Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inter/Intraobserver Reliability of T1 Pelvic Angle (TPA), a Novel Radiographic Measure for Global Sagittal Deformity

Study Design. Reliability analysis. Objective. To assess intra- and interobserver agreement of the T1 pelvic angle (T1PA), a novel radiographic measure of spinal sagittal alignment. Orthopedic surgeons of various levels of experience measured the T1PA in a series of healthy adult volunteers. The relationship of the TIPA to pelvic position was also assessed. Summary of Background Data. Recent literature suggests that the T1PA is a more reliable measure of global sagittal alignment than traditional measurements (i.e., sagittal vertical axis). Previous research focuses on postoperative patients with known spinal deformity. No published research exists evaluating the use of T1PA on healthy subjects without spinal deformity. The purpose of this study is: (1) to assess the reliability of measurements of the T1PA, (2) to examine its relationship to pelvic position. Methods. Seven evaluators of varying orthopedic experience measured the T1PA in 50 healthy adult volunteers. Subjects were radiographed in each of three pelvic positions: resting, maximal anterior pelvic rotation, and maximal posterior pelvic rotation. After a washout period, the measurement was repeated. Using intraclass correlation coefficients, the intra- and inter-rater agreement for the T1PA was measured. The collected data was also used to determine the accuracy of this measurement and its relationship to pelvic position. Results. A very high level of agreement was found in measurements of the T1PA (intraclass correlation coefficients r = 0.98). At each pelvic position, all examiners had excellent intrarater reliability, > 0.85. The inter-rater reliability, compared with a gold standard, consistently measured the T1PA within ± 2°. The data also shows that the T1PA changes with pelvic rotation. Conclusion. T1PA is a reproducible and reliable measure of global sagittal alignment regardless of the level of training. The T1PA varies based on pelvic rotation; this variation must be taken into account when assigning an absolute target for correction. Level of Evidence: 4
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Antibodies in Dromedary Camels, Bangladesh, 2015

Dromedary camels are bred domestically and imported into Bangladesh. In 2015, of 55 camels tested for Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus in Dhaka, 17 (31%) were seropositive, including 1 bred locally. None were PCR positive. The potential for infected camels in urban markets could have public health implications and warrants further investigation.
Association of emitter and emission using deep learning

A method for using deep neural networks (DNN) to perform RF emitter localization is presented. The localization is performed using a DNN to perform dual modality sensor fusion to associate observed RF emissions and detected potential RF emitters. A synthetic dataset is presented as a means of evaluating the validity of the approach in a simplified setting.
Geometric Insights for Data-Driven Gait Analysis

Energetically optimal gaits are of interest to both robotics and biology communities. Two respective goals are: (a) finding goal functions for learning robot gaits which produce stable and efficient motion [1], [2]; and (b) assessing biomechanical optimality of behaviors in organisms [3]. A common pitfall of the former goal is a cumbersome experimental requirement, as each candidate gait must be physically tested. The latter goal is challenging because it is difficult to assess the actual energetic cost organisms incur. Our contribution to solving these problems is a novel approach for building gait-centered, local models from data. By using data-driven analysis tools for oscillators [4] to inspect geometric locomotion models of systems, we can predict system performance given small gait modifications. Our techniques are currently restricted to friction dominated regimes in which the mechanical connection and cost of developing kinetic energy govern the cost of transport (such as in [5], [6]). These local models eliminate the requirement for the empirical verification of small design modifications in (a) and provide a pathway for benchmarking biological gait optimalty in (b). We applied our methods to learning a swimming / slithering gait for a simulated 9 link swimmer [7], initialized from a simple gait that used only two of the motors. Our algorithm converged to a gait that looks serpentine after a dozen trials of 30 cycles each, in an 88 parameter gait space. This is notable for two reasons: (a) a typical simplex gradient optimization, e.g. the Nelder-Mead algorithm, would require 89 trials just to initialize the search routine; (b) at each gait, we relied on the simulated system noise to produce enough variability to allow the gait parameter gradients to be identified. Fig. 1. A nine link swimmer converges quickly to a serpentine behavior, even though the initial strategy locks 75% of the joints. A key feature of this approach is that system noise is welcomed here. System noise directly informs the local models, providing a broader view of the system’s dynamical landscape. This allows the swimmer to procedurally improve its performance with each physical test. We are in the process of constructing a data-driven criterion for geometric gait optimality. Future plans include fitting models to biological motion-capture data, allowing us for the first time to address optimality of gaits without detailed mechanical locomotion models.
Second harmonic generation imaging of the collagen architecture in prostate cancer tissue

Optical microscopy has been one of the most important tools for visualizing biological samples since the seventeenth century. Recently, with the advances in femtosecond laser technology, all the nonlinear optical processes have now been included as optical microscopy methods, and second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy has emerged as a powerful new optical imaging tool with applications in medicine and biology. Here we use SHG microscopy to obtain images of 76 prostate biopsies on histological slides. Multiple samples from the excised prostates of patients who underwent a radical prostatectomy were evaluated. The samples were collected from prostate positions as in needle biopsy procedures. The results show the collagen fiber architecture among malignant acini, and analysis of the fiber orientation in the images reveals that the collagen fibers become more aligned at higher malignancy grades. Furthermore, we find that the degree of fiber alignment correlates directly with the Gleason patterns.
Consequences of high effective Prandtl number on solar differential rotation and convective velocity

Observations suggest that the large-scale convective velocities obtained by solar convection simulations might be over-estimated (convective conundrum). One plausible solution to this could be the small-scale dynamo which cannot be fully resolved by global simulations. The small-scale Lorentz force suppresses the convective motions and also the turbulent mixing of entropy between upflows and downflows, leading to a large effective Prandtl number ($\Pr$). We explore this idea in three-dimensional global rotating convection simulations at different thermal conductivity ($\kappa$), i.e., at different $\Pr$. In agreement with previous non-rotating simulations, the convective velocity is reduced with the increase of $\Pr$ as long as the thermal conductive flux is negligible. A subadiabatic layer is formed near the base of the convection zone due to continuous deposition of low entropy plumes in low-$\kappa$ simulations. The most interesting result of our low-$\kappa$ simulations is that the convective motions are accompanied by a change in the convection structure that is increasingly influenced by small-scale plumes. These plumes tend to transport angular momentum radially inward and thus establish an anti-solar differential rotation, in striking contrast to the solar rotation profile. If such low diffusive plumes, driven by the radiative-surface cooling, are present in the Sun, then our results cast doubt on the idea that a high effective $\Pr$ may be a viable solution to the solar convective conundrum. Our study also emphasizes that any resolution of the conundrum that relies on the downward plumes must take into account angular momentum transport as well as heat transport.
Age-Related Slowing of Contractile Properties Differs Between Power, Endurance, and Nonathletes: A Tensiomyographic Assessment

Although master athletes maintain high levels of physical activity, they also suffer from an age-related decline in skeletal muscle function. There are indications of disproportional age- and physical inactivity-induced muscle wasting between muscles. Tensiomyography is a noninvasive tool that has been used to study the effects of a variety of sports on the contraction time (Tc) in different skeletal muscles. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to assess age-related changes in the Tc of the vastus lateralis, gastrocnemius medialis, and biceps femoris muscles with Tensiomyography in older nonathletes (age = 62.1 ± 12.7 years; NMALES = 133; NFEMALES = 246), and power (age = 56.9 ± 13.5 years; NMALES = 100; NFEMALES = 78) and endurance master athletes (age = 56.5 ± 14.5 years; NMALES = 76; NFEMALES = 73). We found an age-related slowing in all muscles, irrespective of discipline, where endurance master athletes had the longest and power master athletes had the shortest Tc. The longer Tc in endurance master athletes than in nonathletes suggests that regular endurance sport activity aggravates slowing of skeletal muscles during aging.
Molecular pathogenesis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: Impact of passenger strand of pre‐miR‐148a on gene regulation

We previously used RNA sequencing to establish the microRNA (miRNA) expression signature of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). We found that both strands of pre‐miR‐148a (miR‐148a‐5p: the passenger strand and miR‐148a‐3p: the guide strand) were downregulated in cancer tissues. Ectopic expression of miR‐148a‐5p and miR‐148a‐3p significantly inhibited cancer cell migration and invasion, indicating that both strands of pre‐miR‐148a had tumor‐suppressive roles in PDAC cells. In silico database and genome‐wide gene expression analyses identified a total of 15 genes that were putative targets regulated by these miRNAs. High expression of miR‐148a‐5p targets (PHLDA2, LPCAT2 and AP1S3) and miR‐148a‐3p targets (SMA, ENDOD1 and UHMK1) was associated with poor prognosis of patients with PDAC. Moreover, knockdown of PHLDA2 expression inhibited cancer cell aggressiveness, suggesting PHLDA2 acted as an oncogene in PDAC cells. Involvement of the passenger strand of pre‐miR‐148a (miR‐148‐5p) is a new concept in cancer research. Novel approaches that identify tumor‐suppressive miRNA regulatory networks in lethal PDAC might provide new prognostic markers and therapeutic targets for this disease.
Collective Attention towards Scientists and Research Topics

Emergent patterns of collective attention towards scientists and their research may function as a proxy for scientific impact which traditionally is assessed via committees that award prizes to scientists. Therefore it is crucial to understand the relationships between scientific impact and online demand and supply for information about scientists and their work. In this paper, we compare the temporal pattern of information supply (article creations) and information demand (article views) on Wikipedia for two groups of scientists: scientists who received one of the most prestigious awards in their field and influential scientists from the same field who did not receive an award. Our research highlights that awards function as external shocks which increase supply and demand for information about scientists, but hardly affect information supply and demand for their research topics. Further, we find interesting differences in the temporal ordering of information supply between the two groups: (i) award-winners have a higher probability that interest in them precedes interest in their work; (ii) for award winners interest in articles about them and their work is temporally more clustered than for non-awarded scientists.
Reduction in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with weight loss: the PREMIER trial.

BACKGROUND Consumption of liquid calories from beverages has increased in parallel with the obesity epidemic in the US population, but their causal relation remains unclear. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to examine how changes in beverage consumption affect weight change among adults. DESIGN This was a prospective study of 810 adults participating in the PREMIER trial, an 18-mo randomized, controlled, behavioral intervention trial. Measurements (weight, height, and 24-h dietary recall) were made at baseline, 6 mo, and 18 mo. RESULTS Baseline mean intake of liquid calories was 356 kcal/d (19% of total energy intake). After potential confounders and intervention assignment were controlled for, a reduction in liquid calorie intake of 100 kcal/d was associated with a weight loss of 0.25 kg (95% CI: 0.11, 0.39; P < 0.001) at 6 mo and of 0.24 kg (95% CI: 0.06, 0.41; P = 0.008) at 18 mo. A reduction in liquid calorie intake had a stronger effect than did a reduction in solid calorie intake on weight loss. Of the individual beverages, only intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) was significantly associated with weight change. A reduction in SSB intake of 1 serving/d was associated with a weight loss of 0.49 kg (95% CI: 0.11, 0.82; P = 0.006) at 6 mo and of 0.65 kg (95% CI: 0.22, 1.09; P = 0.003) at 18 mo. CONCLUSIONS These data support recommendations to limit liquid calorie intake among adults and to reduce SSB consumption as a means to accomplish weight loss or avoid excess weight gain. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT00000616.
Characteristics and long‐term prognosis of patients with heart failure and mid‐range ejection fraction compared with reduced and preserved ejection fraction: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

This study aimed to assess by a meta‐analysis the clinical characteristics, all‐cause and cardiovascular mortality, and hospitalization of patients with heart failure (HF) with mid‐range ejection fraction (HFmrEF) compared with HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).
An Exploration of Discourse-Based Sentence Spaces for Compositional Distributional Semantics

This paper investigates whether the wider context in which a sentence is located can contribute to a distributional representation of sentence meaning. We compare a vector space for sentences in which the features are words occurring within the sentence, with two new vector spaces that only make use of surrounding context. Experiments on simple subject-verbobject similarity tasks show that all sentence spaces produce results that are comparable with previous work. However, qualitative analysis and user experiments indicate that extra-sentential contexts capture more diverse, yet topically coherent information.
Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the British Household Panel Survey

We look for evidence of adaptation in wellbeing to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete; this is not so for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. Equally, the time profiles with life satisfaction as the wellbeing measure are very close to those using a twelve-item scale of psychological functioning. As such, the phenomenon of adaptation may be a general one, rather than being found only in German data or using single-item wellbeing measures.
Semiconductor quantum nanostructures for optoelectronic applications

Semiconductor quantum nanostructures, such as 0D quantum dots (QDs), 1D nanorods and 2D nanoplatelets (NPLs), quantum rings (QRs) and quantum wells (QWs) exhibit unique quantum mechanical and optoelectronic properties due to spatial confinement of excitons in one or more dimensions (∼10−9 m). They have received increasing research interest in recent years owing to their intriguing fundamental properties that can be leveraged for potential applications in optoelectronic and display devices as cost-effective and quantum-efficient luminophores. They have been successfully used to implement and design light-emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, photodetectors, solar cells, biomedical imagers, etc. This is owing to their morphological bandgap tunability, fast fluorescence lifetime and unique optical characteristics supporting tunable pure-color or wide spectral emission. Among the wide range of available and newly studied semiconductor quantum nanostructures, firstly (i) NPLs and QRs of II-VI materials and alloys thereof, and secondly (ii) QDs and QWs of III-V dilute nitride/bismide alloy materials are two families of nanostructures that have emerged as very promising candidates for novel semiconductor device and optoelectronic applications. In this thesis, we report studies on the aforementioned two families of semiconductor quantum nanostructures. The first part of the thesis focuses on the study of II-VI (CdSe and CdS) NPLs and optoelectronic properties thereof under varying physical conditions such as geometrical dimensions, temperature, material composition, topology and optical polarization. NPLs are a unique class of atomically flat quasi-2D quantum confined nanocrystals, often synthesized using wide bandgap II-VI materials, having well-defined thicknesses of several monolayers (MLs). Their sizes enable them to be colloidally suspended in solution. Recent advancements in colloidal chemistry has led to the efficient synthesis of high quality single crystal NPL samples having reduced nonradiative recombination paths and enhanced optical properties. They exhibit strong 1D confinement as their thickness is very
Towards mental stress detection using wearable physiological sensors

Early mental stress detection can prevent many stress related health problems. This study aimed at using a wearable sensor system to measure physiological signals and detect mental stress. Three different stress conditions were presented to a healthy subject group. During the procedure, ECG, respiration, skin conductance, and EMG of the trapezius muscles were recorded. In total, 19 physiological features were calculated from these signals. After normalization of the feature values and analysis of correlations among these features, a subset of 9 features was selected for further analysis. Principal component analysis reduced these 9 features to 7 principal components (PCs). Using these PCs and different classifiers, a consistent classification accuracy between stress and non stress conditions of almost 80% was found. This suggests that a promising feature subset was found for future development of a personalized stress monitor.
Application of Activated Carbon Fiber in Functional Clothing

The development and health performance of multi-functional activated carbon fiber materials are mainly studied. Based on the special biological effects of functional health fiber materials, the product is designed. From the pathogenesis of female breast lobular hyperplasia and Chinese medicine therapy, multifunctional activated carbon fiber material is used to develop a health care bra, which has the function of preventing and treating breast lobular hyperplasia. Its health performance is evaluated. The design and development of functional health bra and the verification of its health effect are the focus of this research.
Five-Year Summary of In Vitro Activity and Resistance Mechanisms of Linezolid against Clinically Important Gram-Positive Cocci in the United States from the LEADER Surveillance Program (2011 to 2015)

ABSTRACT This report describes linezolid susceptibility testing results for 6,741 Gram-positive pathogens from 60 U.S. sites collected during 2015 for the LEADER Program. In addition, the report summarizes linezolid in vitro activity, resistance mechanisms, and molecular typing obtained for 2011 to 2015. During 2015, linezolid showed potent activity in testing against Staphylococcus aureus, inhibiting >99.9% of 3,031 isolates at ≤2 µg/ml. Similarly, linezolid showed coverage against 99.2% of coagulase-negative staphylococci, 99.7% of enterococci, and 100.0% of Streptococcus pneumoniae, virdans group, and beta-hemolytic streptococcus isolates tested. The overall linezolid resistance rate remained a modest <1% from 2011 to 2015. Staphylococci, especially Staphylococcus epidermidis, showed a range of linezolid resistance mechanisms. Increased annual trends for the presence of cfr among Staphylococcus aureus isolates were not observed, but 64.3% (9/14) of the isolates with decreased susceptibility (MIC, ≥4 µg/ml) to linezolid carried this transferrable gene (2011 to 2015). The cfr gene was detected in 21.9% (7/32) of linezolid-resistant staphylococci other than S. aureus from 2011 to 2015. The optrA gene was noted in half (2/4) of the population of linezolid-nonsusceptible Enterococcus faecalis isolates from 2011 to 2015, while linezolid-nonsusceptible Enterococcus faecium isolates showed alterations predominantly (16/16) in the 23S rRNA gene (G2576T). This report confirms a long record of linezolid activity against Gram-positive isolates in the United States since regulatory approval in 2000 and reports the oxazolidinones evolving resistance mechanisms.
Efficacy of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in neurological diagnosis and neurotherapeutic decision making

SummaryAnatomic and functional neuroimaging with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) includes the technology more widely known as magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Now a routine automated “add-on” to all clinical magnetic resonance scanners, MRS, which assays regional neurochemical health and disease, is therefore the most accessible diagnostic tool for clinical management of neurometabolic disorders. Furthermore, the noninvasive nature of this technique makes it an ideal tool for therapeutic monitoring of disease and neurotherapeutic decision making. Among the more than 100 brain disorders that fall within this broad category, MRS contributes decisively to clinical decision making in a smaller but growing number. In this review, we will cover how MRS provides therapeutic impact in brain tumors, metabolic disorders such as adrenoleukodystrophy and Canavan’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, hypoxia, secondary to trauma or ischemia, human immunodeficiency virus dementia and lesions, as well as systemic disease such as hepatic and renal failure. Together, these eight indications for MRS apply to a majority of all cases seen. This review, which examines the role of MRS in enhancing routine neurological practice and treatment concludes: 1) there is added value from MRS where MRI is positive; 2) there is unique decision-making information in MRS when MRI is negative; and 3) MRS usefully informs decision making in neurotherapeutics. Additional efficacy studies could extend the range of this capability.