of eigenvalues are known with an error < e.
Inductance Calculations: Working Formulas and Tables

This authoritative compilation of formulas and tables simplifies the design of inductors for electrical engineers. It features a single simple formula for virtually every type of inductor, together with tables from which essential numerical factors may be interpolated. An esteemed reference, it belongs in the library of every electrical engineer. 1946 edition.
Successful Treatment of a Left Gastric Artery Pseudoaneurysm by Image Guided Percutaneous Thrombin Injection

Visceral artery pseudoaneurysms are common complications of pancreatitis that carry a high mortality rate. The splenic artery is the commonest artery involved. Gastric artery pseudoaneurysms are less common with less than 50 cases reported in the literature. A 58-year-old female was referred to the Interventional Radiology department with a left gastric artery pseudoaneurysm secondary to acute pancreatitis. Initial Digital Subtraction Angiography revealed the pseudoaneurysm arising from the left gastric artery. Several attempts to cannulate the pseudoaneurysm were unsuccessful due to arterial spasm. Consequently, the left gastric artery proximal to the pseudoaneurysm was embolised with 300 microns of polyvinyl alcohol and two coils. 24 hours post-procedure, a computed tomography (CT) scan was performed which revealed a blush of contrast enhancement within the pseudoaneurysm sac, consistent with unsuccessful embolisation. Using a combination of ultrasound and cone beam CT guidance, a 22-gauge Chiba needle was advanced percutaneously via a transhepatic approach to the patent segment of the pseudoaneurysm. 2.5 ml of human thrombin was then injected directly into the pseudoaneurysm. Image guided injection of thrombin has become a well-recognised treatment for a variety of peripheral and visceral pseudoaneurysms and is often performed following a failed attempt of routine endovascular embolisation. We report the case of a patient affected by a pseudoaneurysm of the left gastric artery, treated with a CT guided percutaneous thrombin injection directly into the pseudoaneurysm. This demonstrates that percutaneous coagulation can be an adjunct or an alternative to endovascular embolisation.