Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A review of the management of endodontically treated teeth. Post, core and the final restoration.

BACKGROUND The clinical decision as to whether an endodontically treated (ET) tooth requires a post and a crown poses a challenge to dental practitioners. The author conducted a review of the principles for the use of post and core and the newer materials such as ceramic and fiber-reinforced posts. TYPES OF STUDIES REVIEWED Using a MEDLINE search and resulting cross-references, the author selected original research articles and previous review articles on the topic of ET teeth, as well as that of post and core. RESULTS The author reviewed the principles for the use of posts in terms of when it is necessary to use a post, different types of posts, various post materials and designs. He also reviewed the criteria and technique for post space preparation and post cementation. Finally, he discussed the principles of core buildup, as well as options for the final restorations. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The author provides a review of the principles for the use of post and core, crowns and the different materials available today to help clinicians make a clinical decision based on sound evidence.
The Experience of Discrimination and Black-White Health Disparities in Medical Care

The current study of Black patients focuses on how discrimination contributes to racial disparities in health. The authors used a longitudinal methodology to study how perceived past discrimination affects reactions to medical interactions and adherence to physician recommendations. In addition, they explored whether these reactions and/or adherence mediate the relationship between discrimination and patients' health. The participants in this study were 156 Black patients of low socioeconomic status at a primary care clinic. Patients completed questionnaires on their current health, past adherence, and perceived past discrimination. Then, they saw a physician and rated their reactions to the visit. Four and 16 weeks later they reported on their adherence to physician recommendations and overall health. Perceived discrimination was significantly and negatively associated with patient health, reactions to the physician, and adherence. Path analyses indicated that adherence mediated the relationship between discrimination and patient health, but patient reactions to the interaction did not.
Placebo treatment was meaningless

EDITOR,—Describing the design of their study, L M Mynors-Wallis and colleagues state that they compared “(a) problem solving; (b) amitriptyline with standard clinical management; and (c) drug placebo with standard clinical management. ”1 The patients in the second two groups, however, were seen by therapists who were under strict instructions with regard to the type of interventions they could make. The therapists were instructed to avoid specific psychological interventions, in particular problem solving treatment. If …
Pediatric microbial keratitis in Taiwanese children: a review of hospital cases.

OBJECTIVE To study the clinical and microbiological characteristics of pediatric microbial keratitis in Taiwan. METHODS The medical records of 81 eyes with microbial keratitis in 78 children aged 16 years or younger who were diagnosed and treated at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, from July 1, 1998, through December 31, 2002, were retrospectively reviewed. Predisposing factors, microbial culture results, clinical course, and visual outcomes were analyzed. RESULTS Predisposing factors were contact lens wear (33 cases [40.7%]), trauma (17 cases [21.0%]), ocular disease (12 cases [14.8%]), and systemic disease (9 cases [11.1%]). Eight of the 33 contact lenses were rigid gas-permeable lenses that were worn overnight for orthokeratology. Forty-seven (58.0%) of the 81 eyes were culture positive. The most common isolates were Pseudomonas aeruginosa (21 eyes [44.7%]) and Staphylococcus aureus (9 eyes [19.1%]). Twelve (14.8%) of the 81 eyes required surgical intervention. Of the 68 eyes that had a best-corrected visual acuity available at the last follow-up, 33 eyes achieved best-corrected visual acuity of 20/25 or better. CONCLUSIONS Predisposing factors for pediatric infectious keratitis vary with age. In the teenage years, the most predominant risk factor is contact lens wear. Infectious keratitis resultant from overnight orthokeratology lenses should receive particular attention. Parents of children who consider overnight orthokeratology should evaluate the benefit of temporary myopia reduction and the risk of infection. Identification of predisposing factors and microorganisms may be helpful for early recognition and treatment of pediatric microbial keratitis.
A virtual machine-based approach for fast and flexible reprogramming of modular robots

Modular robot programming spans a number of issues ranging from high-level coordination to controller distribution and update in individual modules. The latter issue has received little attention from the research community though in our experience it is one of the main factors hindering agile development and experimentation with physical robots: reprogramming tens or hundreds of modules can be a major overhead in the development process and cannot be done with traditional approaches without restarting the robot, which impedes updating a running system. We propose a solution based on a virtual machine design shaped around three core concepts: the context of a module and its role in the ensemble, the reactive nature of robot controllers, and control programs decomposable into subparts that can be dynamically and separately redefined. We show that by incorporating those concepts into the design we are able to both achieve program conciseness (thus providing fast and efficient code distribution) and program expressiveness (thus providing versatility to represent diverse control algorithms). The virtual machine is programmed in a high-level role-oriented language that allows the programmer to declaratively specify how programs are deployed in the modular robot. Our approach enables fast and incremental on-line updates, allowing the programmer to interactively experiment with the physical robots. We show how this design lends itself to an efficient implementation targeting typical resource-constrained modular robotic hardware by illustrating our prototype implementation for the ATRON self-reconfigurable robot.
Gender Differences in Anxiety among Undergraduates from Ten Arab Countries

This study investigated gender differences in anxiety among volunteer undergraduates recruited from 10 Arab countries; Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Oman, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine (Nablus and Gaza), Jordan and Iraq ( N = 3,064). The Kuwait University Anxiety Scale (KUAS) was used in its Arabic form. It was found that females had higher mean anxiety scores than did their male counterparts in all 10 countries. However, significant differences were found in 7 out of the 10 countries. The salient gender differences were interpreted in the light of a socialization process; especially sex-typing and gender roles.
Implementing a Farmers’ Market Incentive Program: Perspectives on the New York City Health Bucks Program

Introduction One strategy for lowering the prevalence of obesity is to increase access to and affordability of fruits and vegetables through farmers’ markets. However, little has been documented in the literature on the implementation of such efforts. To address this gap, the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (DNPAO) sponsored an evaluation of the New York City Health Bucks program, a farmers’ market coupon incentive program intended to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables in underserved neighborhoods while supporting local farmers. Methods We conducted a process evaluation of Health Bucks program implementation. We interviewed 6 farmer/vendors, 3 market managers, and 4 program administrators, and collected data on site at 86 farmers’ markets, including surveys of 81 managers and 141 farmer/vendors on their perspectives on promotion and redemption of the incentive coupons; knowledge and attitudes regarding the program; experiences with markets and products; and facilitators and barriers to program participation. Results Results indicate that respondents view Health Bucks as a positive program model. Farmers’ market incentive coupon programs like Health Bucks are one strategy to address the problem of obesity and were associated with higher fruit and vegetable access and purchases in low-income communities. Conclusions This evaluation identified some areas for improving implementation of the Health Bucks program. Farmers’ market incentive programs like Health Bucks may be one avenue to increase access to and affordability of fruits and vegetables among low-income persons. Further research is needed to assess the potential effects of these programs on access and health outcomes.
A Context-aware Miner for Medical Processes

Medical process mining is gaining much attention in recent years, but the available mining algorithms can hardly cope with medical application peculiarities, that require to properly contextualize process patterns. Indeed, most approaches lose the connection between a mined pattern and the relevant portion of the input event log, and can have a limited precision, i.e., they can mine incorrect paths, never appearing in the input log traces. These issues can be very harmful in medical applications, where it is vital that mining results are reliable as much as possible, and properly reference the contextual information, in order to facilitate the work of physicians and hospital managers in guaranteeing the highest quality of service to patients. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to medical process mining that operates in a context-aware fashion. We show on a set of critical examples how our algorithm is able to cope with all the issues sketched above. In the future, we plan to test the approach on a real-world medical dataset, and to extend the framework in order to support ef cient and exible trace querying as well.
Modelling voiceless speech segments by means of an additive procedure based on the computation of formant sinusoids

A previously developed vowel synthesis algorithm implements formants as sinusoids, amplitude- and phase-modulated by the fundamental frequency (Hertrich and Ackermann, 1999, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 29882990). The present study extends this approach to the modelling of the ac oustic c haracteristics of aperiodic speech segments. To these e nds, a voiceless s ignal component i s generated by adding at each sample point a random parameter onto the formants' phase progression. Voiceless stop consonants then can be modelled, e.g., by combining a release burst, i.e., an interval in which the formant sinusoids abruptly increase a nd gradually decrease in amplitude, with formantshaped noise components, representing inter-articulator frication, aspiration, and breathy vowel onset.
Optimization of heartbeat detection based on clustering and multimethod approach

In this paper, an approach for optimizing heartbeat locations as detected in time by multimethod approach is proposed. The approach builds a two-dimensional representation of heartbeat locations obtained by several independent detection methods. The representation depends on heartbeat time instants and beat-to-beat intervals. It is first transformed into a smoothed two-dimensional histogram of points indicating individual heartbeat detections. Heartbeat time instants are determined as local maxima in the histogram. We tested our approach on signals acquired by optical interferometer. Seven subjects participated in the experiment, beginning by an ergometer exercise until they reached submaximal heart rate. A resting period followed, during which optical interferometric signal was taken unobtrusively in parallel with referential ECG. The proposed detection procedure was capable of tracking the changing heart rhythm by analyzing optical interferometric signals and comparing the results to the referential ECG recordings. Sensitivity 97.13±2.00% and precision 97.82±2.09% were obtained. Mean absolute error between detected beat-to-beat and referential RR intervals yielded 20.05±8.38 ms and corresponding mean relative error 7.47±3.19%.
Livestock infectious diseases and zoonoses

Infectious diseases of livestock are a major threat to global animal health and welfare and their effective control is crucial for agronomic health, for safeguarding and securing national and international food supplies and for alleviating rural poverty in developing countries. Some devastating livestock diseases are endemic in many parts of the world and threats from old and new pathogens continue to emerge, with changes to global climate, agricultural practices and demography presenting conditions that are especially favourable for the spread of arthropod-borne diseases into new geographical areas. Zoonotic infections that are transmissible either directly or indirectly between animals and humans are on the increase and pose significant additional threats to human health and the current pandemic status of new influenza A (H1N1) is a topical example of the challenge presented by zoonotic viruses. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some of the issues relating to infectious diseases of livestock, which will be discussed in more detail in the papers that follow.
Intonational Patterns of Nonverbal Vocalizations in People With Dementia

Nonverbal vocalizations in dementia are important clinically since they generally have been regarded as disruptive behavior that is disturbing. The aim of the present study is to describe the interactional pattern, including the prosodic package, of nonverbal vocalizations in a participant in a late stage of dementia. The acoustic analysis shows that the vocalizations do not differ significantly from the verbal utterances regarding mean fundamental frequency or pitch range. The mean fundamental frequency, F0, of the utterances from Anna was significantly higher than the mean F0 from the other elderly participants. The analysis demonstrates that there is a singing-like type of vocalizations that does not resemble the previously described patterns of nonverbal vocalizations. This pattern of the nonverbal vocalization does not resemble the intonation of Anna’s verbal utterances. The other participants perceive Anna’s vocalizations as potentially meaningful turns. Nonverbal vocalizations in clinical settings should be taken as communicative contributions.
Pose-constrained whole-body planning using Task Space Region Chains

We present an efficient approach to generating paths for humanoids and other robotic manipulators that uses the Task Space Region (TSR) framework to specify manipulation tasks. TSRs can define acceptable goal poses of an end-effector or constraints on the end-effector's pose during the path, or both. First presented as a method for goal-specification [1], TSRs are a straightforward representation of sets of end-effector poses which can be sampled and which entail a clear distance metric. This makes TSRs ideal for sampling-based motion planning. However, a finite set of TSRs is sometimes insufficient to capture the pose constraints of a given task. To describe more complex constraints, we present TSR Chains, which are defined by linking a series of TSRs. Though the sampling for TSR Chains follows clearly from that of TSRs, the distance metric for TSR Chains is radically different. We also present a new version of our Constrained Bidirectional RRT (CBiRRT2) planner, which is capable of planning with TSR chains as well as other constraints. We demonstrate our approach on the HRP3 robot by performing a variety of whole-body manipulation tasks.
Histogenesis of Clear Cell Adenocarcinoma in the Urinary Tract: Evidence of Urothelial Origin

Purpose: Clear cell adenocarcinoma in the urinary tract is a rare entity with an appearance resembling its counterpart in the female genital tract. Although several theories have been proposed about its origin, its exact histogenesis has remained uncertain. Experimental Design: We integrated molecular genetic evaluation by fluorescence in situ hybridization and X-chromosome inactivation with conventional morphologic and immunohistochemical analyses in 12 patients with clear cell adenocarcinomas in the urinary tract. Results: Concurrent urothelial carcinoma or urothelial carcinoma in situ was present in six cases (50%) and foci of cystitis glandularis were observed in four cases (33%). Neither intestinal metaplasia nor Müllerian component was identified in any case. Cytoplasmic expression of α-methylacyl-CoA racemase was demonstrable in 10 of 12 tumors (83%). Moderate to diffuse immunostaining for cytokeratin 7 was identified in all 12 tumors (100%), whereas only 3 of 12 (25%) tumors showed positive immunostaining for cytokeratin 20. Focal uroplakin III staining was seen in 6 of 12 tumors (50%). In five cases (42%), focal to moderate CD10 immunoreactivity was observed. Immunostains for OCT4 and CDX2 were completely negative in all tumors. In UroVysion fluorescence in situ hybridization assays, all tumors displayed chromosomal alterations similar to those commonly found in urothelial carcinoma. Identical patterns of nonrandom X-chromosome inactivation in concurrent clear cell adenocarcinoma and urothelial neoplasia were identified in two informative female cases. Conclusions: Our findings support an urothelial origin for most clear cell adenocarcinomas of the urinary tract, despite their morphologic resemblance to certain Müllerian-derived tumors of the female genital tract.
Improving detection of mild loss of retinal light increment sensitivity at the posterior pole with the microperimeter MP1.

PURPOSE With "standard" stimuli (white, Goldmann size III, 200 ms), the Nidek Microperimeter MP1 underestimates retinal light increment sensitivity (LIS). We thoroughly analyze this problem, suggest alternative settings to improve sensitivity to detect dysfunction, and provide true normal values. METHODS LIS was tested at 55 positions in the macular region using a 4-2-1 staircase strategy with 200 ms white or red stimuli on a 1.3 cd m⁻² background. Stimulus size was Goldmann III and I, and additionally II in the healthy subjects. All participants underwent a complete ophthalmologic examination, spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT), and fundus autofluorescence (FAF). RESULTS In normals, distributions of LIS for white Goldmann sizes II and III within the central 6° to 10° were clipped off at 20 dB--the MP1 cannot attenuate them any further. When the stimulus size was reduced to Goldmann I or the color changed to red, median LIS in the fovea (∼15 dB) was approximately 5 dB higher than at 10° eccentricity. Estimated from these results, central LIS for white Goldmann sizes II and III stimuli were 21 and 27 dB, respectively. In four patients with either focal or diffuse macular pathology, as confirmed by funduscopy, OCT, or FAF, reduced LIS was detected clearly with Goldmann size I stimuli, but not III. CONCLUSIONS In all subjects reported here, standard central LIS was above the technical limit of the MP1. To measure true thresholds in healthy subjects, either smaller (Goldmann size I) or dimmer stimuli (red) must be used.
A new noise reduction system based on ALE and noise reconstruction filter

A noise reduction technique is proposed to reduce wideband and sinusoidal noise in noisy speech. In real environments, the background noise includes sinusoidal noise, for example, from ventilation fans. Therefore, it is also important to reduce sinusoidal noise. The new noise reduction system uses two types of adaptive line enhancer (ALE) and a noise reconstruction filter (NRF). First, two ALEs estimate the speech components. However, since two ALEs cannot estimate unvoiced sound, the quality of the speech enhanced by the two ALEs is not enough. Thus, the NRF is used to improve the noise reduction ability. The NRF accurately estimates the background noise from the signal occupied by the noise components, which is obtained by subtracting the speech enhanced by the two ALEs from the noisy speech. The enhanced speech is obtained by subtracting the reconstructed noise from the noisy speech. Additionally, the noise reduction system with a feedback path is also proposed for more improvement of the quality of the enhanced speech.
Down-regulation of porin M35 in Moraxella catarrhalis by aminopenicillins and environmental factors and its potential contribution to the mechanism of resistance to aminopenicillins

Objectives The outer membrane protein M35 of Moraxella catarrhalis is an antigenically conserved porin. Knocking out M35 significantly increases the MICs of aminopenicillins. The aim of this study was to determine the biological mechanism of this potentially new antimicrobial resistance mechanism of M. catarrhalis and the behaviour of M35 in general stress situations. Methods PCR using m35-specific primers was used to detect the m35 gene in clinical isolates. The m35 mRNA expression of strains 300, O35E and 415 after exposure to amoxicillin and different stress conditions was measured by real-time PCR and normalized in relation to their 16S rRNA expression. The expression of M35 protein was analysed by SDS-PAGE and western blotting. Results Screening of 52 middle ear isolates resulted in positive PCR products for all tested strains. The analysis of m35 mRNA expression after amoxicillin treatment showed 24%–85% down-regulation compared with the respective amoxicillin-free controls in all three strains tested. Also, analysis of protein concentrations revealed lower M35 expression after growth with amoxicillin. Investigation of M35 during general stress responses showed down-regulation of the porin with growth at 26°C and 42°C, under hyperosmolar stress and under iron restriction. Conclusions The reduced expression of M35 after aminopenicillin exposure indicates a novel resistance mechanism against aminopenicillins in M. catarrhalis, which may be relevant in vivo. The differences in expression after different stress treatments demonstrate that M35 is involved in general stress responses.
Rights and commitment in multi-agent agreements

For agents to act in collaboration, they often require an agreement that describes how they are to act, to which they are committed. Typically, agreements are characterised as an explicit course of action or a goal to be achieved. It is argued such agreements may over specify the interaction required. To overcome this problem, a novel formalisation of agreements between agents is presented that is based on rights as well as actions to be performed. Each agent that is involved in an agreement is bound to uphold the rights of others, and the implications of exercising rights and acting for others. It is argued that this approach provides agents with greater flexibility in the agreements they may reach, while retaining the necessary group commitment.