Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Coronary Heart Disease Versus Total Cardiovascular Mortality Paradox: A Method to Enhance the Comparability of Cardiovascular Death Statistics in the United States

Background— Coronary heart disease (CHD) represents the largest share of cardiovascular disease in the United States, but there are conspicuous discrepancies between CHD and total cardiovascular death rates across the states, possibly due in part to variations in physician assignment of causes of death. Our aim was to identify exogenous individual- and community-level predictors of cause-of-death assignment and variability and to use these predictors to improve the comparability of CHD mortality estimates across states. Methods and Results— We performed a multinomial logistic regression analysis to estimate the effect of individual- and community-level factors on the likelihood of a death being certified as 1 of 3 ill-defined clusters (general atherosclerosis and unspecified heart disease, heart failure, and cardiac arrest) relative to being certified as CHD. The individual-level variables were the decedent’s race, sex, age, education, and place of death; the community-level variable was the number of cardiologists per capita. We used the model to estimate state-level CHD rates that are standardized with regard to the levels of individual- and community-level determinants of cause-of-death assignment. Decedents who died in hospitals and in counties with more cardiologists per capita were more likely to be assigned to CHD than to the ill-defined categories, as were white males relative to other race-sex combinations. Adjustment for these factors resulted in substantially improved correlation between death rates for CHD and all cardiovascular causes. Increases in CHD death rates across states after adjustment for external predictors of cause-of-death assignment ranged from 2% (North Dakota) to 72% (Washington, DC); New York had a decrease (1%) in CHD death rates after adjustment. Nationally, CHD death rates increased 10% for males and 15% for females. The total number of deaths in 2001 attributed to CHD in patients over 30 years of age rose from 433 625 to 489 836 after adjustment. Conclusions— Greater presence of medical knowledge at the time of death, reflected by place of death and cardiologists per capita, reduces the use of the ill-defined cardiovascular clusters. Racial and gender effects on CHD assignment may reflect disparities in access to care and quality of care. By adjusting for differentials in these parameters, a comparable and consistent set of CHD mortality estimates can be created. The role of the exogenous predictors in validity and comparability of cause-of-death statistics should be confirmed in carefully designed validation autopsy studies.
Port-hamiltonian modeling for soft-finger manipulation

In this paper, we present a port-Hamiltonian model of a multi-fingered robotic hand, with soft-pads, while grasping and manipulating an object. The algebraic constraints of the interconnected systems are represented by a geometric object, called Dirac structure. This provides a powerful way to describe the non-contact to contact transition and contact viscoelasticity, by using the concepts of energy flows and power preserving interconnections. Using the port based model, an Intrinsically Passive Controller (IPC) is used to control the internal forces. Simulation results validate the model and demonstrate the effectiveness of the port-based approach.
A refined modelling approach to assess the influence of sampling on palaeobiodiversity curves: new support for declining Cretaceous dinosaur richness

Modelling has been underdeveloped with respect to constructing palaeobiodiversity curves, but it offers an additional tool for removing sampling from their estimation. Here, an alternative to subsampling approaches, which often require large sample sizes, is explored by the extension and refinement of a pre-existing modelling technique that uses a geological proxy for sampling. Application of the model to the three main clades of dinosaurs suggests that much of their diversity fluctuations cannot be explained by sampling alone. Furthermore, there is new support for a long-term decline in their diversity leading up to the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. At present, use of this method with data that includes either Lagerstätten or ‘Pull of the Recent’ biases is inappropriate, although partial solutions are offered.
Combining antihypertensive and antihyperlipidemic agents – optimizing cardiovascular risk factor management

Clinical guidelines now recognize the importance of a multifactorial approach to managing cardiovascular (CV) risk. This idea was taken a step further with the concept of the Polypill™. There are, however, considerable patent, pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic, registration, and cost implications that will need to be overcome before the Polypill™ or other single-pill combinations of CV medications become widely available. However, a medication targeting blood pressure (BP) and lipids provides much of the proposed benefits of the Polypill™. A single-pill combination of the antihypertensive amlodipine besylate and the lipid-lowering medication atorvastatin calcium (SPAA) is currently available in many parts of the world. This review describes the rationale for this combination therapy and the clinical trials that have demonstrated that these two agents can be combined without the loss of efficacy for either agent or an increase in the incidence of adverse events. The recently completed Cluster Randomized Usual Care vs Caduet Investigation Assessing Long-term-risk (CRUCIAL trial) is discussed in detail. CRUCIAL was a 12-month, international, multicenter, prospective, open-label, parallel design, cluster-randomized trial, which demonstrated that a proactive intervention strategy based on SPAA in addition to usual care (UC) had substantial benefits on estimated CV risk, BP, and lipids over continued UC alone. Adherence with antihypertensive and lipid-lowering therapies outside of the controlled environment of clinical trials is very low (~30%–40% at 12 months). Observational studies have demonstrated that improving adherence to lipid-lowering and antihypertensive medications may reduce CV events. One means of improving adherence is the use of single-pill combinations. Real-world observational studies have demonstrated that patients are more adherent to SPAA than co-administered antihypertensive and lipid-lowering therapy, and this improved adherence translated to reduced CV events. Taken together, these findings suggest that SPAA can play an important role in helping physicians improve the management of CV risk in their patients.
Biomechanics of spinal metastases

The lack of suitable models for prediction of the vertebral body (VB) failure load for a variety of pathologies hampers the development of indications for surgical and pharmaceutical interventions and the assessment of novel treatments. Similar models would also be of benefit in a laboratory environment in which predictions of failure load could aid experimental design when using cadaveric tissue. Finite element modelling shows great potential but the expertise required to effectively deploy this technology in a clinical environment precludes its routine use at the present time. Its deployment within the laboratory environment is also time consuming. An alternative approach may be the use of composite beam theory structural analysis that takes into account both vertebral geometry and the bone mineral density (BMD) distribution and they are utilised to predict the loads at which vertebrae will fail. As a part of this work, vertebrae suffering from three distinct pathologies (osteoporosis, multiple myeloma (MM) and metastases) were tested in a wedge compression loading protocol (WCF) as a determinant for vertebroplasty treatment. MM bone was first tested for changes at the bone tissue level by means of depth-sensing micro-indentation testing. In the second part more than one hundred VBs were subjected to a destructive in-vitro WCF experiment, while CT images were used for in-silico structural and morphological assessment. In the last part, two vertebroplasty cements, calcium phosphate and PMMA, were tested. At the tissue level MM bone shows rather moderate changes which are of such small magnitude that alone would not be sufficient to change the overall vertebral strength. Relatively good predictions of VB strength were obtained when using image-based fracture prediction suggesting that bone distribution and pathological alterations to its structure make a significant contribution to overall VB strength. The results of VB reinforcement using either of the cements show increased strength while stiffness was restored only when PMMA cement was injected in lower porosity samples.
Natural fibre composites : materials, processes and properties

Part 1 Natural fibre reinforcements: Wood fibres as reinforcements in natural fibre composites: Structure, properties, processing and applications Chemistry and structure of cellulosic fibres as reinforcements in natural fibre composites Creating hierarchical structures in cellulosic fibre-reinforced polymer composites for advanced performance Using recycled polymers in natural fibre-reinforced polymer composites Electrospun cellulosic fibre-reinforced composite materials. Part 2 Processing of natural fibre composites: Ethical practices in the processing of green composites Manufacturing methods for natural fiber composites Compression and injection molding techniques for natural fiber composites Thermoset matrix natural fibre-reinforced composites. Part 3 Testing and properties: Non-destructive testing (NDT) of natural fiber composites: acoustic emission technique High strain rate testing of natural fiber composites Performance of natural fiber composites under dynamic loading The response of natural fibre composites to impact damage: A case study Natural fibre composites in a marine environment.
Mesh-Guided Optimized Retexturing for Image and Video

This paper presents a novel approach for replacing textures of specified regions in the input image and video using stretch-based mesh optimization. The retexturing results have the similar distortion and shading effect conforming to the unknown underlying geometry and lighting conditions. For replacing textures in a single image, two important steps are developed: The stretch-based mesh parameterization incorporating the recovered normal information is deduced to imitate perspective distortion of the region of interest; the Poisson-based refinement process is exploited to account for texture distortion at fine scale. The luminance of the input image is preserved through color transfer in YCbCr color space. Our approach is independent of the replaced textures. Once the input image is processed, any new textures can be applied to efficiently generate the retexturing results. For video retexturing, we propose key-frame-based texture replacement extended and generalized from the image retexturing. Our approach repeatedly propagates the replacement results of key frames to the rest of the frames. We develop the local motion optimization scheme to deal with the inaccuracies and errors of robust optical flow when tracking moving objects. Visibility shifting and texture drifting are effectively alleviated using graphcut segmentation algorithm and the global optimization to smooth trajectories of the tracked points over temporal domain. Our experimental results showed that the proposed approach can generate visually pleasing results for retextured images and video.
Bone mineral density directly correlates with duodenal Marsh stage in newly diagnosed adult celiac patients

Abstract Objectives. To estimate the prevalence of low bone mineral density (BMD) in a prospective series of adult celiac patients and to identify nutritional and metabolic factors associated with osteoporosis and osteopenia. Methods. Patients over 18 years of age who were consecutively and newly diagnosed with celiac disease (CD) were recruited. A bone density scan with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry was carried out on the left hip and lumbar spine; nutritional parameters were analyzed and a hormone study conducted in order to exclude secondary low BMD. Results. 40 patients (36 females/4 males) between the ages of 18 and 68 (mean 44.25 years) were recruited. Overall, at the moment of diagnosis 45% of patients exhibited low BMD at both demarcations. Risk of hip fracture was generally low, but ascended to mild in patients with villous atrophy (p = 0.011). Differences in major fracture risk were also observed depending on Marsh stage (p = 0.015). Significant differences were observed in nutritional status between patients with and without duodenal villous atrophy, with body mass index and blood levels of prealbumin, iron, vitamin D and folic acid significantly lower in Marsh III stage patients. No differences were found in blood hormone levels between Marsh stages or BMDs. The degree of bone mass loss in the lumbar spine directly correlated to Marsh stage. In the hip, a parallel association between BMD and Marsh stage was also observed, but did not reach statistical significance. Conclusion. Duodenal villous atrophy, through malabsorption, was the main determinant factor for low BMD in adult-onset CD patients.
Optical fiber sensor for the detection of laser-generated ultrasound in arterial tissues

Theoretical and experimental aspects of an extrinsic Fabry-Perot optical fiber ultrasound sensor for use in a photoacoustic-guided laser angioplasty system are described. The sensor has been characterized using laser generated thermoelastic waves as a source of wideband ultrasound. A system sensitivity of 25 mV/MPa and an acoustic noise floor of 2 Pa/Hz1/2 are reported using a transparent polymer film as the sensing element. The system demonstrates the required bandwidth for sensing thermoelastic waves containing frequency components up to 20 MHz.
Evaluating software engineering standards

The authors report on the results of the Smartie project (Standards and Methods Assessment Using Rigorous Techniques in Industrial Environments), a collaborative effort to propose a widely applicable procedure for the objective assessment of standards used in software development. We hope that, for a given environment and application area, Smartie will enable the identification of standards whose use is most likely to lead to improvements in some aspect of software development processes and products. In this article, we describe how we verified the practicality of the Smartie framework by testing it with corporate partners. <<ETX>>
Optimized Multiuser Computation Offloading with Multi-Antenna NOMA

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been regarded as a promising technique to enhance the computation capabilities of wireless devices, by enabling them to offload computationintensive tasks to base stations (BSs) at the network edge. This paper studies a new multiuser MEC system with multiantenna non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based computation offloading. In this system, multiple users simultaneously offload their computation tasks to one multi-antenna BS over the same time/frequency resources for remote execution, and the BS uses successive interference cancellation (SIC) for information decoding. We consider the partial offloading case, such that each user can partition the computation task into two parts for local computing and offloading, respectively. Under this setup, we minimize the weighted sum of the energy consumption at all users subject to their computation latency constraints. The decision variables include the task partition, local central processing unit (CPU) frequencies, and offloading power and rates at the users, and the SIC decoding order at the BS. We present an efficient algorithm to obtain the globally optimal solution to this problem by applying the Lagrange dual method. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-based partial offloading design can significantly improve the energy efficiency of the multiuser MEC system, as compared to benchmark schemes with orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based partial offloading, and with only local computing or full offloading.
Conceptualisation study for using RFID as a stand-alone vehicle positioning system

This paper examines the possibility for using RFID technology as a complete stand-alone vehicle positioning system. The concept is based on the vehicle carrying an RFID reader, which reads RFID tags installed on the side of the vehicle path. Selection of the RFID reader, antenna and tags is studied based on the current RFID technology. A positioning system using a Kalman filter is proposed in order to estimate the vehicle position. The inputs of the proposed algorithm are the fixed distance between two consecutive tags and the erroneous measurements of the backscattered signal power propagated from nearby RFID tags. A numerical example is presented illustrating the performance of the proposed positioning system.
KpsF Is the Arabinose-5-phosphate Isomerase Required for 3-Deoxy-d-manno-octulosonic Acid Biosynthesis and for Both Lipooligosaccharide Assembly and Capsular Polysaccharide Expression in Neisseria meningitidis *

We have identified and defined the function ofkpsF of Neisseria meningitidis and the homologues of kpsF in encapsulated K1 and K5Escherichia coli. KpsF was shown to be the arabinose-5-phosphate isomerase, an enzyme not previously identified in prokaryotes, that mediates the interconversion of ribulose 5-phosphate and arabinose 5-phosphate. KpsF is required for 3-deoxy-d-manno-octulosonic acid (Kdo) biosynthesis inN. meningitidis. Mutation of kpsF or the gene encoding the CMP-Kdo synthetase (kpsU/kdsB) inN. meningitidis resulted in expression of a lipooligosaccharide (LOS) structure that contained only lipid A and reduced capsule expression in the five invasive disease-associated meningococcal serogroups (A, B, C, Y, and W-135). The step linking meningococcal capsule and LOS biosynthesis was shown to be Kdo production as the expression of capsule was wild type in a Kdo transferase (kdtA) mutant. Thus, in addition to lipooligosaccharide assembly, Kdo is required for meningococcal capsular polysaccharide expression. Furthermore, N. meningitidis, unlike enteric Gram-negative bacteria, can survive and synthesize only unglycosylated lipid A.
Neural Representation of Probabilistic Information

It has been proposed that populations of neurons process information in terms of probability density functions (PDFs) of analog variables. Such analog variables range, for example, from target luminance and depth on the sensory interface to eye position and joint angles on the motor output side. The requirement that analog variables must be processed leads inevitably to a probabilistic description, while the limited precision and lifetime of the neuronal processing units lead naturally to a population representation of information. We show how a time-dependent probability density(x; t) over variable x, residing in a specified function space of dimension D, may be decoded from the neuronal activities in a population as a linear combination of certain decoding functions i(x), with coefficients given by the N firing rates ai(t) (generally with D N). We show how the neuronal encoding process may be described by projecting a set of complementary encoding functions i(x) on the probability density (x; t), and passing the result through a rectifying nonlinear activation function. We show how both encoders i (x) and decoders i(x) may be determined by minimizing cost functions that quantify the inaccuracy of the representation. Expressing a given computation in terms of manipulation and transformation of probabilities, we show how this representation leads to a neural circuit that can carry out the required computation within a consistent Bayesian framework, with the synaptic weights being explicitly generated in terms of encoders, decoders, conditional probabilities, and priors.
Molecular alterations during development of esophageal adenocarcinoma

The incidence of esophageal adenocarcinoma has risen significantly over the last decades. During esophageal carcinogenesis many molecular alterations occur that disrupt essential cellular processes, directing the cell to a rapidly proliferating, immortal state. The chronic inflammation that is present in Barrett's esophagus creates an environment in which such molecular alterations are both induced and tolerated. Here, the novel insights in the molecular mechanisms that underlie the development of esophageal adenocarcinoma are reviewed, focusing on the role of inflammation, angiogenesis, apoptosis inhibition, loss of cell cycle control, and loss of cell‐cell adhesion. These novel developments will open new perspectives for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of esophageal adenocarcinoma. J. Surg. Oncol. 2005;92:89–98. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Clinical Recovery From End-Stage Heart Failure Using Left-Ventricular Assist Device and Pharmacological Therapy Correlates With Increased Sarcoplasmic Reticulum Calcium Content but Not With Regression of Cellular Hypertrophy

Background—Left ventricular assist device (LVAD) treatment is known to lead to structural and functional cellular modifications in the heart. The relevance of these changes for clinical recovery is unknown. Methods and Results—We compared properties of cardiomyocytes obtained from tissue taken at explantation of the LVAD in patients with clinical recovery with those obtained from hearts of patients who did not show clinical recovery, thus requiring transplantation. Compared with myocytes taken at implantation, both the recovery and nonrecovery groups showed ≈50% reduction in cell capacitance, an index of cell size. However, action potential duration shortened, L-type Ca2+ current fast inactivation was more rapid, and sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ content was increased in the recovery compared with the nonrecovery group. Conclusions—These results show that specific changes in excitation-contraction coupling, and not regression of cellular hypertrophy, are specifically associated with clinical recovery after LVAD and further identify sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ handling as a key functional determinant in patients with heart failure.