Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Chronic Illness System Using Biomedical Knowledge Sources and Relevance Feedback

CISS+ is a new surveillance system designed to aid clinicians seeking to help patients make healthy decisions about their lifestyle and health. It takes clinical records as queries anduses these records to find articles in the scientific literature that describe risk factors relevant to the patients' history and medical state. CISS+ is a revision of the earlier CISS system, which useda simple n-gram text retrieval strategy. CISS+ enhances CISS byusing higher-relevance terms and concepts taken from the UMLS and MetaMap systems and by using automated techniques related to relevance feedback to refine queries. CISS+ was evaluated viaa small set of experimental queries that were sent to other widely available biomedical research search systems. CISS+ returned asmall number of results that had better relevance to the goal of identifying risks factors.
Electromechanical Resonance in Magnetoelectric Composites: Direct and Inverse Effect

Magnetoelectric (ME) coupling in the composites is mediated by the mechanical stress and one would expect orders of magnitude stronger coupling when the frequency of the ac field is tuned to acoustic mode frequencies in the sample than at non-resonance frequencies. A model is presented for the increase in ME coupling in magnetostrictive-piezoelectric bilayers for the longitudinal, radial, and bending modes in the electromechanical resonance region. We solved the equation of medium motion taking into account the magnetostatic and elastostatic equations, constitutive equations, Hooke's law, and boundary conditions. We estimated the ME voltage coefficient for direct ME effect and ME susceptibility for inverse ME coupling. The frequency dependence of the ME voltage coefficient and ME susceptibility reveals a resonance character in the electromechanical resonance region. Then we considered ME interaction in the magneto-acoustic resonance region at the coincidence of electromechanical and magnetic resonance. Variation in the piezomagnetic coefficient with static magnetic field for magnetic layer results in a dependence of ME voltage on applied bias magnetic field. As an example, we considered specific cases of cobalt ferrite or yttrium-ferrum garnet - lead zirconate titanate and nickel/permendur - lead zirconate titanate bilayers. Estimated values of ME voltage coefficient versus frequency profiles are in agreement with data.
Isolation, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Virulence Genes of Pasteurella multocida Strains from Swine in China

ABSTRACT A total of 233 isolates of Pasteurella multocida were obtained from 2,912 cases of clinical respiratory disease in pigs in China, giving an isolation rate of 8.0%. Serogroup A P. multocida isolates were isolated from 92 cases (39.5%), and serogroup D isolates were isolated from 128 cases (54.9%); 12 isolates (5.2%) were untypeable. P. multocida was the fourth most frequent pathogenic bacterium recovered from the respiratory tract, after Streptococcus suis, Haemophilus parasuis, and Escherichia coli. All isolates were characterized for their susceptibilities to 20 antibiotics and the presence of 19 genes for virulence factors (VFs). The frequency of antimicrobial resistance among P. multocida isolates from swine in China was higher than that reported among P. multocida isolates from swine in from other countries, and 93.1% of the isolates showed multiple-drug resistance. There was a progressive increase in the rate of multiresistance to more than seven antibiotics, from 16.2% in 2003 to 62.8% in 2007. The resistance profiles suggested that cephalosporins, florfenicol, and fluoroquinolones were the drugs most likely to be active against P. multocida. Use of PCR showed that colonization factors (ptfA, fimA, and hsf-2), iron acquisition factors, sialidases (nanH), and outer membrane proteins occurred in most porcine strains. The VFs pfhA, tadD, toxA, and pmHAS were each present in <50% of strains. The various VFs exhibited distinctive associations with serogroups: concentrated in serogroup A, concentrated in serogroup D, or occurring jointly in serogroups A and D. These findings provide novel insights into the epidemiological characteristics of porcine P. multocida isolates and suggest that the potential threat of such multiresistant bacteria in food-producing animals should not be neglected.
Central shunt flows and pressures in the mature fetal lamb.

Two to eight days after surgery, we determined biventricular cardiac output with the microsphere-dilution method and individual ventricular output with an electromagnetic flow sensor in 12 fetal lambs. Mean biventricular output was 462 ml.min-1.kg-1. Right ventricular output was 60%, pulmonary blood flow was 6%, blood flow in the ductus arteriosus was 54%, flow through the foramen ovale was 34%, and flow in the descending thoracic aorta above the ductus arteriosus was 12% of the biventricular cardiac output. Foramen ovale flow did not correlate with the pressure difference between the atria. The flow though the foramen ovale correlated positively with the flow in the inferior caval vein. It was concluded the shunt flow through the foramen ovale is mainly determined by the kinetic energy of the blood in the "lower atrial inflow tract. " Fetal systemic somatic blood flow showed a reliable negative correlation with the oxygen tension in the fetal arterial blood. This was taken as presumptive evidence for long-term autoregulation of flow in the peripheral tissues.
Transparent aggregation of variables with Individual Differences Scaling

Although the aggregation of many linguistic variables has provided new insights into the structure of language varieties, aggregation studies have been criticized for obscuring the behavior of individual input variables. Previous solutions to this criticism consisted of extensive post-hoc calculations, simple correlation measures, or highly complex algorithms. We think that these solutions can be improved. Therefore, the current article proposes a creative use of Individual Differences Scaling (INDSCAL) as an alternative, more straightforward solution. INDSCAL is a branch of Multidimensional Scaling, which is currently the preferred dimension reduction technique for most aggregation studies. The link to the existing methodology and the simplicity of its rationale are the main advantages of INDSCAL. The article introduces INDSCAL by means of a non-linguistic example, a discussion of the mathematical properties, and a case study on the lexical convergence between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch in a corpus of language from 1950 and 1990. The case study shows how INDSCAL reproduces the results of a typical aggregation study, but elegantly keeps open the possibility of investigating the behavior of individual variables.
Transcriptome Profiling Reveals Higher Vertebrate Orthologous of Intra-Cytoplasmic Pattern Recognition Receptors in Grey Bamboo Shark

From an immunologist perspective, sharks are an important group of jawed cartilaginous fishes and survey of the public database revealed a great gap in availability of large-scale sequence data for the group of Chondrichthyans the elasmobranchs. In an attempt to bridge this deficit we generated the transcriptome from the spleen and kidney tissues (a total of 1,606,172 transcripts) of the shark, Chiloscyllium griseum using the Illumina HiSeq2000 platform. With a cut off of > = 300 bp and an expression value of >1RPKM we used 43,385 transcripts for BLASTX analysis which revealed 17,548 transcripts matching to the NCBI nr database with an E-value of < = 10−5 and similarity score of 40%. The longest transcript was 16,974 bases with matched to HECT domain containing E3 ubiqutin protein ligase. MEGAN4 annotation pipeline revealed immune and signalling pathways including cell adhesion molecules, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, T-cell receptor signalling pathway and chemokine signaling pathway to be highly expressed in spleen, while different metabolism pathways such as amino acid metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, lipid metabolism and xenobiotic biodegradation were highly expressed in kidney. Few of the candidate genes were selected to analyze their expression levels in various tissues by real-time PCR and also localization of a receptor by in-situ PCR to validate the prediction. We also predicted the domains structures of some of the identified pattern recognition receptors, their phylogenetic relationship with lower and higher vertebrates and the complete downstream signaling mediators of classical dsRNA signaling pathway. The generated transcriptome will be a valuable resource to further genetic and genomic research in elasmobranchs.
Collection of soluble variants of membrane proteins for transcriptomics and proteomics

The existence of a soluble splice variant for a gene encoding a transmembrane protein suggests that this gene plays a role in intercellular signalling, particularly in immunological processes. Also, the absence of a splice variant of a reported soluble variant suggests exclusive control of the solubilisation by proteolytic cleavage. Soluble splice variants of membrane proteins may also be interesting targets for crystallisation as their structure may be expected to preserve, at least partially, their function as integral membrane proteins, whose structures are most difficult to determine. This paper presents a dataset derived from the literature in an attempt to collect all reported soluble variants of membrane proteins, be they splice variants or shedded. A list of soluble variants is derived in silico from Ensembl. These are checked on their presence in multiple organisms and their number of membranespanning regions is inspected. The findings then are confirmed by a comparison with identified proteins of a recent global proteomics study of human blood plasma. Finally, a tool to determine novel soluble variants by proteomics is provided.
Binding and Fusion of Extracellular Vesicles to the Plasma Membrane of Their Cell Targets

Exosomes and ectosomes, extracellular vesicles of two types generated by all cells at multivesicular bodies and the plasma membrane, respectively, play critical roles in physiology and pathology. A key mechanism of their function, analogous for both types of vesicles, is the fusion of their membrane to the plasma membrane of specific target cells, followed by discharge to the cytoplasm of their luminal cargo containing proteins, RNAs, and DNA. Here we summarize the present knowledge about the interactions, binding and fusions of vesicles with the cell plasma membrane. The sequence initiates with dynamic interactions, during which vesicles roll over the plasma membrane, followed by the binding of specific membrane proteins to their cell receptors. Membrane binding is then converted rapidly into fusion by mechanisms analogous to those of retroviruses. Specifically, proteins of the extracellular vesicle membranes are structurally rearranged, and their hydrophobic sequences insert into the target cell plasma membrane which undergoes lipid reorganization, protein restructuring and membrane dimpling. Single fusions are not the only process of vesicle/cell interactions. Upon intracellular reassembly of their luminal cargoes, vesicles can be regenerated, released and fused horizontally to other target cells. Fusions of extracellular vesicles are relevant also for specific therapy processes, now intensely investigated.
Fingerprint orientation modeling by sparse coding

Local ridge orientation field describes well the topological pattern of fingerprint ridge-valley flows. It is a rich information resource for fingerprint image processing and feature extraction in automatic fingerprint recognition algorithm. But reliable estimation of orientation field is still challenging for fingerprint images of poor quality. In this paper, we propose a method for modeling fingerprint orientation field using sparse coding. The basis functions of discrete cosine transform (DCT) are used to build the basis atoms for the representation of orientation field and l1-norm regularized optimization is used for the sparse coding of DCT atoms. Finally, orientation field is reconstructed by linear combination of sparse coefficients and DCT atoms. The proposed orientation model does not need any prior information such as the locations of singular points and it is easy to implement. More importantly, the effect of noise can be significantly reduced by sparse coding. Experimental results and comparison are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for modeling orientation fields of fingerprints, especially the poor quality fingerprints.
Study on the application of advanced power electronics in smart grid

It is well known that the tendency of the smart grid constructing is more reliable, secure and efficient. Advancement in power electronics technology provides an important approach for such purpose. Therefore, this paper studied on the application of advanced power electronics in smart grid. The demand of smart grid for advanced power electronics technology and the research and development trend of advanced power electronic technology was introduced firstly. Then the principle of power electronics technology and its applications in smart grid was presented, with emphasis on the application of FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission Systems) technology, HVDC (high voltage DC Direct Current) transmission system technology and power quality technology in smart grid. The security, efficiency and reliability of that smart grids which had applied advanced power electronics were evaluated. The result shows that application of the advanced power electronic technology can strengthen and optimize the grid, ensure the safety of power grid stability and promote the utilization of renewable energy.
Advanced Quality-of-Service signaling for IP multicast

Supporting Quality-of-Service resource reservations for IP multicast flows is especially advantageous for distributed multimedia applications like video conferencing, 3D tele-immersion, or multi-player online gaming. In response to various limitations of RSVP the IETF developed more flexible signaling protocols within the Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) framework. But unlike RSVP, the NSIS protocols were designed to consider unicast flows only in order to reduce protocol complexity. This paper presents an extension of the NSIS signaling protocols that allow for QoS resource reservations of IP multicast data flows. We describe the main challenges and discuss the resulting design decisions in detail. Enhancements of an existing NSIS implementation show that the required changes are minimal and do neither affect the unicast protocol operation, nor increase the protocol's complexity significantly. Instead, all of the advanced features introduced by NSIS, like reliable signaling message transport or support for sender- and receiver-initiated reservations can also be used with IP multicast flows. Evaluation results confirm that the overhead introduced by supporting IP multicast in NSIS compared to unicast reservations is negligible and that the presented solutions also offers scalable sender-initiated reservations.
Created Beings: From Commonplace Motifs to Robot Myths and Simulacra

A commonplace object becomes the basis for an autonomous robotic artwork called Floribots. The work exhibits novel movement patterns that are highly engaging to its audience - leading the author to posit the phenomenon of emergence to explain unanticipated artwork behavior. The limits of this explanation are mapped by creating a series of autonomous artworks of varying levels of complexity. A synthesis around the nature of created beings is extended with reference to anthropomorphism, robot mythology, and simulacra.
Targeting heterogeneity of adrenocortical carcinoma: Evaluation and extension of preclinical tumor models to improve clinical translation

In recent years it has been recognized that clinical translation of novel therapeutic strategies for patients with adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) often fails. These disappointing results indicate that the currently utilized tumor models only poorly reflect relevant pathophysiology and, thereby, do not predict clinical applicability of novel pharmacological approaches. However, also the development of new preclinical ACC models has remained a challenge with only one human cell line (NCI-H295R) and one recently established human pediatric xenograft model (SJ-ACC3) being available for this highly heterogeneous malignancy. Our current study furthermore reveals a poor reproducibility of therapeutic action between different clones of the most commonly used tumor model NCI-H295R. In an attempt to broaden the current preclinical armamentarium, we aimed at the development of patient-individual tumor models. During these studies, one xenograft (MUC-1) displayed marked engraftment and sustained tumor growth. MUC-1 tumor analysis revealed highly vascularized, proliferating and SF-1 positive xenografts. In a next step, we characterized all currently available human tumor models for ACC for Ki67, SF-1 and EGF-receptor status in comparison with MUC-1-xenografts. In addition, we established a primary culture, which is now viable over 31 passages with sustained nuclear SF-1 and cytoplasmic 3βHSD immuno-positivity. Subsequent investigation of therapeutic responsiveness upon treatment with the current systemic gold standard EDP-M (etoposide, doxorubicin, cisplatin and mitotane) demonstrated maintenance of the clinically observed drug resistance for MUC-1 exclusively. In summary, we provide evidence for a novel patient-derived tumor model with the potential to improve clinical prediction of novel therapeutic strategies for patients with ACC.
First-Principles Study of a Novel Molecular Rectifier

Designing molecular structures to meet certain behavior has become an important step in the field of molecular electronics. Interestingly, linker groups between molecules and electrodes show a critical role in the characteristic of the molecular devices. In this theoretical paper, a molecular rectifier that offers rectification ratio of more than three orders of magnitude, while preserving high on-current, is designed. In addition, a thorough investigation and explanation for the quantum transport through the device is provided. The characterization developed in this paper establishes a tight relation between the transmission spectra and electrostatic potential profile of the molecular device on the one hand, and the understanding/prediction of the rectification behavior on the other hand.
Overcoming faults using evolution on the PAnDA architecture

This paper explores the potential for transistor level fault tolerance on a new Programmable Analogue and Digital Array (PAnDA) architecture1. In particular, this architecture features Combinatorial Configurable Analogue Blocks (CCABs) that can implement a number of combinatorial functions similar to FPGAs. In addition, PAnDA allows one to reconfigure features of the underlying analogue layer. In PAnDA-EINS, the functions that the CCAB can implement are predefined through the use of a routing block. This paper is a study of whether removing this routing block and allowing direct control of the transistors provides benefits for fault tolerance. Experiments are conducted in two stages. In the first stage, a logic function is evolved on a CCAB and then optimised using a GA. A fault is then injected into the substrate, breaking the logic function. The second stage of the experiment consists of evolving the logic function again on the faulty substrate. The results of these experiments show that the removal of the routing block from the CCAB is beneficial for fault tolerance.
Estimating Switching Costs for Medicare Advantage Plans

Medicare eligibles have the option of choosing from a menu of privately administered managed care plans, known as Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, in lieu of conventional fee-for-service Medicare coverage ("original Medicare"). These plans often provide extra bene ts to enrollees, but may impose large switching costs as a result of restrictive provider networks, di¤erences in coverage across plans, and learning and search costs. I propose a structural dynamic discrete choice model of how consumers who are persistently heterogeneous make the choice among MA plans and original Medicare based on the characteristics of the available MA plans. The model explicitly incorporates a switching cost and changes over time in choice sets and plan characteristics. I estimate the parameters of the model, including the switching cost, using the methods developed by Gowrisankaran and Rysman (2011). The estimates indicate that the switching cost is statistically and economically signi cant. Through a series of counterfactual analyses, I nd that the share of consumers choosing MA plans in place of original Medicare would more than triple in the absence of switching costs, and nearly double if plan exit and quality changes were eliminated. I also nd that when switching costs are accounted for the Medicare Advantage program is not very valuable to consumers and even reduces consumer welfare in some years. I am grateful to my main advisor, Gautam Gowrisankaran, who has been an excellent source of ideas, suggestions, and encouragement. The input of Kei Hirano, Mo Xiao, and Keith Joiner has also been invaluable. Paris Cleanthous and other participants at the CEPR IO School made helpful comments, as did participants in the University of Arizona Empirical Workshop, including Mauricio Varela, Tiemen Woutersen, and Mario Samano. Josh Lustig kindly shared data for this paper.
Dopamine transmission in DYT1 dystonia: A biochemical and autoradiographical study

Abstract—Indices of dopamine transmission were measured in the postmortem striatum of DYT1 dystonia brains. A significant increase in the striatal 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid/dopamine ratio was found. Quantitative autoradiography revealed no differences in the density of dopamine transporter or vesicular monoamine transporter-2 binding; however, there was a trend toward a reduction in D1 receptor and D2 receptor binding. One brain with DYT1 parkinsonism was similarly evaluated and marked reductions in striatal dopamine, 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid, and homovanillic acid content as well as the density of binding of all four dopaminergic ligands were measured.
Optimization of the Kinematics Available in the Polishing Process of Ceramic Tiles by Computational Simulations

This work investigated the influence of the kinematics involved in the polishing process of stoneware tiles over the spatial distribution of abrasive contacts. The basic intention was to delimit the best combinations of both forward and transverse oscillation motions that would result in a uniform polishing effect over the tile surface. Such uniformity was quantitatively represented by the variance of the distribution of polishing time. By means of computational algorithms, a wide range of both forward speed and oscillation frequency were simulated in order to obtain the corresponding distributions of polishing time. The results highlight the importance of adopting good kinematics to avoid excessive polishing gradients. Thus, a large number of kinematic conditions could be potentially recommended, whereas many others were found to be primarily inadequate. In view of this, the simulations carried out herein can be suggested as a useful guide for future phenomenological investigations, and also as a useful tool for polishing industries.
Glutathione peroxidase of calf trabecular meshwork.

Glutathione peroxidase was extracted from calf trabecular meshwork. The kinetics of this enzyme were examined, varying the substrates hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), tert- butylhydroperoxide ( tBHP ), and glutathione. The activity of the enzyme in nonpurified homogenates was 596 nmole H2O2 reduced/min/gm wet weight and 680 nmole tBHP reduced/min/gm wet weight (27-28 nmole peroxide reduced/min/mg protein). The apparent Michaelis--Menten constants for H2O2, tBHP , and GSH were 0.012, 0.102, and 2.89 mM, respectively. These data, together with published levels of glutathione in trabecular meshwork, suggest that the trabecular endothelial cell actively detoxifies H2O2.