Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective increase of autoimmune epitope expression on aged erythrocytes in mice: implications in anti-erythrocyte autoimmune responses.

We investigated the impact of changes occurring during red blood cell (RBC) ageing on the RBC-binding activity of pathogenic anti-erythrocyte monoclonal antibodies derived from autoimmune-prone New Zealand black (NZB) mice. As assessed by flow cytometric analysis on in vivo biotinylated RBCs, all five NZB-derived anti-RBC mAb exhibited more efficient binding to aged RBCs than to young RBCs, and resulted in a selective elimination of more aged RBCs from the circulating blood. In addition, treatment of RBCs with proteases markedly enhanced the binding of all five anti-RBC mAb, raising the possibility that increased exposure of autoimmune epitopes on aged RBCs may be in part, a result of contacts with proteolytic enzymes during the lifetime of circulating RBCs. In marked contrast, the binding activity of mAb raised in non-autoimmune animals against antigens expressed on RBCs, such as CD44, CD47, CD147 and TER-119, was either decreased or unchanged with RBC ageing, and these epitopes, except for that recognized by anti-CD47 mAb, were highly sensitive to mild treatment with proteases. Our data unravel the unique molecular feature of RBC epitopes involved in autoimmune haemolytic anaemia, suggesting that membrane alterations in aged RBCs might play a significant role in the development of the autoantibody response to RBCs.
The S1P2 Receptor Negatively Regulates Platelet-Derived Growth Factor-Induced Motility and Proliferation

ABSTRACT Sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), a bioactive sphingolipid metabolite, is the ligand for five specific G protein-coupled receptors, named S1P1 to S1P5. In this study, we found that cross-communication between platelet-derived growth factor receptor and S1P2 serves as a negative damper of PDGF functions. Deletion of the S1P2 receptor dramatically increased migration of mouse embryonic fibroblasts toward S1P, serum, and PDGF but not fibronectin. This enhanced migration was dependent on expression of S1P1 and sphingosine kinase 1 (SphK1), the enzyme that produces S1P, as revealed by downregulation of their expression with antisense RNA and small interfering RNA, respectively. Although S1P2 deletion had no significant effect on tyrosine phosphorylation of the PDGF receptors or activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 or Akt induced by PDGF, it reduced sustained PDGF-dependent p38 phosphorylation and markedly enhanced Rac activation. Surprisingly, S1P2-null cells not only exhibited enhanced proliferation but also markedly increased SphK1 expression and activity. Conversely, reintroduction of S1P2 reduced DNA synthesis and expression of SphK1. Thus, S1P2 serves as a negative regulator of PDGF-induced migration and proliferation as well as SphK1 expression. Our results suggest that a complex interplay between PDGFR and S1P receptors determines their functions.
A Wideband Compact Parallel-Strip 180 $^circ$ Wilkinson Power Divider for Push– Pull Circuitries

A Wilkinson power divider with a differential output implemented in parallel-strip-line (PSL) is proposed. Taking full advantages of the PSL technology and a three-stage cascaded design, more than 170% impedance and isolation bandwidths are obtained. Inherent to the PSL structure, the 180 differential output is frequency-independent. A class-B push–pull power amplifier employing the devised concept is designed, showing a peak efficiency of 44% over a 4-GHz bandwidth. Without exploiting any extra and external low-pass filters, the proposed design can produce startling second-harmonic suppressions (more than 50 dB) over the whole working dynamics and operated bandwidth.
Wireless patient monitorization using full passive devices

There is a strong motivation for the implementation of electronic identification systems and wireless sensors in hospitals. This work presents a sensor enabled passive RFID tag for patient monitorization. Special attention is paid to the analog FE, which has been designed and implemented in a low cost 0. 35µm CMOS standard process. The proposed front-end architecture allows the implementation of power management techniques that, together with the power optimized blocks and the use of Schottky diodes in the voltage multiplier, achieves a long reading range. The fabricated analog front-end, assembled to a matched dipole antenna, is able to provide a wireless communication up to 2.4m from a 2W EIRP output power reader to a digital module+sensor with an average power consumption up to 37. 5µW. The system has been tested with a temperature sensor. Successful ID and temperature communication with a commercial RFID reader over a distance of approximately 2m has been reported. The results demonstrate the capacity of the proposed system for wireless patient monitorization.
Epigenetic regulation of cardiac development and function by polycomb group and trithorax group proteins

Heart disease is a leading cause of death and disability in developed countries. Heart disease includes a broad range of diseases that affect the development and/or function of the cardiovascular system. Some of these diseases, such as congenital heart defects, are present at birth. Others develop over time and may be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Many of the known heart diseases are associated with abnormal expression of genes. Understanding the factors and mechanisms that regulate gene expression in the heart is essential for the detection, treatment, and prevention of heart diseases. Polycomb Group (PcG) and Trithorax Group (TrxG) proteins are special families of chromatin factors that regulate developmental gene expression in many tissues and organs. Accumulating evidence suggests that these proteins are important regulators of development and function of the heart as well. A better understanding of their roles and functional mechanisms will translate into new opportunities for combating heart disease. Developmental Dynamics 241:1021–1033, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Spatial organization of thalamocortical and corticothalamic projection systems in the rat SmI barrel cortex

Axonal tracing techniques were used to examine the distribution of corticothalamic projection neurons in relation to the organization of the thalamocortical recipient zones in the whisker representation of the rat first somatic sensory cortex. Following injection of horseradish peroxidase into the physiologically defined vibrissa area in the ventrobasal complex of the thalamus, labeling in the cortex had a columnar appearance. Dense patches of anterograde labeling were located within the centers of the layer IV barrels and extended superficially through lamina III; the septa between barrels contained considerably less reaction product. Retrogradely labeled neurons were observed in lower layer V and layer VI where they were concentrated preferentially deep to the barrel centers. Regions deep to the septa displayed less over‐all labeling and a lower relative number of thalamic projecting neurons. Zones having the larger numbers of retrogradely labeled cells also contained terminallike labeling of either corticothalamic or thalamocortical origin. Following an injection that included the posterior group medial to the ventrobasal complex, anterograde labeling in layer IV was located largely in the septa. In conjunction with previous findings concerning the origin and termination of other projection systems in the barrel cortex, these results suggest that a vibrissal column contains a central core zone intimately linked with the ventrobasal thalamus that is bounded by narrower regions of more diverse inputs and outputs that form an interface between adjacent cortical columns.
CP/CV: concept similarity mining without frequency information from domain describing taxonomies

Domain specific ontologies are heavily used in many applications. For instance, these form the bases on which similarity/dissimilarity between keywords are extracted for various knowledge discovery and retrieval tasks. Existing similarity computation schemes can be categorized as (a) structure- or (b) information-based approaches. Structure based approaches compute dissimilarity between keywords using a (weighted) count of edges between two keywords. Information-base approaches, on the other hand, leverage available corpora to extract additional information, such as keyword frequency, to achieve better performance in similarity computation than structure-based approaches. Unfortunately, in many application domains (such as applications that rely on unique-keys in a relational database), frequency information required by information-based approaches does not exist. In this paper, we note that there is a third way of computing similarity: if each node in a given hierarchy can be represented as a vector of related concepts, these vectors could be compared to compute similarities. This requires mapping concept-nodes in a given hierarchy onto a concept space. In this paper, we propose a concept propagation (CP) scheme, which relies on the semantical relationships between concepts implied by the structure of the hierarchy to annotate each concept-node with a concept-vector (CV). We refer to this approach as CP/CV. Comparison of keyword similarity results shows that CP/CV provides significantly better (upto 33%) results than existing structure-based schemes. Also, even if CP/CV does not assume the availability of an appropriate corpus to extract keyword frequency information, our approach matches (and slightly improves on) the performance of information-based approaches.
Caregiver, patient, and nurse visit communication patterns in cancer home hospice

Few studies have examined the triadic communication between patients, spouse caregivers, and nurses in the home hospice setting. Thus, little is known about the types of communication patterns that unfold. The goals of the study were to, first, identify common patterns of communication in nurse‐patient‐caregiver home hospice visits and, second, to identify nurse, caregiver‐patient dyad, and visit characteristics that predict visit communication patterns.
COMPARISON OF ACTIVE RELEASE TECHNIQUE AND MYOFASCIAL RELEASE TECHNIQUE ON PAIN, GRIP STRENGTH & FUNCTIONAL PERFORMANCE IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC LATERAL EPICONDYLITIS

Background & Purpose: Lateral epicondylitis is the most common lesion of the elbow. Tennis elbow or lateral epicondylitis is defined as a syndrome of pain in the wrist extensor muscles at or near their lateral epicondyle origin or pain directly over the lateral epicondyle. So, the aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of Active Release Technique (ART) and Myofascial Release Technique (MFR) in the treatment of Chronic Lateral Epicondylitis (CLE). Methodology: The study included thirty-six patients with Chronic Lateral Epicondylitis of age group range between 30 to 45 years. Patients were randomly divided into three groups: Control Group (A), Active Release Technique Group (B) and Myofascial Release Technique Group (C). The patients were treated for 4 weeks and three outcome measures: 0-10 NPRS, Hand Dynamometer and PRTEE were taken for assessment and analysis at baseline and after 4 th weeks was done. Result: In this study the result showed that Active Release Technique and Myofascial Release Technique were effective in all three outcome measures when compared to Control Group. Myofascial Release Technique was more effective in improving grip strength & reducing pain & disability when compared to Active Release Technique. (p<0.05) Conclusion: Active Release Technique and Myofascial Release Technique are effective in patients with Chronic Lateral Epicondylitis. Myofascial Release Technique demonstrated better outcomes than Active Release Technique in the management of Chronic Lateral Epicondylitis.
A comparison of distribution curves of body mass index from Brazil and the United States for assessing overweight and obesity in Brazilian adolescents.

OBJECTIVE To assess the validity of recommendations for use of the 85th and 95th percentiles of body mass index (BMI) of the population in the United States of America as a screening tool to assess overweight/obesity in adolescents. METHODS We investigated the relation between BMI and percent body fat in 1,540 adolescents (717 males and 823 females) aged 10 to 17.9 years old from a private high school in Niterói, a city in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We used bioelectric impedance, with the appropriate equations for adolescents, to estimate percent body fat, which served as the gold standard (30% for girls and 25% for boys) to calculate the sensitivity and specificity of the 85th and 95th percentiles of the United States and Brazilian distribution curves of BMI. RESULTS Sensitivity and specificity were high (above 80%) for the Niterói boys, except for the 85th percentile of the Brazilian curve (specificity = 61.8%) and for the 95th percentile of the United States curve (sensitivity = 55.4%). For the Niterói girls, the 85th- and 95th-percentile BMI cutoff points, from both the United States and Brazilian curves, showed low sensitivity, and that sensitivity decreased with age. Specificity was high for the girls, and much higher than it was for the boys. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that using BMI to screen for overweight/obesity in adolescents can generate a high percentage of false-positives for Niterói boys and an even higher percentage of false-negatives for Niterói girls. A more universal approach to using anthropometric measures to screen for overweight/obesity should be developed, preferably linked to stages of maturation.
Gender Differences of Plaque Characteristics in Elderly Patients with Stable Angina Pectoris: An Intravascular Ultrasonic Radiofrequency Data Analysis

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relation between gender and plaque characteristics assessed by virtual histology-intravascular ultrasound (VH-IVUS) in patients with stable angina pectoris. Preinterventional VH-IVUS image was available for analysis in 88 men and 60 women patients. Women had significantly smaller vessel volume (12.7 ± 3.9 versus 14.5 ± 4.2 mm3/mm, P = .01) and smaller plaque volume (8.4 ± 3.5 versus 9.7 ± 3.5 mm3/mm, P = .04). However, these differences were no longer significant when corrected for body surface area (BSA). In VH-IVUS analysis, women had significantly higher dense calcium when corrected for BSA in the culprit lesion (volume: 0.32 ± 0.26 versus 0.44 ± 0.40 mm3/mm/BSA, P = .03; proportion: 8.2 ± 6.1 versus 11.2 ± 7.6%, P = .009). VH-IVUS analysis of plaque components in elderly patients with stable angina showed that women had higher calcium contents compared with men.
There is only one functional somatic syndrome

Functional somatic symptoms and syndromes are a major health issue. They are common, costly, persistent and may be disabling. Most of the current literature pertains to specific syndromes defined by medical subspecialties. Indeed, each medical subspecialty seems to have at least one somatic syndrome. These include: irritable bowel syndrome (gastroenterology); chronic pelvic pain (gynaecology); fibromyalgia (rheumatology); non-cardiac chest pain (cardiology); tension headache (neurology); hyperventilation syndrome (respiratory medicine) and chronic fatigue syndrome (infectious disease). In 1999, Wessely and colleagues concluded on the basis of a literature review that there was substantial overlap between these conditions and challenged the acceptance of distinct syndromes as defined in the medical literature (Wessely et al, 1999). They proposed the concept of a general functional somatic syndrome. But is there any empirical evidence for such a general syndrome? Is it even a useful concept? Five years on, Professor Simon Wessely, King's College London, revisits this debate. He is opposed by Dr Peter White from St Bartholomew's Hospital and Queen Mary School of Medicine and Dentistry, London.
Practical Application-Level Dynamic Taint Analysis of Android Apps

Dynamic taint analysis traces data flows in applications at runtime and allows detection and consequently prevention of flow-based vulnerabilities, such as data leaks or injection attacks. While dynamic taint analysis spanning all components of the stack is potentially more precise, it requires adaptations of components across the OS stack and thus does not allow to analyze applications in their real runtime environment. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic taint analysis framework for Android applications which injects a taint analysis directly into an application's bytecode and can thus operate on any stock Android platform. Our approach is more precise than previous ones, copes with flow-aware source and sink definitions, and propagates data flows across process boundaries, including propagation over file I/O and inter process communication. We explain how our framework performs with popular apps from the Google Play Store and show that it achieves a precision which is comparable to the most precise platform-level tainting framework.
Consistency-preserving Caching of Dynamic Database Content

With the growing use of dynamic web content generated from relational databases, traditional caching solutions for throughput and latency improvements are ineffective. We describe a middleware layer called Ganesh that reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of queries or results. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. These benefits do not require any compromise of the strict consistency semantics provided by the back-end database. Further, Ganesh does not require modifications to applications, web servers, or database servers, and works with closed-source applications and databases. Using two benchmarks representative of dynamic web sites, measurements of our prototype show that it can increase end-to-end throughput by as much as twofold for non-data intensive applications and by as much as tenfold for data intensive ones.
Can Peer-to-Peer live streaming systems coexist with free riders?

Peer-to-Peer live streaming systems help content providers and distributors drastically reduce bandwidth costs by sharing costs among peers. Researchers have dedicated significant effort developing techniques to discourage or exclude uncooperative peers from peer-to-peer systems. However, users are often unable to cooperate, e.g., users using a mobile device with limited, costly bandwidth. We study the impact of uncooperative peers on video discontinuity and latency using PlanetLab. We find that simple mechanisms, like forwarding video data requests to cooperative peers instead of wasting effort sending requests to uncooperative peers, allows peer-to-peer live streaming to serve 50% of uncooperative peers without performance degradation. We argue that denying service to uncooperative peers may not be the best long-term approach; our findings suggest that peer-to-peer live streaming can support uncooperative peers.
A Flexible ICA-Based Method for AEC Without Requiring DoubleTalk Detection

In this paper, we propose the use of the flexible independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm for the acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). The flexible ICA algorithm has a parametric score function which is controlled by the Gaussianity of the source signal (speech in our case). The probability density function of the speech signal is not always the super Gaussian, hence the inflexible score function used in the existing ICAbased AEC system is not always suitable. On the other hand, the proposed method is able to always provide the suitable score function depending on the present Gaussianity of the speech signal. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing ICA-based AEC algorithm and the variable step-size (VSS)-NLMS algorithm.
Segmentation Vectorielle des Images Multi-spectrales MSG2 par une Approche Markovienne

A vector segmentation of multi-spectral MSG2 images, based on the Markov formalism, is presented in this paper. The use of Markov fields take into account space and spectral interactions between the pixels of multi-component image. The use of these models requires an initial choice of their parameters obtained by algorithms of segmentation which can generate additional processing times. To avoid this problem, a simple pre-segmentation, obtained of one of the image components spectral, not requiring any calculation is proposed. The various results are evaluated with Borsotti function. MOTS-CLES : Champs de Markov, segmentation vectorielle, critere d’evaluation, images multi-composantes, MSG2. Studia Informatica Universalis. 90 Studia Informatica Universalis.
Neuro-glial interactions at the nodes of Ranvier: implication in health and diseases

Specific cell adhesion molecules (CAMs) are dedicated to the formation of axo-glial contacts at the nodes of Ranvier of myelinated axons. They play a central role in the organization and maintenance of the axonal domains: the node, paranode, and juxtaparanode. In particular, CAMs are essential for the accumulation of voltage-gated sodium channels at the nodal gap that ensures the rapid and saltatory propagation of the action potentials (APs). The mechanisms regulating node formation are distinct in the central and peripheral nervous systems, and recent studies have highlighted the relative contribution of paranodal junctions and nodal extracellular matrix. In addition, CAMs at the juxtaparanodal domains mediate the clustering of voltage-gated potassium channels which regulate the axonal excitability. In several human pathologies, the axo-glial contacts are altered leading to disruption of the nodes of Ranvier or mis-localization of the ion channels along the axons. Node alterations and the failure of APs to propagate correctly from nodes to nodes along the axons both contribute to the disabilities in demyelinating diseases. This article reviews the mechanisms regulating the association of the axo-glial complexes and the role of CAMs in inherited and acquired neurological diseases.
Reactive Reasoning with the Event Calculus

Systems for symbolic event recognition accept as input a stream of time-stamped events from sensors and other computational devices, and seek to identify high-level composite events, collections of events that satisfy some pattern. RTEC is an Event Calculus dialect with novel implementation and 'windowing' techniques that allow for efficient event recognition, scalable to large data streams. RTEC can deal with applications where event data arrive with a (variable) delay from, and are revised by, the underlying sources. RTEC can update already recognised events and recognise new events when data arrive with a delay or following data revision. Our evaluation shows that RTEC can support real-time event recognition and is capable of meeting the performance requirements identified in a recent survey of event processing use cases.