Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outcome of current and history of cancer on the risk of cardiovascular events following percutaneous coronary intervention: a Kumamoto University Malignancy and Atherosclerosis (KUMA) study

Aims With the advancement in successfully treating different types of cancers, there is an immediate and increased need to focus on the risk and complexity of treating cardiovascular events in cancer survivors. This has led to the emergence of onco-cardiology/cardio-oncology field. We examined the varying incidence of cardiovascular events after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients with or without cancer. Methods and results Participants were divided into a non-malignant group and a malignant group, consisting of patients who were receiving or had ever received cancer treatment. The primary endpoint was target lesion revascularization (TLR) within 1 year of PCI. In the patient groups studied, we showed that the malignant group had a significantly higher probability of TLR than the non-malignant group (P = 0.002). Moreover, proportional hazards analyses identified malignancy as an independent predictor of TLR [hazard ratio (HR) 2.28, 95% confidential interval (CI) 1.3-4.0; P = 0.004]. Combining malignancy status with high-sensitivity C-reactive protein levels further increased the HR for TLR (HR 3.01, 95% CI 1.57-5.76; P = 0.001), and the net reclassification improvement was significant (15.2%, 95% CI 4.3-26%; P = 0.02). Time since completion of cancer treatment had an impact on the rate of TLR, with those patients with a current or recent cancer history having more TLR events within 1 year. Conclusion We demonstrated a significant association between the recent history of cancer and the risk of recurrent coronary atherosclerosis in patients undergoing PCI and showed that malignancy status can predict the likelihood of cardiovascular events following this procedure.
Long-lasting successful dissemination of resistance to oxazolidinones in MDR Staphylococcus epidermidis clinical isolates in a tertiary care hospital in France

Abstract Objectives Patient- and procedure-related changes in modern medicine have turned CoNS into one of the major nosocomial pathogens. Treatments of CoNS infections are challenging owing to the large proportion of MDR strains and oxazolidinones often remain the last active antimicrobial molecules. Here, we have investigated a long-lasting outbreak (2010–13) due to methicillin- and linezolid-resistant (LR) CoNS (n = 168), involving 72 carriers and 49 infected patients. Methods Antimicrobial susceptibilities were tested by the disc diffusion method and MICs were determined by broth microdilution or Etest. The clonal relationship of LR Staphylococcus epidermidis (LRSE) was first determined using a semi-automated repetitive element palindromic PCR (rep-PCR) method. Then, WGS was performed on all cfr-positive LRSE (n = 30) and LRSE isolates representative of each rep-PCR-defined clone (n = 17). Self-transferability of cfr-carrying plasmids was analysed by filter-mating experiments. Results This outbreak was caused by the dissemination of three clones (ST2, ST5 and ST22) of LRSE. In these clones, linezolid resistance was caused by (i) mutations in the chromosome-located genes encoding the 23S RNA and L3 and L4 ribosomal proteins, but also by (ii) the dissemination of two different self-conjugative plasmids carrying the cfr gene encoding a 23S RNA methylase. By monitoring linezolid prescriptions in two neighbouring hospitals, we highlighted that the spread of LR-CoNS was strongly associated with linezolid use. Conclusions Physicians should be aware that plasmid-encoded linezolid resistance has started to disseminate among CoNS and that rational use of oxazolidinones is critical to preserve these molecules as efficient treatment options for MDR Gram-positive pathogens.
Effect of a particular coupling on the dynamic behavior of nonlinear systems

In this paper, the dynamics of particular nonlinear dynamic systems of order six, characterized by two positive Lyapunov exponents, is analyzed. Transformation techniques are applied to the study of these systems; in particular, the analysis of the transverse and tangent systems showed that they are equivalent to two uncoupled identical chaotic systems of order three. Examples of polynomial and piecewise linear systems are proposed. Both numerical simulation and circuit implementation have been performed. Moreover, a systematic method to project these systems is presented. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A piecewise parallel solution of current mismatch based Newton-Raphson power flow

This paper proposes a piecewise parallel solution to the Newton-Raphson power flow problem using the concept of current mismatches, instead of power mismatches. The given large network is divided into a number of smaller sub-networks. Computations are performed upon the individual sub-networks. Then the sub-network solutions are consolidated to obtain the solution of the original network using the Large Change Sensitivity concept. No restrictions are imposed on the number and size of the sub-networks in this method. Also, complications such as temporary slack bus assignment for each sub-network and bus reordering do not arise. The number of iterations required for convergence remains exactly the same as that for the original undivided network. The proposed algorithm is tested on 118, 300, 2383, 6515, 9241 and 13659 bus test systems. For large systems, a speed up of 5 to 6 times is obtained compared to the sequential current mismatch based solution.
Rule Extraction from Support Vector Machines and Its Applications

Support Vector Machines are the state-of-the-art tools in data mining. However, their strength are also their main weakness, as the generated nonlinear models are typically regarded as incomprehensible black-box models. Therefore, opening the black-boxor making SVMs explainable became more important and necessary in areas such as medical diagnosis and credit evaluation. Rule extraction from SVMs, which is in order to make SVMs more explainable has developed during recent years. However, existing rule extracted algorithms have limitations in real applications especially when the problems are large scale with high dimensions. In this paper, we combined two feature selection techniques with rule extraction from SVMs in order to deal with this case. And we also proposed a new criteria to evaluate the extracted rules in order to rich the evaluation standards. Numerical experiments show the efficiency of our method.
Exploring Software Engineering Catalogues with Poster Sessions

In modern software engineering there are many aspects of software craftsmanship that consist of long catalogues of patterns or of dos and don'ts. For example, there are a number of standard books on important topics such as refactorings, aspects of Clean Code and design patterns that are useful to the practitioner, but would be extremely boring if they were to be taught by an instructor displaying slide after slide. Encouraging students to produce and present posters on these topics can be a useful pedagogical method for teaching these subjects. This short paper will discuss the use of poster sessions in university-level software engineering courses.
Online temporal calibration for camera–IMU systems: Theory and algorithms

When fusing visual and inertial measurements for motion estimation, each measurement’s sampling time must be precisely known. This requires knowledge of the time offset that inevitably exists between the two sensors’ data streams. The first contribution of this work is an online approach for estimating this time offset, by treating it as an additional state variable to be estimated along with all other variables of interest (inertial measurement unit (IMU) pose and velocity, biases, camera-to-IMU transformation, feature positions). We show that this approach can be employed in pose-tracking with mapped features, in simultaneous localization and mapping, and in visual–inertial odometry. The second main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the identifiability of the time offset between the visual and inertial sensors. We show that the offset is locally identifiable, except in a small number of degenerate motion cases, which we characterize in detail. These degenerate cases are either (i) cases known to cause loss of observability even when no time offset exists, or (ii) cases that are unlikely to occur in practice. Our simulation and experimental results validate these theoretical findings, and demonstrate that the proposed approach yields high-precision, consistent estimates, in scenarios involving either known or unknown features, with both constant and time-varying offsets.
Epitope-Binding Characteristics for Risk versus Protective DRB1 Alleles for Visceral Leishmaniasis

HLA-DRB1 is the major genetic risk factor for visceral leishmaniasis (VL). We used SNP2HLA to impute HLA-DRB1 alleles and SNPTEST to carry out association analyses in 889 human cases and 977 controls from India. NetMHCIIpan 2.1 was used to map epitopes and binding affinities across 49 Leishmania vaccine candidates, as well as across peptide epitopes captured from dendritic cells treated with crude Leishmania Ag and identified using mass spectrometry and alignment to amino acid sequences of a reference Leishmania genome. Cytokines were measured in peptide-stimulated whole blood from 26 cured VL cases and eight endemic healthy controls. HLA-DRB1*1501 and DRB1*1404/DRB1*1301 were the most significant protective and risk alleles, respectively, with specific residues at aa positions 11 and 13 unique to protective alleles. We observed greater peptide promiscuity in sequence motifs for 9-mer core epitopes predicted to bind to risk (*1404/*1301) compared with protective (*1501) DRB1 alleles. There was a higher frequency of basic amino acids in DRB1*1404/*1301-specific epitopes compared with hydrophobic and polar amino acids in DRB1*1501-specific epitopes at anchor residues pocket 4 and pocket 6, which interact with residues at DRB1 positions 11 and 13. Cured VL patients made variable, but robust, IFN-γ, TNF, and IL-10 responses to 20-mer peptides based on captured epitopes, with peptides based on DRB1*1501-captured epitopes resulting in a higher proportion (odds ratio 2.23, 95% confidence interval 1.17–4.25, p = 0.017) of patients with IFN-γ/IL-10 ratios > 2-fold compared with peptides based on DRB1*1301-captured epitopes. Our data provide insight into the molecular mechanisms underpinning the association of HLA-DRB1 alleles with risk versus protection in VL in humans.
Reducing Dropout in Treatment for Depression: Translating Dropout Predictors Into Individualized Treatment Recommendations.

OBJECTIVE Premature discontinuation of therapy is a widespread problem that hampers the delivery of mental health treatment. A high degree of variability has been found among rates of premature treatment discontinuation, suggesting that rates may differ depending on potential moderators. In the current study, our aim was to identify demographic and interpersonal variables that moderate the association between treatment assignment and dropout. METHODS Data from a randomized controlled trial conducted from November 2001 through June 2007 (N = 156) comparing supportive-expressive therapy, antidepressant medication, and placebo for the treatment of depression (based on DSM-IV criteria) were used. Twenty prerandomization variables were chosen based on previous literature. These variables were subjected to exploratory bootstrapped variable selection and included in the logistic regression models if they passed variable selection. RESULTS Three variables were found to moderate the association between treatment assignment and dropout: age, pretreatment therapeutic alliance expectations, and the presence of vindictive tendencies in interpersonal relationships. When patients were divided into those randomly assigned to their optimal treatment and those assigned to their least optimal treatment, dropout rates in the optimal treatment group (24.4%) were significantly lower than those in the least optimal treatment group (47.4%; P = .03). CONCLUSIONS Present findings suggest that a patient's age and pretreatment interpersonal characteristics predict the association between common depression treatments and dropout rate. If validated by further studies, these characteristics can assist in reducing dropout through targeted treatment assignment. TRIAL REGISTRATION Secondary analysis of data from ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00043550.
Enhancing model-based skin color detection: From low-level RGB features to high-level discriminative binary-class features

We propose two very effective high-level binary-class features to enhance model-based skin color detection. First we find that the log likelihood ratio of the testing data between skin and non-skin RGB models can be a good discriminative feature. We also find that namely the background-foreground correlation provides another complementary feature compared to the conventional low-level RGB feature. Further improvement can be accomplished by Bayesian model adaptation and feature fusion. By jointly considering both schemes of Bayesian model adaptation and feature fusion, we attain the best system performance. Experimental results show that the proposed joint framework improves the 68% to 84% baseline F1 scores to as high as almost 90% in a wide range of lighting conditions.
Agriculture and food animals as a source of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria

One of the major breakthroughs in the history of medicine is undoubtedly the discovery of antibiotics. Their use in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine has resulted in healthier and more productive farm animals, ensuring the welfare and health of both animals and humans. Unfortunately, from the first use of penicillin, the resistance countdown started to tick. Nowadays, the infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing, and resistance to antibiotics is probably the major public health problem. Antibiotic use in farm animals has been criticized for contributing to the emergence of resistance. The use and misuse of antibiotics in farm animal settings as growth promoters or as nonspecific means of infection prevention and treatment has boosted antibiotic consumption and resistance among bacteria in the animal habitat. This reservoir of resistance can be transmitted directly or indirectly to humans through food consumption and direct or indirect contact. Resistant bacteria can cause serious health effects directly or via the transmission of the antibiotic resistance traits to pathogens, causing illnesses that are difficult to treat and that therefore have higher morbidity and mortality rates. In addition, the selection and proliferation of antibiotic-resistant strains can be disseminated to the environment via animal waste, enhancing the resistance reservoir that exists in the environmental microbiome. In this review, an effort is made to highlight the various factors that contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance in farm animals and to provide some insights into possible solutions to this major health issue.
Adaptation of Reactive Saccades is Influenced by Unconscious Priming of the Attention Focus

ABSTRACT The authors investigated whether the size of the attention focus can influence saccadic adaptation, and whether this influence changes in older age. Using the scrambled sentence task, young and older participants were either primed for a wide attention focus, or primed of a narrow attention focus, or were not primed for any specific attention focus. Subsequently, all participants underwent a double-step saccadic adaptation paradigm aimed at changing the direction of reflexive saccades. The authors found that compared to the nonprimed control group, priming for a wide attention focus enhanced saccadic adaptation in both age groups by a similar amount; the benefit persisted throughout the adaptation phase, but was absent during the deadaptation phase. In contrast, the authors found no effects of priming with a narrow attention focus on saccadic adaptation. From this the authors conclude that a wide attention focus is beneficial for workaround strategies but not for adaptive recalibration, and that those benefits are similar in young and older persons.
Defining ecologically relevant scales for spatial protection with long‐term data on an endangered seabird and local prey availability

Human activities are important drivers of marine ecosystem functioning. However, separating the synergistic effects of fishing and environmental variability on the prey base of nontarget predators is difficult, often because prey availability estimates on appropriate scales are lacking. Understanding how prey abundance at different spatial scales links to population change can help integrate the needs of nontarget predators into fisheries management by defining ecologically relevant areas for spatial protection. We investigated the local population response (number of breeders) of the Bank Cormorant (Phalacrocorax neglectus), a range‐restricted endangered seabird, to the availability of its prey, the heavily fished west coast rock lobster (Jasus lalandii). Using Bayesian state‐space modeled cormorant counts at 3 colonies, 22 years of fisheries‐independent data on local lobster abundance, and generalized additive modeling, we determined the spatial scale pertinent to these relationships in areas with different lobster availability. Cormorant numbers responded positively to lobster availability in the regions with intermediate and high abundance but not where regime shifts and fishing pressure had depleted lobster stocks. The relationships were strongest when lobsters 20–30 km offshore of the colony were considered, a distance greater than the Bank Cormorant's foraging range when breeding, and may have been influenced by prey availability for nonbreeding birds, prey switching, or prey ecology. Our results highlight the importance of considering the scale of ecological relationships in marine spatial planning and suggest that designing spatial protection around focal species can benefit marine predators across their full life cycle. We propose the precautionary implementation of small‐scale marine protected areas, followed by robust assessment and adaptive‐management, to confirm population‐level benefits for the cormorants, their prey, and the wider ecosystem, without negative impacts on local fisheries.
Modified transprepancreatic septotomy reduces postoperative complications after intractable biliary access

Abstract This study aimed to assess the clinical value of transprepancreatic septotomy indwelling guide wire or pancreatic duct stent in intractable endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) for bile duct cannulation. Of the 2107 patients treated by ERCP, a total of 81 cases with difficult bile duct cannulation underwent transprebiliopancreatic septotomy (referred to as the septotomy group, 37 cases) and transprepancreatic septotomy with pancreatic duct stent (modified septotomy group, 44 cases). Success rates of cannulation and postoperative complications for both methods were compared. Among them, 77 cases were successfully administered bile duct cannulation. The success rates of the septotomy and modified septotomy groups were 91.89% and 97.73%, respectively, with no significant difference (P = .489). Of the 77 patients, 12 cases had complications. The septotomy group included 7 acute pancreatitis, 1 bleeding, and 1 biliary tract infection cases; while in the modified septotomy group, there were 1 acute pancreatitis, 1 bleeding, and 1 biliary tract infection cases. The occurrence rate of acute pancreatitis in the modified septotomy group was lower than that of the septotomy group (2.33% vs 20.59%) with a significant difference (P = .026). These findings indicate that transprepancreatic septotomy with pancreatic duct stent seems to be a safe and feasible operation with reducing complication rates.
Kidney function modifies the selection of treatment strategies and long-term survival in stable ischaemic heart disease: insights from the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcomes Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH) registry

Aims Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) have been under-represented in stable ischaemic heart disease (SIHD) trials despite their heightened risk of cardiovascular mortality. We examine associations between kidney disease, treatment selection, and long-term survival in patients with SIHD. Methods and results SIHD patients with angiographically significant stenosis (≥70%) were categorized by renal function [dialysis-dependent, severe CKD [estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) < 30], mild-moderate CKD (eGFR 30-59), and no CKD (eGFR ≥ 60)] and by treatment groups [revascularization ≤3 months of angiogram (percutaneous coronary intervention or coronary artery bypass surgery) vs. medical therapy]. The association between renal function category and treatment on long-term survival was examined and adjusted for differences in age, sex, co-morbidities, and coronary anatomy. Of the 17 910 SIHD patients, 0.7% (n = 118) were dialysis-dependent, 1.2% (n = 215) severe CKD, 12.0% (n = 2157) mild-moderate CKD, and 86.1% (n = 15420) no CKD. The presence of CKD was associated with significantly lower adjusted odds of receiving revascularization [reference no CKD: dialysis-dependent: odds ratio (OR) 0.52 (0.35, 0.79), severe (non-dialysis) CKD: OR 0.54 (0.40, 0.73), and mild-moderate CKD: OR 0.80 (0.71, 0.89)]. Over a median follow-up of 8.0 (interquartile range 3.2) years, patients with progressive CKD had higher long-term mortality (dialysis-dependent, 53.4%; severe CKD, 30.2%; mild-moderate CKD, 22.2%; no CKD, 11.9%, Ptrend < 0.0001). Revascularization was associated with improved long-term survival [adjusted hazard ratio (HR): dialysis-dependent: HR 0.29 (0.15, 0.55), severe CKD: HR 0.63 (0.36, 1.08), mild-moderate CKD: HR 0.49 (0.40, 0.60), and no CKD: HR 0.47 (0.42, 0.52)] (Pinteraction < 0.001). Conclusion In SIHD, the presence of CKD was accompanied by lower revascularization rates and a higher risk of mortality. However, revascularization in CKD was associated with improved long-term survival.
A prospective 10-year follow-up dental cast study of patients with obstructive sleep apnoea/snoring who use a mandibular protruding device

Objectives This 10-year prospective study aimed to measure and evaluate the teeth position and occlusion following 10-year nocturnal use of a mandibular protruding device (MPD) in subjects with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) or snoring. Materials and methods Seventy-seven consecutive patients diagnosed with OSA/snoring were treated with an MPD. Fabrication of dental casts with jaw registration indexes in the intercuspal position was carried out at baseline and at follow-up, a construction bite was made, and an MPD was fitted. At the 10-year follow-up, all subjects (n = 74) were invited to participate. The dental casts were analysed in a series of measurements. Results Sixty subjects were included in the follow-up examination-41 were still using the device and 19 had ceased using the MPD. The MPD users showed significant changes in all analysed variables-decrease of overjet (-1.8 mm), overbite (-1.5 mm)-except the mandibular intercanine width and the maxillary anteroposterior relationship. Subjects who had ceased using their MPD retained their initial values, with the exception of a decreased overbite. The MPD users also showed an increased number of subjects with mesio-occlusion and posterior infra-occlusion; those who had ceased using their MPD mostly retained their initial status. Conclusions Long-term nocturnal use of an MPD may cause both favourable and unfavourable occlusion changes, such as a decrease of the overjet and overbite or posterior infra-occlusion, and these changes may continue to develop during treatment with an MPD. Subjects with a Class III relationship may not be a suitable group for treatment with an MPD due to the mesial drift of the mandibular teeth.