Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Immuno-Regulatory Impact of Orally-Administered Hypericum perforatum Extract on Balb/C Mice Inoculated with H1n1 Influenza A Virus

Hypericum perforatum ( H . perforatum ) ethanol extract has been found to inhibit lipopolysaccharide-induced production of inflammatory mediators and cytokines in cultured macrophages. Therefore, it may be able to protect the host from excessive inflammation during viral infection. In the current study, the immune-regulatory effect of H . perforatum extract was evaluated in A549 lung epithelial cells and BALB/c mice exposed to Influenza A/PR/8/34 H1N1 virus. In A549 cells, the extract (30 µg/mL) significantly inhibited influenza virus induced monocyte chemotactic protein (MCP)-1 and interferon-γ induced protein 10 kD (IP-10), but dramatically increased interleukin-6 (IL-6). In mice inoculated intranasally with 107.9 EID50 of Influenza A/PR/8/34 H1N1 (high dose), daily oral treatment of H . perforatum extract at a rate of 110 mg/kg of body weight increased lung viral titer, bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) pro-inflammatory cytokine and chemokine levels, and the infiltration of pro-inflammatory cells in the lung 5 days post-inoculation, as compared to ethanol vehicle treated mice. Transcription of suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) was increased by H . perforatum extract both in A549 cells and BALB/c mice, which could have interrupted anti-viral immune response and thus led to the inefficient viral clearance and increased lung inflammation. H . perforatum treatment resulted in minor reduction in viral titer without affecting body weight when mice were inoculated with a lower dose (~105.0 EID50) and H . perforatum was applied in the later phase of infection. Mice challenged intranasally with high dose of influenza virus (107.9 EID50) suffered from a higher mortality rate when dosed with H . perforatum extract. In conclusion, the current study showed that SOCS3 elevation by H . perforatum may cause impaired immune defense against influenza virus infection and lead to higher mortality.
An Analysis of Ensemble Pruning Techniques Based on Ordered Aggregation

Several pruning strategies that can be used to reduce the size and increase the accuracy of bagging ensembles are analyzed. These heuristics select subsets of complementary classifiers that, when combined, can perform better than the whole ensemble. The pruning methods investigated are based on modifying the order of aggregation of classifiers in the ensemble. In the original bagging algorithm, the order of aggregation is left unspecified. When this order is random, the generalization error typically decreases as the number of classifiers in the ensemble increases. If an appropriate ordering for the aggregation process is devised, the generalization error reaches a minimum at intermediate numbers of classifiers. This minimum lies below the asymptotic error of bagging. Pruned ensembles are obtained by retaining a fraction of the classifiers in the ordered ensemble. The performance of these pruned ensembles is evaluated in several benchmark classification tasks under different training conditions. The results of this empirical investigation show that ordered aggregation can be used for the efficient generation of pruned ensembles that are competitive, in terms of performance and robustness of classification, with computationally more costly methods that directly select optimal or near-optimal subensembles.
An alternative approach for generating linear-phase FIR filters from IIR-like filter blocks in cascade

The structure composed of a stable IIR filter G(z) in cascade with its anticausal counterpart G(z/sup -1/) is equivalent to a zero-phase IIR filter. Truncating the impulse responses of G(z) and G(z/sup -1/), followed by a subsequent delay transforms the structure into a linear-phase FIR. A design technique to implement the above scheme has already been proposed by the authors. This paper takes a new approach to the implementation problem by introducing a new truncation scheme, and illustrates its superiority for certain design specifications.
Clinical outcomes after detection of elevated cardiac enzymes in patients undergoing percutaneous intervention. IMPACT-II Investigators. Integrilin (eptifibatide) to Minimize Platelet Aggregation and Coronary Thrombosis-II.

OBJECTIVES We examined the relations of elevated creatine kinase (CK) and its myocardial band isoenzyme (CK-MB) to clinical outcomes after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients enrolled in Integrilin (eptifibatide) to Minimize Platelet Aggregation and Coronary Thrombosis-II (trial) (IMPACT-II), a trial of the platelet glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitor eptifibatide. BACKGROUND Elevation of cardiac enzymes often occurs after PCI, but its clinical implications are uncertain. METHODS Patients undergoing elective, scheduled PCI for any indication were analyzed. Parallel analyses investigated CK (n=3,535) and CK-MB (n=2,341) levels after PCI (within 4 to 20 h). Clinical outcomes at 30 days and 6 months were stratified by postprocedure CK and CK-MB (multiple of the site's upper normal limit). RESULTS Overall, 1,779 patients (76%) had no CK-MB elevation; CK-MB levels were elevated to 1 to 3 times the upper normal limit in 323 patients (13.8%), to 3 to 5 times normal in 84 (3.6%), to 5 to 10 times normal in 86 (3.7%), and to >10 times normal in 69 patients (2.9%). Elevated CK-MB was associated with an increased risk of death, reinfarction, or emergency revascularization at 30 days, and of death, reinfarction, or surgical revascularization at 6 months. Elevated total CK to above three times normal was less frequent, but its prognostic significance paralleled that seen for CK-MB. The degree of risk correlated with the rise in CK or CK-MB, even for patients with successful procedures not complicated by abrupt closure. CONCLUSIONS Elevations in cardiac enzymes, including small increases (between one and three times normal) often not considered an infarction, are associated with an increased risk for short-term adverse clinical outcomes after successful or unsuccessful PCI.
Efficient unit test case minimization

Randomized unit test cases can be very effective in detecting defects. In practice, however, failing test cases often comprise long sequences of method calls that are tiresome to reproduce and debug. We present a combination of static slicing and delta debugging that automatically minimizes the sequence of failure-inducing method calls. In a case study on the EiffelBase library, the strategy minimizes failing unit test cases on average by 96%. This approach improves on the state of the art by being far more efficient: in contrast to the approach of Lei and Andrews, who use delta debugging alone, our case study found slicing to be 50 times faster, while providing comparable results. The combination of slicing and delta debugging gives the best results and is 11 times faster.
Role of β‐lactamase residues in a common interface for binding the structurally unrelated inhibitory proteins BLIP and BLIP‐II

The β‐lactamase inhibitory proteins (BLIPs) are a model system for examining molecular recognition in protein‐protein interactions. BLIP and BLIP‐II are structurally unrelated proteins that bind and inhibit TEM‐1 β‐lactamase. Both BLIPs share a common binding interface on TEM‐1 and make contacts with many of the same TEM‐1 surface residues. BLIP‐II, however, binds TEM‐1 over 150‐fold tighter than BLIP despite the fact that it has fewer contact residues and a smaller binding interface. The role of eleven TEM‐1 amino acid residues that contact both BLIP and BLIP‐II was examined by alanine mutagenesis and determination of the association (kon) and dissociation (koff) rate constants for binding each partner. The substitutions had little impact on association rates and resulted in a wide range of dissociation rates as previously observed for substitutions on the BLIP side of the interface. The substitutions also had less effect on binding affinity for BLIP than BLIP‐II. This is consistent with the high affinity and small binding interface of the TEM‐1‐BLIP‐II complex, which predicts per residue contributions should be higher for TEM‐1 binding to BLIP‐II versus BLIP. Two TEM‐1 residues (E104 and M129) were found to be hotspots for binding BLIP while five (L102, Y105, P107, K111, and M129) are hotspots for binding BLIP‐II with only M129 as a common hotspot for both. Thus, although the same TEM‐1 surface binds to both BLIP and BLIP‐II, the distribution of binding energy on the surface is different for the two target proteins, that is, different binding strategies are employed.
Antibodies to Selected Disease Agents in Translocated Wild Turkeys in California

Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) trapped within California (n = 715) or imported into California from other states (n = 381) from 1986 to 1996 were tested for exposure to certain disease agents. Prevalence of antibody to Mycoplasma gallisepticum, Mycoplasma meleagridis, Salmonella pullorum, Salmonella typhimurium, Newcastle disease virus, and avian influenza virus was low (0–4%) for wild turkeys trapped within California. With the exception of antibody prevalence to M. meleagridis of 33%, the same was true for wild turkeys imported into California from other states. Antibody prevalence to Mycoplasma synoviae was 8–10% for both groups.
Tree-Structured Wavelet Estimation in a Mixed Effects Model for Spectra of Replicated Time Series

This article develops a method for estimating the spectrum of a stationary process using time series traces recorded from experimental designs. Our procedure estimates the “common” log-spectrum and the variability over the traces (or subjects) using a mixed effects model. We combine spatially adaptive smoothing methods with recursive dyadic partitioning to construct a model for predicting subject-specific effects. The method is easy to implement and can handle large datasets because it uses the discrete wavelet transform which is computationally efficient. Numerical studies confirm that the proposed method performs very well despite its simplicity. The method is also applied to a multisubject electroencephalogram dataset.
GENERALIZED COVERING SPACE THEORIES

In this paper, we unify various approaches to generalized covering space theory by introducing a categorical framework in which coverings are dened purely in terms of unique lifting properties. For each categoryC of path-connected spaces having the unit disk as an object, we construct a category of C-coverings over a given space X that embeds in the category of 1(X;x0)-sets via the usual monodromy action on bers. When C is extended to its coreective hull H (C), the resulting category of based H (C)-coverings is complete, has an initial object, and often characterizes more of the subgroup lattice of 1(X;x0) than traditional covering spaces. We apply our results to three special coreective subcategories: (1) The category of -coverings employs the convenient category of -generated spaces and is universal in the sense that it contains every other generalized covering category as a subcategory. (2) In the locally path-connected category, we preserve notion of generalized covering due to Fischer and Zastrow and characterize the topology of such coverings using the standard whisker topology. (3) By employing the coreective hull Fan of the category of all contractible spaces, we characterize the notion of continuous lifting of paths and identify the topology of Fan-coverings as the natural quotient topology inherited from the path space.
An autonomous search utility for pervasive storage virtualization

Storage virtualization provides abstraction to pervasive storage graphs. Data management operations require pervasive search utilities to discovery entities and services. In search methods, algorithmic complexity, such as memory bound problems, error convergence issues and supervised training is prohibitive for large state and solution spaces or high dimensional state spaces. In addition, among popular search strategies, heuristic algorithms may not guarantee search optimality or are hard to approximate it without close formed utility functions. Furthermore, model-building algorithms require large computation per iteration since every update needs to compute sums over the entire state space. Hence, dynamic search function and control optimization are major primitives to construct search utilities for stochastic system processes to ensure converged resource accesses. This research focuses on optimization of general search solution methods and proposes a formal search utility framework and algorithms rooted from reinforcement learning (RL) and dynamic programming (DP) techniques. To reduce space complexity within large dimension search spaces, a memory-less Q learning is augmented with self-organized index structure and algorithms for exact state-action value function mapping to optimize search procedures for optimal state actions. Data parallelization is ensured with this page-based index value mapping function. Hence, time complexity is reduced with threaded search parallelism. Convergence analysis and error estimation are presented for numeric and information evaluation. Finally, simulation and learning results are presented and discussed.
Tight bounding volumes for subdivision surfaces

We first demonstrate how to compute exact limit points and tangents for surfaces generated by an arbitrary, stationary subdivision scheme. We then describe how to construct simple bounding volumes for the patches of a subdivision surface and present a simple numerical technique to compute guaranteed bounds for the ranges of the basis functions being associated with the subdivision scheme. Merging the local bounding volumes allows us to generate envelope meshes which tightly enclose the limit surface and which have the same structure as the initial control mesh. The prominent applications for these envelope meshes are the efficient ray tracing of subdivision surfaces as well as efficient collision detection.
EEG and ECG changes during selected flight sequences.

BACKGROUND Mental workload has become a critical factor in the design and use of modern aircraft. Because of the complexity of the human-machine system, it is necessary to determine workload, fatigue, and level of performance using noninvasive electrophysiological measures. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to identify the electrophysiological indicators of mental workload during piloting tasks. METHODS Electroencephalographic (EEG) and electrocardiographic (ECG) activity was recorded during actual flight, with a profile planned to produce different levels of mental workload. RESULTS In-flight EEG and ECG recordings enabled us to document mental workload levels. During active segments, delta and theta band activity increased (p < 0.05 or greater); results showed an increase of 22.5% for theta band activity during active flight segments compared with in-flight rest periods. Inversely, alpha band activity diminished: the decrease between ground baseline and all flight sequences was 30% (p < 0.05 or greater). These variations were reversed during the in-flight rest sequences. Instrumental flight caused an increase in the theta and alpha frequency band activity in the parietal-occipital area (p < 0.05 or greater); the alpha/beta ratio also increased. Heart rate increased during the active segments and fell during the in-flight rest periods. The mean difference between active segments and in-flight rest periods was of 8.89 bpm (i.e., an increase of 11.5%; p < 0.01). Heart rate was correlated to the EEG activity of the delta and beta bands in the central area (C3, Cz, C4, p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS The electrophysiological measures recorded provide useful indicators of the mental workload required by different flight sequences.
Cooperative access in cognitive radio networks: stable throughput and delay tradeoffs

In this paper, we study and analyze fundamental throughput-delay tradeoffs in cooperative multiple access for cognitive radio systems. We focus on the class of randomized cooperative policies, whereby the secondary user (SU) serves either the queue of its own data or the queue of the primary user (PU) relayed data with certain service probabilities. The proposed policy opens room for trading the PU delay for enhanced SU delay. Towards this objective, stability conditions for the queues involved in the system are derived. Furthermore, a moment generating function approach is employed to derive closed-form expressions for the average delay encountered by the packets of both users. Results reveal that cooperation expands the stable throughput region of the system and significantly reduces the delay at both users. Moreover, we quantify the gain obtained in terms of the SU delay under the proposed policy, over conventional relaying that gives strict priority to the relay queue.
FastSEA: A very fast and very effective matching technique for very complex time series

Complex time series are a concatenation of quasi-periodic time series, e.g. electrocardiogram (ECG) and capnogram. The complexity lies in the fact that these series usually composed of different number of periods, of different lengths that might be shifted/scaled on the time/magnitude axis. Due to this complexity, time series matching is rendered more difficult. The Shape Exchange Algorithm (SEA) and its derivates are currently the only algorithms that can effectively match this type of time series. However, SEA usefulness is limited only to small time series due to its quadratic temporal complexity. In this paper, an accelerated version of the SEA method is proposed that has a linear computational complexity. The new method is referred to by the acronym FastSEA. It is based on more efficient and yet simple sorting algorithm that is Counting Sort Algorithm. We have evaluated the new developed FastSEA method on ECG signals, selected from (MIT-BIH) public database. The experimental results show that FastSEA outperforms SEA in terms of efficiency by time reduction up to 99 % without loss with respect to SEA in terms of effectiveness. Also, FastSEA is found to be comparable to previously published speed up techniques for SEA: ASEAL and FANSEA, besides it obviously being more interesting than the famous DTW method, with no loss in accuracy. As a result, the proposed FastSEA is able to align very long time series in very short periods of time. Needless is to mention that FastSEA inherits the ability of SEA of being suitable for many applications, such as time series diagnosis and person identification using ECG, etc.
Regulatory Roles of NKT Cells in the Induction and Maintenance of Cyclophosphamide-Induced Tolerance1

We have previously reported the sequential mechanisms of cyclophosphamide (CP)-induced tolerance. Permanent acceptance of donor skin graft is readily induced in the MHC-matched and minor Ag-mismatched recipients after treatment with donor spleen cells and CP. In the present study, we have elucidated the roles of NKT cells in CP-induced skin allograft tolerance. BALB/c AnNCrj (H-2d, Lyt-1.2, and Mls-1b) wild-type (WT) mice or Vα14 NKT knockout (KO) (BALB/c) mice were used as recipients, and DBA/2 NCrj (H-2d, Lyt-1.1, and Mls-1a) mice were used as donors. Recipient mice were primed with 1 × 108 donor SC i.v. on day 0, followed by 200 mg/kg CP i.p. on day 2. Donor mixed chimerism and permanent acceptance of donor skin allografts were observed in the WT recipients. However, donor skin allografts were rejected in NKT KO recipient mice. In addition, the donor reactive Vβ6+ T cells were observed in the thymus of a NKT KO recipient. Reconstruction of NKT cells from WT mice restored the acceptance of donor skin allografts. In addition, donor grafts were partially accepted in the thymectomized NKT KO recipient mice. Furthermore, the tolerogen-specific suppressor cell was observed in thymectomized NKT KO recipient mice, suggesting the generation of regulatory T cells in the absence of NTK cells. Our results suggest that NKT cells are essential for CP-induced tolerance and may have a role in the establishment of mixed chimerism, resulting in clonal deletion of donor-reactive T cells in the recipient thymus.
CMB power spectrum estimation for the Planck Surveyor

We use an iterative generalized least squares map-making algorithm, in conjunction with Monte Carlo techniques, to obtain estimates of the angular power spectrum from cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps. This is achieved by characterizing and removing the instrumental noise contribution in multipole space. This technique produces unbiased estimates and can be applied to an arbitrary experiment. In this paper, we use it on realistic simulations of Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) observations, showing that it can lead to fast and reliable estimation of the CMB angular power spectrum from megapixel maps.
XB130 is overexpressed in prostate cancer and involved in cell growth and invasion

XB130 is a cytosolic adaptor protein involved in various physiological processes and oncogenesis of certain malignancies, but its role in the development of prostate cancer remains unclear. In current study, we examined XB130 expression in prostate cancer tissues and found that XB130 expression was remarkably increased in prostate cancer tissues and significantly correlated with increased prostate specific antigen (PSA), free PSA (f-PSA), prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP) and T classification. Patients with highly expressed XB130 had significantly decreased survival, which suggested XB130 as a possible prognostic indicator for prostate cancer. In vitro experiments showed that reduced XB130 expression restrained tumor growth both in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, XB130 knockdown hindered transition of G1 to S phase in prostate cancer cell line DU145 and LNCap, which might contribute to the inhibition of cellular proliferation. Results from transwell assay demonstrated that downregulation of XB130 may attenuate invasion and metastasis of prostate cancer. Semiquantitative analysis of Western blot suggested that decreased XB130 expression was accompanied by diminished Akt signaling and EMT process. Thus, above observations suggest that XB130 may be a novel molecular marker and potent therapeutic target for prostate cancer.
Effect of inclined support surface on postural strategy during anterior-posterior platform translations

Previous studies have reported that postural coordination patterns change as a function of translation frequency. However, the effect of inclined support surface on postural strategy was not clear. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of inclined support surface on postural strategy during platform translations. Eight healthy adults maintained their balance in stance during support surface translations in the anterior-posterior direction at two different frequencies (0.2 and 0.8[Hz]) and at three different base of support condition (LV: Level, TD: Toe Down, TU: Toe Up). For the kinematic data at slow frequency, subjects rode the platform depending on the movement of platform itself, while at fast frequency subjects fixed their head and center of mass (COM) in space. For the kinetic data at slow frequency, the ankle moment amplitude is similar among all support surface conditions, while at fast frequency the ankle moment amplitude for TU is significantly larger than LV. Result shown that the effect of inclined surface on postural strategy changed according to frequency of support surface translations.