Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Congenital diaphragmatic hernia: a meta-analysis of mortality factors.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to review all available studies reported in the English-language literature from 1975 through 1998, and by meta-analysis assess the importance of prenatal diagnosis, associated malformations, side of hernia, timing of surgery, and study population on mortality rates in patients with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). METHODS One-hundred-two studies were identified, and 51 studies (2,980 patients) fulfilled the prespecified inclusion criteria. Studies were grouped according to study population into: (I) fetuses diagnosed prenatally; (II) neonates admitted to a treatment center; and (III) population-based studies. RESULTS Pooled total mortality rate was significantly higher in category I than in category III (75.6% v 58.2%, P < .001). Pooled hidden postnatal mortality rate (deaths before admittance to a treatment center) in population-based studies was 34.9%. Prenatally diagnosed patients in both category II and III had significantly higher mortality rates than those diagnosed postnatally. Mortality rates were significantly higher among CDH infants with associated major malformations compared with isolated CDH in all 3 categories. An increased mortality rate in right-sided CDH was found in category II and III. CONCLUSIONS Prenatal diagnosis of CDH, presence of associated major malformations, and the study population have a major influence on mortality rate. The very high mortality rate in studies of fetuses with a prenatal diagnosis of CDH should be taken into account in prenatal counselling.
Tumour necrosis factor (TNFalpha) as a novel therapeutic target in symptomatic corticosteroid dependent asthma.

BACKGROUND Tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFalpha) is a major therapeutic target in a range of chronic inflammatory disorders characterised by a Th1 type immune response in which TNFalpha is generated in excess. By contrast, asthma is regarded as a Th2 type disorder, especially when associated with atopy. However, as asthma becomes more severe and chronic, it adopts additional characteristics including corticosteroid refractoriness and involvement of neutrophils suggestive of an altered inflammatory profile towards a Th1 type response, incriminating cytokines such as TNFalpha. METHODS TNFalpha levels in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid of 26 healthy controls, 42 subjects with mild asthma and 20 with severe asthma were measured by immunoassay, and TNFalpha gene expression was determined in endobronchial biopsy specimens from 14 patients with mild asthma and 14 with severe asthma. The cellular localisation of TNFalpha was assessed by immunohistochemistry. An open label uncontrolled clinical study was then undertaken in 17 subjects with severe asthma to evaluate the effect of 12 weeks of treatment with the soluble TNFalpha receptor-IgG1Fc fusion protein, etanercept. RESULTS TNFalpha levels in BAL fluid, TNFalpha gene expression and TNFalpha immunoreative cells were increased in subjects with severe corticosteroid dependent asthma. Etanercept treatment was associated with improvement in asthma symptoms, lung function, and bronchial hyperresponsiveness. CONCLUSIONS These findings may be of clinical significance in identifying TNFalpha as a new therapeutic target in subjects with severe asthma. The effects of anti-TNF treatment now require confirmation in placebo controlled studies.
Incidence, Medical Resource Utilisation and Costs of Hyperuricemia and Tumour Lysis Syndrome in Patients with Acute Leukaemia and Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in Four European Countries

Hyperuricemia (HU) and tumour lysis syndrome (TLS) are complications of acute leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) leading to increased morbidity and mortality. The objective of this study was to define incidence and calculate health care cost associated with HU and TLS. 788 acute leukaemia and NHL patients from Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain and UK were screened retrospectively for HU and TLS. Resource use related to HU and TLS was recorded and costs were calculated applying local unit costs. Results showed that HU occurred in 18.9% of patients, and 27.8% of them fulfilled TLS criteria. The cost of HU without TLS was €672 (SE 181), the cost of TLS €7,342 (SE 1,412). TLS requiring dialysis incurred an average cost of €17,706. In conclusion, it is noted that the observed incidence rates were lower than earlier reports. In addition, some risk factors for HU and TLS (e.g. paediatric patients versus adults) were not associated with increased rates of HU or TLS as a consequence of higher rates of prevention. TLS cases incurred 11 times higher costs than HU cases in which TLS was absent. The main cost drivers in TLS are interventions requiring intensive care.
Changes in Thy1 gene expression associated with damaged retinal ganglion cells.

PURPOSE The temporal series of molecular events that occur in dying retinal ganglion cells is poorly understood. We have examined the change in expression of a normally-expressed ganglion cell marker gene, Thy1, relative to the kinetics of cell loss caused by acute and chronic damaging stimuli. METHODS For acute experiments, mice were subjected to optic nerve crush or intravitreal injections of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) to induce ganglion cell death. RNase protection analysis was used to quantify Thy1 mRNA levels from total retina RNA and in situ hybridization was used to monitor the pattern of Thy1 positive cells. Changes in Thy1 expression were compared to the time course of cell loss induced by each treatment. To induce elevated intraocular pressure (IOP), the episcleral veins of rats were injected with hypertonic saline, which scleroses Schlemm's Canal and the trabecular meshwork. Elevated IOP was monitored every day for 35 days after which the animals were sacrificed and the retinas harvested for quantitative RT-PCR or fixed for in situ hybridization studies. Evaluation of glaucomatous damage caused by elevated IOP was determined from histological sections of the optic nerves of all rat eyes. RESULTS After optic nerve crush, Thy1 mRNA levels decreased within 24 h, although the number of expressing cells did not decline until 7 days. Both measures showed a loss of Thy1 well in advance of cell loss, which was detected by 2 weeks after surgery. This change in expression was not dependent on execution of the cell death program since a similar decrease was detected in Bax-/- ganglion cells, which are resistant to cell death induced by optic nerve crush. Thy1 mRNA levels and the number of expressing cells also decreased within 6 h after NMDA injection, in advance of cell loss, which was detected by 24 h. Similarly, elevated intraocular pressure was associated with a decrease in mRNA and expressing cells in a pressure-dependent manner. In moderately hypertensive rat eyes, the number of cells expressing Thy1 decreased before significant cell loss in the retina. Virtually no Thy1-expressing cells were detected in eyes with severe disease. CONCLUSIONS Thy1 mRNA abundance and expressing cells, decreased in advance of detectable ganglion cell loss caused by three different modalities of damage. This change is independent of the committed step of cell death.
Cancer Therapy : Preclinical Engineering the Brain Tumor Microenvironment Enhances the Efficacy of Dendritic Cell Vaccination : Implications for Clinical Trial Design

Purpose: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a deadly primary brain tumor. Clinical trials for GBM using dendritic cell (DC) vaccination resulted in antitumor immune responses. Herein, we tested the hypothesis that combining in situ (intratumoral) Ad-Flt3L/Ad-TK–mediated gene therapy with DC vaccination would increase therapeutic efficacy and antitumor immunity. Experimental Design: We first assessed the immunogenicity of tumor lysates generated by Ad-TK (þGCV), temozolomide (TMZ), or freeze/thawing cycles (FTC) in a syngeneic brain tumor model. We also assessed phenotypic markers, cytokine release, and phagocytosis of bone marrow–derived DCs generated by fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 ligand (Flt3L)þ IL-6 or by granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and interleukin (IL) 4. Inhibition of tumor progression and production of anti-GBM antibodies was assessed following vaccination with (i) tumor cell lysates, (ii) DCs generated with either Flt3L/IL-6 or GM-CSF/IL-4 loaded with either Ad-TK/GCV-, TMZ-, or FTC-generated tumor lysates, or (iii) DCs in combination with in situ Ad-Flt3L/Ad-TK gene therapy. Results: DCs loaded with tumor cell lysates generated with either Ad-TK/GCV or TMZ led to increased levels of phagocytosis, therapeutic efficacy, and humoral immune response. In situ immunogene therapy in combination with DC vaccination led to brain tumor regression and long-term survival in about 90% of animals, a significant increase when compared with either therapy alone. Conclusions:Our results indicate that modifying the tumor microenvironment using intratumoral AdFlt3L/Ad-TK–mediated gene therapy potentiates therapeutic efficacy and antitumor immunity induced by DC vaccination. These data support novel phase I clinical trials to assess the safety and efficacy of this combined approach. Clin Cancer Res; 17(14); –1 . ’2011 AACR.
Remote Opportunities: A Rethinking and Retooling

Introducing technology as a sustainable means of creating, connecting, and collaborating reveals the need to carefully consider subtle aspects of deployment strategies and support in remote regions. In order to comprehensively address both cultural and technical issues for educational infrastructure, we consider two elements to be key: (1) a staged deployment approach, involving both educators and community members, coupled with (2) uniquely designed collaborative integrated development environments (IDEs) to aid constructivism. This paper presents our current experience with these elements in the context of a pilot project for aboriginal communities on the west coast of British Columbia. Currently, these local communities have been working alongside our group for a staged deployment of programs throughout southern Vancouver Island. In our next phase we will be extending this to more remote regions in the north island and coastal regions. By building on a philosophy of community-driven initiatives for technology (C-DIT), we hope to secure community involvement in the development and testing of necessary tool support. These tools specifically target IDEs for the development of programming skills, and support our long term goal to help secondary and post-secondary level students appreciate both the process and the art of programming.
Dynamic Resource Management using Operating System-Level Virtualization

This thesis expands upon an existing system called Golondrina that performs autonomic workload management among a cluster of hardware nodes running operating system-level virtualization. Golondrina works by identifying localized resource stress situations and attempting to dissipate them by reallocating system resources and, if necessary, migrating or replicating virtual machines. It is predicted that, using Golondrina, efficiency of similar systems can be further improved by achieving greater resource utilization on the hardware nodes while maintaining resource availability for each virtual machine. The following topics are discussed: virtualization technologies and associated challenges relating to resource management, the architecture and design of Golondrina, intelligent resource reallocation based on predefined policies, and preliminary results demonstrating the effects of a memory resource management policy on the performance of a web application hosted in a virtual environment. This research makes a significant contribution to the study of virtualized data centres since currently no other system considers virtual machine replication and dynamic memory reallocation as an approach to workload management.
The Progressive Education Movement: Is It Still a Factor in Today's Schools?

Part 1 Introduction Chapter 2 The Rise of Progressive Education Chapter 3 John Dewey Chapter 4 Other Pioneers in the Progressive Education Movement Chapter 5 The Progressive Education Movement During the First Half of the Twentieth Century Chapter 6 The Fifties Chapter 7 The Sixties and Seventies Chapter 8 A Nation at Risk (1983) Chapter 9 The Eighties and Nineties Chapter 10 No Child Left Behind Chapter 11 Maria Montessori Chapter 12 Teacher Education Programs Chapter 13 Middle Schools Chapter 14 Choice Chapter 15 Education of the Gifted and Talented Chapter 16 Progressive Education Today Chapter 17 The Future of Progressive Education
Association rule-based Markov Decision Processes

In this paper we present a novel approach for the fast solution of Markov decision processes based on the concept of association rules. These processes have successfully solved many probabilistic problems such as: process control, decision analysis and economy. But for problems with continuous or high dimensionality domains, high computational complexity arises, because the search space grows exponentially with the number of variables. In order to reduce the complexity in these processes, we propose a new approach to represent, learn and apply the actions that really operate on the current state as a small set of association rules and a new value iteration algorithm based on association rules. Experimental results on a robot path planning task indicate that the solution time and therefore the complexity of the proposed approach are considerably reduced, because they increase linearly when the number of the states increases.
Urinary 5-methoxytryptamine in patients with rheumatic fever.

No specific diagnostic test for rheumatic fever has been available to date (1). The tryptophannicotinic acid metabolic series was studied exhaustively in the present work. This investigation was based on a previous observation that the tetrahydrofurfuryl ester of nicotinic acid elicited a different response in the skin of patients suffering from active rheumatic fever than in the skin of nonrheumatic patients (2). The reaction was attributed to nicotinic acid, a member of the tryptophan metabolic series. The present report describes an abnormal product of tryptophan metabolism isolated from the urine of rheumatic subjects.
Feature reconstruction using sparse imputation for noise robust audio-visual speech recognition

In this paper, we propose to use noise reduction technology on both speech signal and visual signal by using exemplar-based sparse representation features for audio-visual speech recognition. First, we introduce sparse representation classification technology and describe how to utilize the sparse imputation to reduce noise not only for audio signal but also for visual signal. We utilize a normalization method to improve the accuracy of the sparse representation classification, and propose a method to reduce the error rate of visual signal when using the normalization method. We show the effectiveness of our proposed noise reduction method and that the audio features achieved up to 88.63% accuracy at -5dB, a 6.24% absolute improvement is achieved over the additive noise reduction method, and the visual features achieved 27.24% absolute improvement at gamma noise.
Long-term potentiation and horizontal connections in rat motor cortex

This paper reviews studies that investigated conditions resulting in long-lasting modifications of synaptic efficacy in horizontal connections within layers 111111 of adult rat motor cortex using the in vitro slice preparation. Long-term potentiation (LTP) was induced by high frequency theta burst stimulation (TBS) when local synaptic inhibition was transiently suppressed by bicuculline methiodide application at the recording site immediately prior to TBS of the horizontal pathway. Without bicuculline, TBS failed to produce LTP. LTP could also be induced without Bic application by conjoint TBS of horizontal and vertical (ascending) inputs. By contrast, long-term depression (LTD) of horizontal transmission was induced by 10 min of 2 Hz stimulation. Depressed horizontal connections nevertheless retained the capability for synaptic strength increases. These studies indicate that synaptic modification across horizontally connected neurones is regulated both by the arrangement of their intrinsic circuits and by the availability of mechanisms for modification at individual synapses. Activity dependent forms of synaptic plasticity operating within horizontal connections may form a spatial substrate and mechanism for experience-dependent regulation of cortical representations.
SlackProbe: A Flexible and Efficient In Situ Timing Slack Monitoring Methodology

In situ monitoring is an accurate way to monitor circuit delay or timing slack, but usually incurs significant overhead. We observe that most existing slack monitoring methods focus exclusively on monitoring path endpoints, which is not cost efficient from power and area perspectives. In this paper, we first propose SlackProbe methodology, which inserts timing slack monitors like probes at a selected set of nets, including intermediate nets along critical paths. SlackProbe can be used to detect impending delay failures due to various reasons (process variations, ambient fluctuations, circuit aging, etc.) and can be used with various preventive actions (e.g., voltage/frequency scaling, clock stretching/time borrowing, etc.). Then we perform thorough analysis of the potential benefits and caveats of SlackProbe over conventional approaches in terms of number of monitors required, monitoring efficiency and observability, delay margin, and design perturbation. Experimental results on commercial processors show that with 5% extra timing margin, SlackProbe can reduce the number of monitors by 12-16X as compared to the number of monitors inserted at path ending pins. SlackProbe can also improve the monitoring efficiency by up to 1.9X and improve the monitoring observability by up to 32%, as compared to endpoint monitoring.
Detection of salient object using pixel blurriness

In this paper we propose a method to detect salient object in still image and non-slow motion background video. The key technique is measuring pixel blurriness. Generally speaking, salient object was taken in focus, pixels within salient object should be sharper than those within background. In the first step image intensity is extracted, and then four different-size average filters are applied to intensity. Subsequently, variation of intensity differences (VID) is computed among the original intensity and four blurred versions. The VID is employed to represent degree of pixel blurriness. Finally, a thresholding method is applied to pixels' blurriness in order to distinguish salient object from background, and salient object is composed of low-blurriness pixels. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in detection of salient object in still image and non-slow motion background video. Moreover, our method has better detection performance than the two compared methods.
Bioaccumulation of Pb(II) From Aqueous Solutions by Bacillus cereus M1 16

Because of the severity of heavy metal contamination and potential adverse health impact on the public, tremendous efforts have been made to purify waters containing toxic metal ions. Biosorption is presented as an alternative to traditional physicochemical means for removing toxic metals from groundwaters and wastewaters. Removal of lead from solution was studied using growing cells and washed cells of Bacillus cereus M 1 16 . The removal of Pb(II) ions with growing cells was maximum (85%) when initial lead concentration was 50 mg/L. Other process conditions were optimized. These were volume of medium: 40 ml in a 250-ml Erlenmeyer fl ask, temperature: 30 o C, pH: 6.0, fermentation time: 30 hours, and inoculum concentration (24-hour cell growth): 4%. Biosorption of Pb(II) on washed biomass of the selected strain was investigated in batch mode and optimum conditions were determined. The uptake of metal was very fast, and equilibrium was attained within 30 minutes. It was found that the overall adsorption process was best described by pseudo second-order kinetics. Both Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms were tested, and it was found that the latter had a better fi t with the data. The adsorption continuously increased in the pH range of 3.6 – 6.0, beyond which the adsorption could not be carried out due to precipitation of metal. The highest value of lead uptake was 96%, with 1.8 g/L washed biomass (dry basis) at 20 o C and 92% at 30 o C.
Predicting Character Traits Through

This paper discusses the use of subreddits in the prediction of personality as determined by the Myers Briggs Personality Identification system. For the personality types of ESTJ and INFP the users are gathered from the respective subreddits and then the posts of those users are collected. Extracting only the surbeddit names of the posts, the data is aggregated then clustered. The centroids of these clusters are used to classify the data. This method proves to be more successful for the INFP personality type than the ESTJ personality type suggesting that through this method, certain users may be easier to classify than others.
An examination of engineering parts in large CAD-databases in order to create adjacency matrices and build clusters

This paper presents different approaches to extract information from large databases in order to process the gained information and find appropriate clusters. Starting from an unsorted collection of varying engineering parts in CAD format, the whole database will be automatically transformed to the non-proprietary IGES-format. Aided by Python-programmed macros controlling diverse measuring functions, every part is analyzed and every surface the part is consisting of is considered separately. For the further approach the following three different matrices are introduced. The first one is a simple adjacency matrix that indicates the connections of all surfaces among themselves. The second matrix is called distance matrix. Beside the spaces between the surfaces the part is built of, also some additional information, like the surface sizes or the centroids, is included. The last matrix is labeled as a thinned matrix. While all small surfaces are removed, it contains only the remaining large ones in order to use that kind of information to find clusters. In that last step the algorithm creates a number of classes automatically and assigns every engineering part from the initial database to its appropriate cluster. In addition to the whole methodology, a further program is presented that visualizes the matrices in a three-dimensional graph structure. Beside a comprehensive description of all programs showing simple examples, also an encompassing performance test on an actual database is conducted.
Current Concepts Underlying Benefits of Exercise Training in Congestive Heart Failure Patients

The pathophysiology of several conditions including heart failure is partly attributable to a failure of the cell energy metabolism. Studies have shown that exercise training (ET) improves quality of life (QOL) and is beneficial in terms of reduction of symptoms, mortality and duration of hospitalization. Increasingly, ET is now achieving acceptance as complimentary therapy in addition to routine clinical practice in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). However, the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of ET are far less understood and need further evaluation. Evidence suggests that while CHF induces generalized metabolic energy depletion, ET largely enhances the overall function of the heart muscle. Hence, research efforts are now aiming to uncover why ET is beneficial as a complimentary treatment of CHF in the context of improving endothelial function and coronary perfusion, decreasing peripheral resistance, induction of cardiac and skeletal muscle cells remodeling, increasing oxygen uptake, substrate oxidation, and resistance to fatigue. Here we discuss the current evidence that suggest that there are beneficial effects of ET on cardiac and skeletal muscle cells oxidative metabolism and intracellular energy transfer in patients with CHF.