Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Consequences of Inhibiting Amyloid Precursor Protein Processing Enzymes on Synaptic Function and Plasticity

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease, one of whose major pathological hallmarks is the accumulation of amyloid plaques comprised of aggregated β-amyloid (Aβ) peptides. It is now recognized that soluble Aβ oligomers may lead to synaptic dysfunctions early in AD pathology preceding plaque deposition. Aβ is produced by a sequential cleavage of amyloid precursor protein (APP) by the activity of β- and γ-secretases, which have been identified as major candidate therapeutic targets of AD. This paper focuses on how Aβ alters synaptic function and the functional consequences of inhibiting the activity of the two secretases responsible for Aβ generation. Abnormalities in synaptic function resulting from the absence or inhibition of the Aβ-producing enzymes suggest that Aβ itself may have normal physiological functions which are disrupted by abnormal accumulation of Aβ during AD pathology. This interpretation suggests that AD therapeutics targeting the β- and γ-secretases should be developed to restore normal levels of Aβ or combined with measures to circumvent the associated synaptic dysfunction(s) in order to have minimal impact on normal synaptic function.
Serum cardiac troponin I and cardiac troponin T concentrations in dogs with gastric dilatation-volvulus.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether serum concentrations of cardiac troponin I (cTnI) and cardiac troponin T (cTnT) are increased in dogs with gastric dilatationvolvulus (GDV) and whether concentrations correlate with severity of ECG abnormalities or outcome. DESIGN Prospective case series. ANIMALS 85 dogs with GDV. PROCEDURE Serum cTnl and cTnT concentrations were measured 12 to 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours after surgery. Dogs were grouped on the basis of severity of ECG abnormalities and outcome. RESULTS cTnl and cTnT were detected in serum from 74 (87%) and 43 (51%) dogs, respectively. Concentrations were significantly different among groups when dogs were grouped on the basis of severity of ECG abnormalities (none or mild vs moderate vs severe). Dogs that died (n = 16) had significantly higher serum cTnI (24.9 ng/ml) and cTnT (0.18 ng/ml) concentrations than did dogs that survived (2.05 and < 0.01 ng/ml, respectively). Myocardial cell injury was confirmed at necropsy in 4 dogs with high serum cardiac troponin concentrations. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Results indicate that concentrations of cTnI and cTnT suggestive of myocardial cell injury can commonly be found in serum from dogs with GDV and that serum cardiac troponin concentrations are associated with severity of ECG abnormalities and outcome.
Resistance training on physical performance in disabled older female cardiac patients.

PURPOSE We evaluated the value of resistance training on measures of physical performance in disabled older women with coronary heart disease (CHD). METHODS The study intervention consisted of a 6-month program of resistance training in a randomized controlled trial format. Training intensity was at 80% of the single-repetition maximal lift. Control patients performed light yoga and breathing exercises. Study participants included 42 women with CHD, all >or= 65 yr of age and community dwelling. Subjects were screened by questionnaire to have low self-reported physical function. The primary study measurements related to the performance of 16 household activities of the Continuous Scale Physical Functional Performance test (CSPFP). These ranged from dressing, to kitchen and cleaning activities, to carrying groceries and walking onto a bus with luggage, and a 6-min walk. Activities were measured in time to complete a task, weight carried during a task, or distance walked. Other measures included body composition, measures of aerobic fitness and strength, and questionnaire-based measures of physical function and depression score. RESULTS Study groups were similar at baseline by age, aerobic capacity, strength, body composition, and in performing the CSPFP. After conditioning, 13 of 16 measured activities were performed more rapidly, or with increased weight carried, compared with the control group (all P < 0.05). Maximal power for activities that involved weight-bearing over a distance, increased by 40% (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Disabled older women with CHD who participate in an intense resistance-training program improve physical capacity over a wide range of household physical activities. Benefits extend beyond strength-related activities, as endurance, balance, coordination, and flexibility all improved. Strength training should be considered an important component in the rehabilitation of older women with CHD.
Purification and some properties of inositol 1,3,4,5,6-pentakisphosphate 2-kinase from immature soybean seeds.

Inositol 1,3,4,5,6-pentakisphosphate 2-kinase was purified from immature soybean seeds harvested approximately 5 weeks post-anthesis. A crude extract was clarified using polyethyleneimine and purified by chromatography on DEAE-cellulose, Cibacron Blue 3GA-agarose, Toyopearl DEAE 650M, and Toyopearl phenyl 650M columns. The enzyme had a relative molecular mass, M(r), of 52,000 as determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate-poly-acrylamide gel electrophoresis and retained 50% of its activity after 6 weeks at 0 degrees C. The Km values for inositol 1,3,4,5,6-pentakisphosphate and MgATP, respectively, were 2.3 microM and 8.4 microM, and the Vmax was 243 nmol/min/mg. The pH and temperature optima, respectively, were 6.8 and 42 degrees C. Maximum activity was obtained when the magnesium ion concentration was 4 mM. The kinase specifically phosphorylated the 2-position on the inositol ring and could also utilize D-inositol 1,4,5,6-tetrakisphosphate as a substrate. The K for the reaction was 14, indicating that the enzyme may be involved in both inositol hexakisphosphate formation in maturing seeds and ATP resynthesis in germinating seeds. Substrate concentrations in mature seeds were favorable for ATP formation, whereas additional factors appeared to drive the accumulation of inositol hexakisphosphate in maturing seeds.
Eleven Guidelines for Implementing Pair Programming in the Classroom

Utilizing pair programming in the classroom requires specific classroom management techniques. We have created nine guidelines for successfully implementing pair programming in the classroom. These guidelines are based on pair programming experiences spanning seven years and over one thousand students at North Carolina State University. In Fall 2007, pair programming was adopted in the undergraduate human-computer interaction (HCI) course at Virginia Tech. We present the pair programming guidelines in the context of the HCI course, discuss how the guidelines were implemented, and evaluate the general applicability and sufficiency of the guidelines. We find that eight of the nine guidelines were applicable to the Virginia Tech experience. We amended our peer evaluation guideline to account for constantly supervised pairing, as was the case at Virginia Tech. We add two guidelines stating that a pair should always be working toward a common goal and that pairs should be encouraged to find their own answers to increase their independence and self-confidence.
Combination of cancer antigen 125 and carcinoembryonic antigen can improve ovarian cancer diagnosis.

INTRODUCTION The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the ability of the tumour marker carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) in combination with cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) to differentiate between malignant ovarian and malignant non-ovarian disease. MATERIAL AND METHODS All patients attending the Department of Gynaecology, Herlev Hospital, who underwent an "ovary lab investigation" between 1 January 2006 and 31 December 2008 were included. Among a total of 640 patients, 355 had a malignant diagnosis. Preoperative CEA and CA-125 serum levels and final malignant diagnosis after surgery were extracted from the medical records. RESULTS Among the patients with CEA levels > 5 ng/ml, 68% had non-ovarian malignancies. This test identified 39% of the non-ovarian cancers correctly. In patients with a CA-125/CEA ratio > 25, an ovarian cancer was found in 82%. The CA-125/CEA test identified 63% of the non-ovarian cancers correctly. The specificity increased to around 85% when the cut-off value of the CA-125/CEA ratio was increased from 25 to 100. CONCLUSION In patients with an undiagnosed tumour in the pelvis, the CA-125/CEA ratio may be used to preoperatively identify a substantial fraction of patients with non-ovarian malignancies. In the study population, the specificity rose to 85% when the cut-off value was increased from 25 to 100, which highlights the usefulness of a higher cut-off level. FUNDING not relevant. TRIAL REGISTRATION not relevant.
Component based energy aware multi-tenant application in software as-a service

Today as software applications tend to move towards cloud computing infrastructure, the energy requirements at datacenter also tend to rise significantly. Multi-tenancy enables SaaS providers offer a single application to multiple different tenants (i.e. organizations) simultaneously. Multi-tenancy has various advantages including effective version control, cost control and much more. However, the energy consumption at datacenter is still a challenge, in modern CPU, dynamic voltage/frequency scaling is used as a standard to achieve energy efficiency in processors. However, an idle server utilizes up to 70% of its peak energy requirement to run system software and maintain essential hardware devices. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware application component migration method that computes the load of the datacenter servers by considering the number of components attached to the servers, count of tenant users accessing the application components; components strike rate and various other vital factors in choosing components to migrate. When all components of the underutilized servers are migrated the server is powered off to conserve energy. We evaluate our proposed algorithm using discrete event simulation. Our evaluation and discussion exhibits the usefulness of the proposed solution by reducing the number of server up and reducing energy consumption at datacenter.
On privacy preservation against adversarial data mining

Privacy preserving data processing has become an important topic recently because of advances in hardware technology which have lead to widespread proliferation of demographic and sensitive data. A rudimentary way to preserve privacy is to simply hide the information in some of the sensitive fields picked by a user. However, such a method is far from satisfactory in its ability to prevent adversarial data mining. Real data records are not randomly distributed. As a result, some fields in the records may be correlated with one another. If the correlation is sufficiently high, it may be possible for an adversary to predict some of the sensitive fields using other fields.In this paper, we study the problem of privacy preservation against adversarial data mining, which is to hide a minimal set of entries so that the privacy of the sensitive fields are satisfactorily preserved. In other words, even by data mining, an adversary still cannot accurately recover the hidden data entries. We model the problem concisely and develop an efficient heuristic algorithm which can find good solutions in practice. An extensive performance study is conducted on both synthetic and real data sets to examine the effectiveness of our approach.
Selected problems of industrial concrete ground floors design

The main function of the ground floor is to transmit static and dynamic loads and to save performance over required time in environment of the influence of different agents. Because of the hard exploitation conditions, together with the influence of different agents that destruct the ground floors, they must fulfill some usable requirements. To fulfill the service life requirements that are connected with the concrete ground floors, they must get the proper structure. To estimate the exertion of the analyzed concrete ground floors, it is necessary to take into consideration the complex state of stresses, which takes palace where the floor slab is subjected to pointed loads. The method, which makes possible to include the complex state of stresses in ground concrete slab calculations and to estimate the level of slab stresses in characteristic, analyzed of Wetergaard`s places objected by loads, has been proposed. That is why only some issues, connected with this topic, are presented in this paper. The model of concrete slab exertion, which makes possible to take under consideration the complex state of stresses in the slab at the place of putting the loads, is proposed. On the basis of considerations, analyses and calculations the method of defining the vertical susceptibility of the subsoil in the function of the subsoil deformation modulus is proposed. The selected issues connected with the structural solutions of concrete ground floors are presented as well.
I ARC, a Novel Arachidonate-regulated, Noncapacitative Ca2+ Entry Channel*

Along with the inositol trisphosphate-induced release of stored Ca2+, a receptor-enhanced entry of Ca2+ is a critical component of intracellular Ca2+ signals generated by agonists acting at receptors coupled to the activation of phospholipase C. Although the simple emptying of the intracellular Ca2+ stores is known to be capable of activating Ca2+ entry via the so-called “capacitative” mechanism, recent evidence suggests that Ca2+ entry at physiological agonist concentrations, where oscillatory Ca2+ signals are typically observed, does not conform to such a model. Instead, a noncapacitative Ca2+entry pathway regulated by arachidonic acid appears to be responsible for Ca2+ entry under these conditions. Using whole-cell patch clamp techniques we demonstrate that low concentrations of arachidonic acid activate a Ca2+-selective current that is superficially similar to the store-operated current I CRAC, but which also demonstrates certain distinct features. We have named this novel currentI ARC (forarachidonate-regulated calcium current). Importantly, I ARC can be readily activated in cells whose Ca2+ stores have been maximally depleted. I ARC represents a novel Ca2+ entry pathway that is entirely separate from those activated by store depletion and is specifically activated at physiological levels of stimulation.
Ultra Short MR Relaxometry and Histological Image Processing for Validation of Diffusion MRI

Ultra Short MR Relaxometry and Histological Image Processing for Validation of Diffusion MRI Amin Nazaran Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BYU Doctor of Philosophy Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an imaging modality that acquires an image with little to no damage to the tissue. MRI does not introduce foreign particles or high energy radiation into the body, making it one of the least invasive medical imaging modalities. MRI can achieve excellent soft tissue contrast and is therefore useful for diagnosis of a wide variety of diseases. While there are a wide variety of available techniques for generating contrast in MRI, there are still many open areas for research. For example, many tissues in the human body exhibit such rapid signal decay that they are difficult to image with MRI: they are “MRI invisible”. Furthermore, some of the newer MRI imaging techniques have not been fully validated to ensure that they are truly revealing accurate information about the underlying anatomical microstructure that they purport to image. This dissertation focuses on the development of new techniques in two distinct areas. First, a novel method for accurately assessing the MRI signal decay properties of tissues that are normally MRI invisible, such as tendons, ligaments, and certain pathological chemical deposits in the brain, is presented. This is termed “ultrashort MRI relaxometry”. Second, two new image processing algorithms that operate on high resolution images of stained histological slices of the ex vivo brain are presented. The first of these image processing algorithms allows the semi-automated extraction of nerve fiber directionality from the histological slice images, a process that is normally done manually, is incredibly time consuming, and is prone to human error. This new technique represents one significant step in the complicated problem of attempting to validate a popular MRI technique, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), by ensuring that DTI results correlate with the true underlying physiology revealed by histological slicing and staining. The second of these image processing algorithms attempts to extract and segment regions of different “cytoarchitectonic characteristics” from stained histological slices of ex vivo brain. Again, traditional cytoarchitectonic segmentation relies on manual segmentation by an expert neuroanatomist, which is slow and sometimes inconsistent. The new technique is a first step towards automated this process, potentially providing greater accuracy and repeatability of the segmentations in a much shorter time. Together, these contributions represent a significant contribution to the body of MR imaging techniques, and associated image processing techniques for validation of newer MR neuroimaging techniques against the gold standard of stained histological slices of ex vivo brain.
A comparison of monodomain and bidomain propagation models for the human heart

A bidomain reaction-diffusion model of the human heart was developed and potentials resulting from normal depolarization and repolarization were compared with results from a compatible monodomain model. Comparisons were made for an empty isolated heart and for a heart with fluid-filled ventricles. Both sinus rhythm and ectopic activation were simulated. The model took 2 days on 32 processors to simulate a complete cardiac cycle. Differences between monodomain and bidomain results were very small, even for the extracellular potentials which, for the monodomain model, were computed with a high-resolution forward model. Electrograms computed with monodomain and bidomain models were visually indistinguishable. We conclude that, in the absence of applied currents, propagating action potentials on the scale of a human heart can be studied with a monodomain model
Fully Polynomial-Time Parameterized Computations for Graphs and Matrices of Low Treewidth

We investigate the complexity of several fundamental polynomial-time solvable problems on graphs and on matrices, when the given instance has low treewidth; in the case of matrices, we consider the treewidth of the graph formed by non-zero entries. In each of the considered cases, the best known algorithms working on general graphs run in polynomial time; however, the exponent of the polynomial is large. Therefore, our main goal is to construct algorithms with running time of the form poly(k)⋅ n or poly(k)⋅ nlog n, where k is the width of the tree decomposition given on the input. Such procedures would outperform the best known algorithms for the considered problems already for moderate values of the treewidth, like O(n1/c) for a constant c. Our results include the following: — an algorithm for computing the determinant and the rank of an n×n matrix using O(k3⋅n) time and arithmetic operations; —an algorithm for solving a system of linear equations using O(k3⋅n) time and arithmetic operations; —an O(k3⋅n log n)-time randomized algorithm for finding the cardinality of a maximum matching in a graph; —an O(k4⋅n log2 n)-time randomized algorithm for constructing a maximum matching in a graph; —an O(k2⋅n log n)-time algorithm for finding a maximum vertex flow in a directed graph. Moreover, we give an approximation algorithm for treewidth with time complexity suited to the running times as above. Namely, the algorithm, when given a graph G and integer k, runs in time O(k7⋅n log n) and either correctly reports that the treewidth of G is larger than k, or constructs a tree decomposition of G of width O(k2). The above results stand in contrast with the recent work of Abboud et al. (SODA 2016), which shows that the existence of algorithms with similar running times is unlikely for the problems of finding the diameter and the radius of a graph of low treewidth.
Making hard problems harder

We consider a general approach to the hoary problem of (im)proving circuit lower bounds. We define notions of hardness condensing and hardness extraction, in analogy to the corresponding notions from the computational theory of randomness. A hardness condenser is a procedure that takes in a Boolean function as input, as well as an advice string, and outputs a Boolean function on a smaller number of bits which has greater hardness when measured in terms of input length. A hardness extractor takes in a Boolean function as input, as well as an advice string, and outputs a Boolean function defined on a smaller number of bits which has close to maximum hardness. We prove several positive and negative results about these objects. First, we observe that hardness-based pseudo-random generators can be used to extract deterministic hardness from non-deterministic hardness. We derive several consequences of this observation. Among other results, we show that if E/O(n) has exponential non-deterministic hardness, then E/O{n) has deterministic hardness 2n/n, which is close to the maximum possible. We demonstrate a rare downward closure result: E with sub-exponential advice is contained in non-uniform space 2deltan for all delta > 0 if and only if there is k > 0 such that P with quadratic advice can be approximated in non-uniform space nk . Next, we consider limitations on natural models of hardness condensing and extraction. We show lower bounds on the advice length required for hardness condensing in a very general model of "relativizing" condensers. We show that non-trivial black-box extraction of deterministic hardness from deterministic hardness is essentially impossible. Finally, we prove positive results on hardness condensing in certain special cases. We show how to condense hardness from a biased function without advice using a hashing technique. We also give a hardness condenser without advice from average-case hardness to worst-case hardness. Our technique uses a connection between hardness condensing and explicit constructions of covering codes
The Joint Development of Orientation and Ocular Dominance: Role of Constraints

Correlation-based learning (CBL) has been suggested as the mechanism that underlies the development of simple-cell receptive fields in the primary visual cortex of cats, including orientation preference (OR) and ocular dominance (OD) (Linsker, 1986; Miller, Keller, & Stryker, 1989). CBL has been applied successfully to the development of OR and OD individually (Miller, Keller, & Stryker, 1989; Miller, 1994; Miyashita & Tanaka, 1991; Erwin, Obermayer, & Schulten, 1995), but the conditions for their joint development have not been studied (but see Erwin & Miller, 1995, for independent work on the same question) in contrast to competitive Hebbian models (Obermayer, Blasdel, & Schulten, 1992). In this article, we provide insight into why this has been the case: OR and OD decouple in symmetric CBL models, and a joint development of OR and OD is possible only in a parameter regime that depends on nonlinear mechanisms.