Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effective Irinotecan (CPT‐11)‐containing Liposomes: Intraliposomal Conversion to the Active Metabolite SN‐38

Irinotecan hydrochloride (CPT‐11) is a prodrug of SN‐38, which is an active metabolite with anti‐tumor activity and side toxicity. The activities of CPT‐11 and SN‐38 depend on the closed lactone ring form of SN‐38. We have examined the tissue distributions of the closed and open forms of CPT‐11 and SN‐38 in Lewis lung carcinoma‐bearing mice after the administration of liposomal CPT‐11 (S‐Lip) and polyethyleneglycol (PEG)‐modified S‐Lip (S‐PEG). The plasma concentrations of closed CPT‐11 and SN‐38 were increased by liposomalization, and their blood circulation was prolonged by the PEG modification. The concentrations of closed CPT‐11 and SN‐38 in tumors were elevated by both the liposomalization and PEG modification. The closed/total ratio of SN‐38 in the tumors of the S‐PEG group was greater than that of the CPT‐11 solution (Sol) group. Thus, SN‐38 was thought to be generated in intact liposomes containing CPT‐11. The bile concentration of closed SN‐38, which is responsible for CPT‐11‐induced intestinal disorder, was decreased by liposomalization. In an in vitro experiment, the SN‐38/CPT‐11 ratio in the tumor cells of the S‐Lip group was found to be higher than that of the Sol group, and the ratio of the closed form of SN‐38 was increased by the liposomalization. Laser scanning confocal microscopy showed the generation of SN‐38 in the liposomal membrane after the incubation of S‐Lip with carboxylesterase. It is therefore considered that a part of CPT‐11 is converted to SN‐38 in the intact liposomes.
Evaluation of Antivascular and Antimitotic Effects of Tubulin Binding Agents in Solid Tumor Therapy

Tubulin binding agents (TBAs) reduce tumor perfusion and inhibit mitosis of tumor cells in solid tumors, but it is not clear which effects contribute to the suppression of solid tumor growth. We evaluated the antivascular and antimitotic effects of several TBAs, combretastatin A‐4 (CS A‐4) phosphate, AC‐7700, a novel CS A‐4 derivative, colchicine, E7010, and vinblastine, on subcutaneous (s.c.) murine colon26 adenocarcinoma (c26). Tolerable doses of vinblastine and E7010 strongly inhibited tumor growth and induced mitotic arrest of tumor cells without affecting tumor perfusion. Colchicine had no effect on tumor growth and perfusion. When the injected dose was increased to the lethal range, however, these drugs markedly reduced tumor perfusion and caused necrosis of tumor tissue. Within the tolerable dose range, AC‐7700 both strongly suppressed tumor growth and reduced tumor perfusion, and CS A‐4 phosphate also exhibited a moderate antivascular effect. To evaluate the contribution of antivascular activity of TBAs to tumor growth suppression, excluding their direct cytotoxic effect on tumor cells, we established c26/acr, which is resistant to TBAs in vitro. Although E7010 showed a reduced suppressive effect on s.c. c26/acr tumor growth as compared with its effect on wild‐type c26, AC‐7700 remained potent against both cell lines. These results indicate that TBAs exert antivascular and antimitotic effects on solid tumors with marked differently effective dose ranges from agent to agent, and that the antivascular effect of TBAs inhibits solid tumor growth independently of the direct cytotoxic effect on tumor cells.
Direct Effects of Testosterone, Dihydrotestosterone and Estrogen on 3,2′‐Dimethyl‐4‐aminobiphenyl‐induced Prostate Carcinogenesis in Castrated F344 Rats

The present experiment was carried out to explore the effect of endogenous androgen on rat prostate carcinogenesis induced by 3,2′‐dimethyl‐4‐aminobiphenyl (DMAB) and testosterone propionate (TP) or 5α‐dihydrotestosterone (DHT) with or without ethinyl estradiol (EE). In order to eliminate the influence of endogenous androgen, F344 rats were orchiectomized just after initiation with the prostate carcinogen, DMAB, and then given TP, DHT, TP plus EE or DHT plus EE for 40 weeks. The results demonstrated that while administration of TP following DMAB treatment causes invasive carcinomas in the lateral and anterior prostate and seminal vesicles, DHT does not exhibit equivalent effects. Synergistic enhancement was also evident with TP plus EE, but not with DHT plus EE. The incidences of prostatic and seminal vesicle lesions in all groups of the present experiment, except for the group given castration without hormonal supplement, were equivalent to those previously found in non‐castrated animals. Therefore, the present findings indicate that endogenous testosterone may not be required for promotion hy TP/EE of DMAB‐initiated prostate carcinogenesis and that it may not contribute to the actions of DHT.
Topic Exploration in Spatio-Temporal Document Collections

Huge amounts of data with both spatial and temporal information (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) are being generated, and are often used to share and spread personal updates, spontaneous ideas, and breaking news. We refer to such data as spatio-temporal documents. It is of great interest to explore topics in a collection of spatio-temporal documents. In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently mining topics from spatio-temporal documents within a user specified bounded region and timespan, to provide users with insights about events, trends, and public concerns within the specified region and time period. We propose a novel algorithm that is able to efficiently combine two pre-trained topic models learnt from two document sets with a bounded error, based on which we develop an efficient approach to mining topics from a large number of spatio-temporal documents within a region and a timespan. Our experimental results show that our approach is able to improve the runtime by at least an order of magnitude compared with the baselines. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of our proposed method is close to the baselines.
Quantum fluctuations in a continuous vectorial Kerr cavity model

We consider a self-defocusing model for a Kerr medium in a planar resonator, which takes into account the vectorial character of the radiation field. For an intensity of the pump beam larger than a given threshold, a y polarized transverse stripe pattern appears. We analyze the spatial behavior of quantum fluctuations around this inhomogeneous steady state, using a Langevin treatment based on Wigner representation. The model is continuous, so that we avoid any restriction to a reduced number of spatial modes. The spatial distribution of the quantum fluctuations around the roll-pattern is dominated by the neutral (or Goldstone) mode, corresponding to rigid spatial displacements of the pattern. The spatial configuration of the field immediately outside the cavity input/output mirror depends on the time window over which fluctuations are averaged: only when the time window is on the order of the cavity lifetime the output field fluctuations are qualitatively similar to that of the intracavity field. We show the existence of a strong anticorrelation between the quantum fluctuations of the intensity of the x-polarized pump and the y-polarized field. We check the possibility to use a Kerr cavity like a quantum non-demolition device, which uses the tilted waves, corresponding in the far field to the y-polarized stripe pattern, as a meter to measure the intensity fluctuation of the pump beam.
Planar Balanced-to-Unbalanced In-Phase Power Divider With Wideband Filtering Response and Ultra-Wideband Common-Mode Rejection

Out-of-phase balanced-to-unbalanced (B2U) power dividers are popular. However, here we present a new in-phase B2U power divider, which is rarely considered. The presented power divider realizes ultrawideband common-mode suppression, while two additional transmission zeros are added around the edges of the passband, exhibiting wideband filtering response. The circuit schematic is simply composed of coupled/non-coupled lines and stubs. Finally, the simulated design is validated experimentally.
A Probabilistic Network for Facial Feature Verification

In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach to determining whether extracted facial features from a video sequence are appropriate for creating a 3D face model. In our approach, the distance between two feature points selected from the MPEG‐4 facial object is defined as a random variable for each node of a probability network. To avoid generating an unnatural or non‐realistic 3D face model, automatically extracted 2D facial features from a video sequence are fed into the proposed probabilistic network before a corresponding 3D face model is built. Simulation results show that the proposed probabilistic network can be used as a quality control agent to verify the correctness of extracted facial features.
The substantiation of the elastic–viscoplastic model of the human spine for modeling the correction process of kyphoscoliotic deformation

Purpose: The relevance of the problem is caused by an increase in the number of spine-related diseases among children, including scoliosis. Currently, there are no methodologies for the treatment of scoliosis, which ensure an unambiguous positive result. The purpose of the article is to justify the spinal model as an elastic viscoplastic body for further mathematical modeling of the process of spine correction and search for its optimal conditions. Methodology: The leading approach to the study of this problem is the development of techniques for the surgical treatment of deformities of the vertebral column with the aid of an external fixation device for the spine, providing for a rigid connection of the elements of the apparatus with each other and with the spine. The rigid connection between the elements of the external fixation device increases the degree of static indeterminacy of the design, which leads to the occurrence of additional dangerous stresses in the details of the apparatus and in the vertebrae. The control actions in such devices do not provide an adequate result for the process of correction of the vertebral column. Results: The main result is the substantiation of the spine model as an elastic viscoplastic body. This will allow more detailed consideration of the medical and biological features of the spine and the physical and mechanical properties of human bone and soft tissues. The proposed model will allow developing an adaptive design of the device, taking into account specific features of the organism and more effectively managing the correction process. Value: The materials of the article can be useful for scientists, doctors and specialists in conducting scientific research on the problem of spine deformation correction and the development of appropriate technical means.
Lip localization technique towards an automatic lip reading approach for Myanmar consonants recognition

Lip reading system is supportive technology to human being especially for hearing impaired, or elderly people. Lip reading is a process where visual information is extracted by watching lip movements of the speaker with or without sound. So, reliable lip movements are required to extract visual information. To our knowledge, this is the first work for lip movement recognition for Myanmar consonants. So, the major challenge is to recognize lip movements because of many possible lip motions and lip shapes. The accuracy and reliability of speech recognition systems can be improved by using visual information from the movements of the lips, and the need for lip-reading systems continues to grow for every language. Therefore, this paper presents Myanmar consonant recognition based on lip movements towards lip reading by using CIELa∗b∗ color transformation, Moore Neighborhood Tracing Algorithm and linear SVM classifier. The purpose of this study was to develop a visual training technique to accurately identify the characteristics of the lips movement for hearing impairment.
Is a Curved Flight Path in SAR Better than a Straight One?

In the plane, we study the transform $R_\gamma f$ of integrating an unknown function $f$ over circles centered at a given curve $\gamma$. This is a simplified model of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), when the radar is not directed but has other applications, like thermoacoustic tomography, for example. We study the problem of recovering the wave front set $WF(f)$. If the visible singularities of $f$ hit $\gamma$ once, we show that $WF(f)$ cannot be recovered; i.e., the artifacts cannot be resolved. If $\gamma=\partial\Omega$ is the boundary of a strictly convex domain $\Omega$, we show that this is still true. On the other hand, in the latter case, if $f$ is known a priori to have singularities in a compact set, then we show that one can recover $WF(f|_\Omega)$, and moreover, this can be done in a simple explicit way, using backpropagation for the wave equation.
10-Gb/s laser communication demonstration based on digital coherent technique

Digital coherent systems will play an important role for increasing throughput and for enhancing receiver sensitivity in optical inter-satellite communication. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity digital coherent system suitable for implementation on a space-grade field programmable gate array (FPGA). An experiment of 10-Gb/s dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) using the proposed digital coherent system is demonstrated over 1.1-m free space path. The experimental results verify that the proposed system is capable of multi-level modulation and compensating Doppler shift.
Design and Implementation of Cost-Effective Probabilistic-Based Noise-Tolerant VLSI Circuits

As the size of CMOS devices is scaled down to nanometers, noise can significantly affect circuit performance. Because noise is random and dynamic in nature, a probabilistic-based approach is better suited to handle these types of errors compared with conventional CMOS designs. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective probabilistic-based noise-tolerant circuit-design methodology. Our cost-effective method is based on master-and-slave Markov random field (MRF) mapping and master-and-slave MRF logic-gate construction. The resulting probabilistic-based MRF circuit trades hardware cost for circuit reliability. To demonstrate a noise-tolerant performance, an 8-bit MRF carry-lookahead adder (MRF_CLA) was implemented using the 0.13-mum CMOS process technology. The chip measurement results show that the proposed master-and-slave MRF_CLA can provide a 7.00 times 10-5 bit-error rate (BER) under 10.6-dB signal-to-noise ratio, while the conventional CMOS_CLA can only provide 8.84 times 10-3 BER. Because of high noise immunity, the master-and-slave MRF_CLA can operate under 0.25 V to tolerate noise interference with only 1.9 muW/MHz of energy consumption. Moreover, the transistor count can be reduced by 42% as compared with the direct-mapping MRF_CLA design .
Effects of Base Fabric Parameters on the Electro-Mechanical Behavior of Piezoresistive Knitted Sensors

Strain sensors embedded into fabric structure are one of the most interesting research areas for health and engineering monitoring. In this paper, a textile-based strain sensor has been developed using an intrinsically conductive stainless steel-polyester plain knitted fabric. The influence of fabric structural parameters, such as loop length on electro-mechanical properties of sensors was studied under a tensile fatigue set. Knitted fabric structure deformation during tensile fatigue was monitored and image processed. Peak fitting of electric resistant waveforms (ERWs) and tensile fatigue versus time were performed to analyze the ERWs behavior in detail wherein the entire elongation of knit strain sensor partitioned into two distinct phases, such as loop head and loop leg sections. The results evidenced a discrepancy between loop head and loop leg elongation rate at the stretching onset and end of relaxing phase. The ERW with the higher resolution was obtained using the longest loop length along with the higher extension.
Intestinal gene expression in pigs: effects of reduced feed intake during weaning and potential impact of dietary components

The weaning transition is characterised by morphological, histological and microbial changes, often leading to weaning-associated disorders. These intestinal changes can partly be ascribed to the lack of luminal nutrition arising from the reduced feed intake common in pigs after weaning. It is increasingly becoming clear that changes in the supply with enteral nutrients may have major impacts on intestinal gene expression. Furthermore, the major dietary constituents, i.e. carbohydrates, fatty acids and amino acids, participate in the regulation of intestinal gene expression. However, nutrients may also escape digestion by mammalian enzymes in the upper gastrointestinal tract. These nutrients can be used by the microflora, resulting in the production of bacterial metabolites, for example, SCFA, which may affect intestinal gene expression indirectly. The present review provides an insight on possible effects of reduced feed intake on intestinal gene expression, as it may occur post-weaning. Detailed knowledge on effects of reduced feed intake on intestinal gene expression may help to understand weaning-associated intestinal dysfunctions and diseases. Examples are given of intestinal genes which may be altered in their expression due to supply with specific nutrients. In that way, gene expression could be modulated by dietary means, thereby acting as a potential therapeutic tool. This could be achieved, for example, by influencing genes coding for digestive or absorptive proteins, thus optimising digestive function and metabolism, but also with regard to immune response, or by influencing proliferative processes, thereby enhancing mucosal repair. This would be of special interest when designing a diet to overcome weaning-associated problems.
Efficient alternatives to PSI-BLAST

In this paper we present two algorithms that may serve as e fficient alternatives to the well-known PSI BLAST tool: SeedBLAST and CTX-PSI Blast. Both may bene t from the knowledge about amino acid composition speci c to a given protein family: SeedBLAST uses a advisedly designed seed, while CTX-PSI BLAST extends PSI BLAST with the context-speci c substitution model. The seeding technique became central in the theory of sequence alignment. There are several e cient tools applying seeds to DNA homology search, but not to protein homology search. In this paper we ll this gap. We advocate the use of multiple subset seeds derived from a hierarchical tree of amino acid residues. Our method computes, by an evolutionary algorithm, seeds that are specifi cally designed for a given protein family. The seeds are represented by deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and built into the NCBI-BLAST software. This extended tool, named SeedBLAST, is compared to the original BLAST and PSI-BLAST on several protein families. Our results demonstrate a superiority of SeedBLAST in terms of e ciency, especially in the case of twilight zone hits. The contextual substitution model has been proven to increase sensitivity of protein alignment. In this paper we perform a next step in the contextual alignment program. We announce a contextual version of the PSI-BLAST algorithm, an iterative version of the NCBI-BLAST tool. The experimental evaluation has been performed demonstrating a signi cantly higher sensitivity compared to the ordinary PSI-BLAST algorithm.
Prevalence of Disability among US- and Foreign-Born Arab Americans: Results from the 2000 US Census

Background:Although the prevalence of disability for various racial and ethnic groups has been documented, little attention has been paid to Arab Americans in the United States. Objectives: We estimated the age- and sex-adjusted prevalence of disability among older Arab Americans and examined the association between nativity status and self-reported physical and self-care disability before and after controlling for covariates. Methods: We used data from the 5% Public Use Microdata Samples of the 2000 US Census. Our sample included 4,225 individuals 65 years of age and older who identified with an Arab ancestry. Of these, 2,280 were foreign-born and 1,945 were US-born. Results: The age- and sex-adjusted prevalence of having a physical disability was 31.2% for foreign- and 23.4% for US-born older Arab Americans, and the age- and sex- adjusted prevalence of having a self-care disability was 13.5% for foreign- and 6.8% for US-born Arab Americans. Iraqis reported the highest estimates for both disabilities (physical, 36.2%; self-care, 19.8%) compared to other Arab ethnic groups. In the crude model, foreign-born Arab Americans were more likely (OR = 1.32; 95% CI = 1.28, 1.36) to report a physical disability compared to US-born Arab Americans. When adjusting for English language ability in the final model, the odds of having a physical disability for foreign-born Arab Americans was protective compared to US-born Arab Americans (OR = 0.92; 95% CI = 0.88, 0.96). In the crude model, foreign-born Arab Americans were 1.82 times (95% CI = 1.74, 1.90) more likely to report a self-care disability compared to US-born Arab Americans. In the fully adjusted model, this association was slightly attenuated (OR = 1.32; 95% CI = 1.24, 1.41). Conclusions: These findings indicate English language ability is associated with variations in reporting a physical disability. Future studies should include better measures of acculturation. Arab Americans are heterogeneous and should be disaggregated both by subgroups and from the white category in order to reveal a more accurate health and disease status profile for these groups. These efforts will assist in tailoring more effective interventions in reducing or preventing disability among Arab Americans 65 years of age and older.
Glue Ear, Hearing Loss and IQ: An Association Moderated by the Child’s Home Environment

Background Glue ear or otitis media with effusion (OME) is common in children and may be associated with hearing loss (HL). For most children it has no long lasting effects on cognitive development but it is unclear whether there are subgroups at higher risk of sequelae. Objectives To examine the association between a score comprising the number of times a child had OME and HL (OME/HL score) in the first four/five years of life and IQ at age 4 and 8. To examine whether any association between OME/HL and IQ is moderated by socioeconomic, child or family factors. Methods Prospective, longitudinal cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). 1155 children tested using tympanometry on up to nine occasions and hearing for speech (word recognition) on up to three occasions between age 8 months and 5 years. An OME/HL score was created and associations with IQ at ages 4 and 8 were examined. Potential moderators included a measure of the child’s cognitive stimulation at home (HOME score). Results For the whole sample at age 4 the group with the highest 10% OME/HL scores had performance IQ 5 points lower [95% CI −9, −1] and verbal IQ 6 points lower [95% CI −10, −3] than the unaffected group. By age 8 the evidence for group differences was weak. There were significant interactions between OME/HL and the HOME score: those with high OME/HL scores and low 18 month HOME scores had lower IQ at age 4 and 8 than those with high OME/HL scores and high HOME scores. Adjusted mean differences ranged from 5 to 8 IQ points at age 4 and 8. Conclusions The cognitive development of children from homes with lower levels of cognitive stimulation is susceptible to the effects of glue ear and hearing loss.