Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intubation Biomechanics: Laryngoscope Force and Cervical Spine Motion during Intubation with Macintosh and Airtraq Laryngoscopes

Introduction:Laryngoscopy and endotracheal intubation in the presence of cervical spine instability may put patients at risk of cervical cord injury. Nevertheless, the biomechanics of intubation (cervical spine motion as a function of applied force) have not been characterized. This study characterized and compared the relationship between laryngoscope force and cervical spine motion using two laryngoscopes hypothesized to differ in force. Methods:Fourteen adults undergoing elective surgery were intubated twice (Macintosh, Airtraq). During each intubation, laryngoscope force, cervical spine motion, and glottic view were recorded. Force and motion were referenced to a preintubation baseline (stage 1) and were characterized at three stages: stage 2 (laryngoscope introduction); stage 3 (best glottic view); and stage 4 (endotracheal tube in trachea). Results:Maximal force and motion occurred at stage 3 and differed between the Macintosh and Airtraq: (1) force: 48.8 ± 15.8 versus 10.4 ± 2.8 N, respectively, P = 0.0001; (2) occiput-C5 extension: 29.5 ± 8.5 versus 19.1 ± 8.7 degrees, respectively, P = 0.0023. Between stages 2 and 3, the motion/force ratio differed between Macintosh and Airtraq: 0.5 ± 0.2 versus 2.0 ± 1.4 degrees/N, respectively; P = 0.0006. Discussion:The relationship between laryngoscope force and cervical spine motion is: (1) nonlinear and (2) differs between laryngoscopes. Differences between laryngoscopes in motion/force relationships are likely due to: (1) laryngoscope-specific cervical extension needed for intubation, (2) laryngoscope-specific airway displacement/deformation needed for intubation, and (3) cervical spine and airway tissue viscoelastic properties. Cervical spine motion during endotracheal intubation is not directly proportional to force. Low-force laryngoscopes cannot be assumed to result in proportionally low cervical spine motion.
Toll Receptor Polymorphisms and Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness

Background and Purpose— Inflammation is a key mechanism in atherosclerosis. Variation in genes encoding inflammatory responses may therefore influence atherosclerosis risk possibly through interaction with chronic infections and proinflammatory environmental risk factors such as smoking, diabetes, and obesity. The Toll-like receptor family (TLRs) genes TLR2 and TLR4, both involved in the inflammatory process, are potential candidates and TLR-4 has been previously associated with cardiovascular disease, although other studies have failed to confirm this. Methods— A total of 3000 individuals from the prospective community-based Carotid Atherosclerosis Progression Study (CAPS) were genotyped for single nucleotide polymorphisms: TLR2 (Arg753Gln, −16934 A/T) and TLR4 (D299G, T399I). Associations were determined with common carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT) at baseline and also progression of IMT over the 3-year follow-up period. Gene–environment interactions with high sensitive C-reactive protein, smoking, body mass index, and diabetes were determined. Results— There was no association between single nucleotide polymorphisms or haplotypes in either TLR4 or TLR2 and either baseline IMT or progression of IMT over the 3-year follow up. There were no interactions among the three proinflammatory risk factors. No genotype or haplotype was associated with high sensitive C-reactive protein. Conclusions— In this large community population, we found no evidence for genetic variation in these two TLRs being risk factors for increased IMT either directly or through interaction with proinflammatory risk factors. We were unable to confirm associations with the TLR4 polymorphisms reported in previous smaller studies.
CHEMICAL STRUCTURE AND OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF TITAN'S THOLINS AND "HCN POLYMER". IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF CASSINI-HUYGENS OBSERVATIONS AND REFRACTORY ORGANICS IN COMETARY GRAINS. E. Quirico, J-M Bernard, G. Montagnac, J-N

Tholins and “HCN polymer” are used as analogs of Titan’s aerosols and N-rich cometary refractory organics, respectively [1,2]. The chemical structure of these compounds is up to now not elucidate, as well as the identification of the parameters which do control their optical properties. This study provides new clues on the chemical structure of these compounds, and we discuss some implications for 1) the analysis of spectral data of the CASSINI-HUYGENS mission and 2) the analysis of organic N-rich compounds in cometary grains.
Controlling chain flexibility in collagen networks to produce hydrogels with distinct properties

ABSTRACT The structure, mechanical properties, and optical density of gels prepared from collagen in a manner that induces the dynamical arrest of the constituent polymers before substantial fibrillogenesis can take place have been investigated. Small angle X-ray scattering and confocal laser scanning fluorescence microscopy reveal that these gels exhibit substantially different network structures, over length scales ranging from a few nanometers to many microns, when compared with traditional collagen networks in which fibrillogenesis is intentionally induced. The highly associated arrangements of the more flexible structural components found in the arrested network yield a considerably lower optical density and higher viscoelastic storage modulus when compared to a “conventional” collagen gel; while the small amount of fibrils that do manage to form still yield strain stiffening and account for the fact that at high strains, moduli from both systems fall onto the same master curve.
Realtime object matching with robust dominant orientation templates

Most of conventional object matching methods are based on comparing the local features, which are too computational demanding to achieve realtime performance on object detection in videos. Recently, Dominant Orientation Templates (DOT) method was proposed to make online feature detection and comparison feasible. However, it still suffers the problem of fragility due to the noise and partial occlusions. To efficiently tackle these problems, we introduce the similarity map to store the matching scores of individual grids in each sliding window, which is used to further denoise and infer the occlusion map. The promising experimental results demonstrate that proposed approach improves the robustness, which outperforms DOT assuredly.
Image Mining from Gel Diagrams in Biomedical Publications

Authors of biomedical publications often use gel images to report experimental results such as protein-protein interactions or protein expressions under different conditions. Gel images offer a way to concisely communicate such findings, not all of which need to be explicitly discussed in the article text. This fact together with the abundance of gel images and their shared common patterns makes them prime candidates for image mining endeavors. We introduce an approach for the detection of gel images, and present an automatic workflow to analyze them. We are able to detect gel segments and panels at high accuracy, and present first results for the identification of gene names in these images. While we cannot provide a complete solution at this point, we present evidence that this kind of image mining is feasible.
University of Groningen Etiology and prognosis of chronic kidney disease in children : Roma ethnicity and other risk factors

Background This study aims to assess the cumulative incidence of elevated albuminuria, hypertension and decreased estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) to identify possible renal injury in children with SFK. Methods Forty-two children with SFK (23 boys; 27 congenital) were included in a prospective follow-up study. Blood pressure, albuminuria and eGFR were assessed repeatedly and the cumulative incidence rate of various forms of renal injury, overall and by type of etiology, were evaluated. Finally, renal injury-free survival was analyzed. Results Mean follow-up was until age 11.3 years (SD 6.3 years). During followup, 16 (38.1%) patients met the criteria for renal injury, defined as hypertension (10; 23.8%), severely increased albuminuria (3; 7.1%) and a significantly impaired eGFR (<60ml/min/1.73m2) (5; 11.9%) and/or use of antihypertensive or antiproteinuric medication (11; 26.2%). Children with CAKUT in SFK had a significantly higher incidence of renal injury. The median time to develop renal injury was 12.8 years. Conclusion A substantial proportion of children with SFK develop renal injury during childhood, especially those with CAKUT in the SFK. Therefore, close follow-up of albuminuria, blood pressure and eGFR are warranted to identify chronic kidney disease in its early stages.
Building a dictionary of lexical variants for phenotype descriptors

Detecting phenotype descriptors in text and linking them to ontology concepts is a challenging task. Current state-of-the art concept recognizers struggle with several issues due the variety of human expressiveness. Here we present initial results of creating a dictionary of lexical variants for the Human Phenotype Ontology. This work is a smaller but important part of a larger project with a goal to improve recall in phenotype concept recognizers.
Speeding up graph clustering via modular decomposition based compression

Nowadays, massive data sets of graph-like data arise in various application domains ranging from bioinformatics to social networks and communication networks analysis. The abundance of such kind of data calls for innovative techniques for storing, managing and processing graph-like data. In order to fulfill these requirements, in this paper we propose: (i) a model for representing compressed weighted graphs, and (ii) an efficient and effective compression algorithm which, leveraging on modular decomposition theory, is capable of exploiting structural properties of graphs in order to obtain highly compact and accurate compressed representations. Such compressed graphs can be used in place of the original graphs in order to enhance the performance of graph clustering algorithms in all contexts where a little inaccuracy in the results is acceptable in order to gain computational efficiency. The paper is completed by an experimental study which shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in the context of graph clustering.
XQuery/IR: Integrating XML Document and Data Retrieval

The structural aspects of the unified XML view are rigid enough to support data retrieval (DR) queries as known from database systems. Over the past few years, increasingly powerful query language, most notably the recent XQuery standard [2], have exploited this fact to provide expressive DR query capabilities for XML. On the other hand, XML’s structural aspects are transparent enough to treat arbitrary parts of the XML-represented data as documents. Document or information retrieval (IR) providing one of the most important capabilities for querying text-rich documents, however, is not supported by XQuery or any of the earlier XML query languages so far.
Stability of phase information

This paper concerns the robustness of phase information for measuring image velocity and binocular disparity, its stability with respect to geometric deformations, and its linearity as a function of spatial position. These properties are shown to depend on the form of the filters used and their frequency bandwidths. The authors also discuss situations in which phase is unstable, many of which can be detected using the model of phase singularities (see Image Vis. Comput. (UK) vol.9, no.5, p.333-7 (Oct. 1991)). <<ETX>>
Intrinsic Efficacy of Antipsychotics at Human D2, D3, and D4 Dopamine Receptors: Identification of the Clozapine Metabolite N-Desmethylclozapine as a D2/D3 Partial Agonist

Drugs that antagonize D2-like receptors are effective antipsychotics, but the debilitating movement disorder side effects associated with these drugs cannot be dissociated from dopamine receptor blockade. The “atypical” antipsychotics have a lower propensity to cause extrapyramidal symptoms (EPS), but the molecular basis for this is not fully understood nor is the impact of inverse agonism upon their clinical properties. Using a cell-based functional assay, we demonstrate that overexpression of Gαo induces constitutive activity in the human D2-like receptors (D2, D3, and D4). A large collection of typical and atypical antipsychotics was profiled for activity at these receptors. Virtually all were D2 and D3 inverse agonists, whereas none was D4 inverse agonist, although many were potent D4 antagonists. The inverse agonist activity of haloperidol at D2 and D3 receptors could be reversed by mesoridazine demonstrating that there were significant differences in the degrees of inverse agonism among the compounds tested. Aripiprazole and the principle active metabolite of clozapine NDMC [8-chloro-11-(1-piperazinyl)-5H-dibenzo [b,e] [1,4] diazepine] were identified as partial agonists at D2 and D3 receptors, although clozapine itself was an inverse agonist at these receptors. NDMC-induced functional responses could be reversed by clozapine. It is proposed that the low incidence of EPS associated with clozapine and aripiprazole used may be due, in part, to these partial agonist properties of NDMC and aripiprazole and that bypassing clozapine blockade through direct administration of NDMC to patients may provide superior antipsychotic efficacy.
SAM-T08, HMM-based protein structure prediction

The SAM-T08 web server is a protein structure prediction server that provides several useful intermediate results in addition to the final predicted 3D structure: three multiple sequence alignments of putative homologs using different iterated search procedures, prediction of local structure features including various backbone and burial properties, calibrated E-values for the significance of template searches of PDB and residue–residue contact predictions. The server has been validated as part of the CASP8 assessment of structure prediction as having good performance across all classes of predictions. The SAM-T08 server is available at http://compbio.soe. ucsc.edu/SAM_T08/T08-query.html
An improved deviation measure for two-path echo cancellation

Parallel adaptive filters have been proposed for echo cancellation to solve the dead-lock problem, occurring when the echo is detected as near-end speech after a severe echo-path change; causing the updating of the adaptive filter to halt. To control the parallel filters and monitor their performance, estimates of the filter deviation (i.e. the squared norm of the filter mismatch vector) are typically used. This paper presents a modification of a filter mismatch estimator. The proposed modification requires slightly more computational resources than the original measure, but provides a significant improvement in terms of robustness during double-talk. This is shown both analytically and through simulations.
Validation of Physical Activity Tracking via Android Smartphones Compared to ActiGraph Accelerometer: Laboratory-Based and Free-Living Validation Studies

Background There is increasing interest in using smartphones as stand-alone physical activity monitors via their built-in accelerometers, but there is presently limited data on the validity of this approach. Objective The purpose of this work was to determine the validity and reliability of 3 Android smartphones for measuring physical activity among midlife and older adults. Methods A laboratory (study 1) and a free-living (study 2) protocol were conducted. In study 1, individuals engaged in prescribed activities including sedentary (eg, sitting), light (sweeping), moderate (eg, walking 3 mph on a treadmill), and vigorous (eg, jogging 5 mph on a treadmill) activity over a 2-hour period wearing both an ActiGraph and 3 Android smartphones (ie, HTC MyTouch, Google Nexus One, and Motorola Cliq). In the free-living study, individuals engaged in usual daily activities over 7 days while wearing an Android smartphone (Google Nexus One) and an ActiGraph. Results Study 1 included 15 participants (age: mean 55.5, SD 6.6 years; women: 56%, 8/15). Correlations between the ActiGraph and the 3 phones were strong to very strong (ρ=.77-.82). Further, after excluding bicycling and standing, cut-point derived classifications of activities yielded a high percentage of activities classified correctly according to intensity level (eg, 78%-91% by phone) that were similar to the ActiGraph’s percent correctly classified (ie, 91%). Study 2 included 23 participants (age: mean 57.0, SD 6.4 years; women: 74%, 17/23). Within the free-living context, results suggested a moderate correlation (ie, ρ=.59, P<.001) between the raw ActiGraph counts/minute and the phone’s raw counts/minute and a strong correlation on minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA; ie, ρ=.67, P<.001). Results from Bland-Altman plots suggested close mean absolute estimates of sedentary (mean difference=–26 min/day of sedentary behavior) and MVPA (mean difference=–1.3 min/day of MVPA) although there was large variation. Conclusions Overall, results suggest that an Android smartphone can provide comparable estimates of physical activity to an ActiGraph in both a laboratory-based and free-living context for estimating sedentary and MVPA and that different Android smartphones may reliably confer similar estimates.
Chemokine Receptor CCR9 Contributes to the Localization of Plasma Cells to the Small Intestine

Humoral immunity in the gut-associated lymphoid tissue is characterized by the production of immunoglobulin A (IgA) by antibody-secreting plasma cells (PCs) in the lamina propria. The chemokine CCL25 is expressed by intestinal epithelial cells and is capable of inducing chemotaxis of IgA+ PCs in vitro. Using a newly generated monoclonal antibody against murine CCR9, we show that IgA+ PCs express high levels of CCR9 in the mesenteric lymph node (MLN) and Peyer's patches (PPs), but down-regulate CCR9 once they are located in the small intestine. In CCR9-deficient mice, IgA+ PCs are substantially reduced in number in the lamina propria of the small intestine. In adoptive transfer experiments, CCR9-deficient IgA+ PCs show reduced migration into the small intestine compared with wild-type controls. Furthermore, CCR9 mutants fail to mount a regular IgA response to an orally administered antigen, although the architecture and cell type composition of PPs and MLN are unaffected and are functional for the generation of IgA PCs. These findings provide profound in vivo evidence that CCL25/CCR9 guides PCs into the small intestine.
Prevalence of anthelmintic resistance on sheep and goat farms in the southeastern United States.

OBJECTIVE To determine prevalence of anthelmintic resistance on sheep and goat farms in the southeastern United States. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. ANIMALS Sheep and goats from 46 farms in 8 southern states, Puerto Rico, and St Croix in the US Virgin Islands. PROCEDURES Parasite eggs were isolated from fecal samples, and susceptibility to benzimidazole, imidathiazole, and avermectin-milbemycin anthelmintics was evaluated with a commercial larval development assay. RESULTS Haemonchus contortus was the most common parasite on 44 of 46 farms; Trichostrongylus colubriformis was the second most commonly identified parasite. Haemonchus contortus from 45 (98%), 25 (54%), 35 (76%), and 11 (24%) farms were resistant to benzimidazole, levamisole, ivermectin, and moxidectin, respectively. Resistance to all 3 classes of anthelmintics was detected on 22 (48%) farms, and resistance to all 3 classes plus moxidectin was detected on 8 farms (17%). CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Findings provided strong evidence that anthelmintic resistance is a serious problem on small ruminant farms throughout the southeastern United States. Owing to the frequent movement of animals among regions, the prevalence of resistance in other regions of the United States is likely to also be high. Consequently, testing of parasite eggs for anthelmintic resistance should be a routine part of parasite management on small ruminant farms.
Effects of Microstructural Morphology on Mechanical Properties of Magnesium Alloys

The mechanical property of magnesium alloy depends on the alloy elements and microstructure strongly. The multiple dependency relations are studied by investigating magnesium alloys with different Al and Zn contents. The semi-continuous casting billets exhibit quite different microstructural morphologies between the centre and edge of the cross section. The centre shows fine and uniform microstructure while the edge is coarse and reticular. However the difference is almost eliminated when the billets were homogenized at 380°C for 15h. The generation mechanism of casting microstructure is also discussed in this paper. The results show that the morphology of second phase and the size of grain have greater effect on the mechanical properties than the element Zn. The alloys with uniform, fine and non-dendrite microstructure exhibit both high strength and elongation when Al content is about 6% and Zn content is various from 0 to 3%. In contrast, the strength increases and elongation decreases significantly as Al content increases from 0 to 6%.
A step-by-step approach to compute a consistent initialization for the MNA

One of the difficulties of the numerical integration methods for differential–algebraic equations (DAEs) is the computation of consistent initial values before starting the integration, i.e. calculating values that satisfy the given algebraic constraints as well as the hidden constraints if higher index problems are considered. This paper presents an approach to calculate consistent initial values for index-2 DAEs starting up from possibly inconsistent ones for systems arising from modified nodal analysis (MNA) in circuit simulation. This article is based on the results from Estevez Schwarz and Tischendorf, International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications 2000; 28: 131–162. Several of the denotations and results that we use were introduced there in more detail. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Design and Simulation of Low Power CMOS Adder Cell at 180nm using Tanner Tool

In this Research Paper, the focus is on the analysis and simulation of the Adder cell which is slightly different as compared to the existing circuits and optimized for Average Power Dissipation. In this paper the adder cell is modified circuit in such a way that it controls the overall capacitances during the Sum and Carry evaluation and will optimize the total capacitance that results in the decrease of the Average Power dissipation. The circuit is characterized by using HSPICE in a 180 nanometer (nm) with supply voltage of 1.8 volt and threshold voltage is 0.40 volts.
Trust Darknet: Control and Compromise in the Internet's Certificate Authority Model

For more than a decade, Internet users have relied on digital certificates issued by certificate authorities to encrypt and authenticate their most valuable communications. Computer security experts have lambasted weaknesses in the system since its inception. Recent exploits have brought several problems back into stark focus. The authors describe some proposed technologybased improvements, as well as some legal, economic, and organizational shortcomings of the trust model. They also propose first steps toward fixes and next steps for study.