Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Overview of Iron in Term Breast-Fed Infants

Background Iron is an essential nutrient for normal growth and neurodevelopment of infants. Iron deficiency (ID) remains the most common micronutrient deficiency worldwide. There are convincing data that ID is associated with negative effects on neurological and psychomotor development. Objectives In this review, we provide an overview of current knowledge of the importance of iron in normal term breast-fed infants with a focus on recommendations, metabolism, and iron requirements. Conclusions Health organizations around the world recommend the introduction of iron-rich foods or iron supplements for growing infants to prevent ID. However, there is no routine screening for ID in infancy. Multicenter trials with long-term follow-up are needed to investigate the association between iron fortification/supplementation and various health outcomes.
Synthesis and Biological Activity of Arylspiroborate Salts Derived from Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester

Two novel boron compounds containing caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) derivatives have been prepared and characterized fully. These new compounds and CAPE have been investigated for potential antioxidant and antimicrobial properties and their ability to inhibit 5-lipoxygenase and whether chelation to boron improves their biological activity. Sodium salt 4 was generally more active than ammonium salt 5 in the biological assays and surpassed the radical scavenging ability of CAPE. Compounds 4 and 5 were more active than CAPE and Zileuton in human polymorphonuclear leukocytes. These results clearly show the effectiveness of the synthesized salts as transporter of CAPE.
Prognostic determinants in patients with uterine and ovarian carcinosarcoma.

OBJECTIVE To analyze and compare the demographics, treatment, recurrence, and survival rates in patients with carcinosarcoma of the uterus and ovary. STUDY DESIGN All patients with uterine and ovarian carcinosarcoma who underwent surgical staging at the 2 participating institutions between 1995 and 2007 were identified. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to generate overall survival (OS) data. Factors predictive of outcome were compared using the Cox proportional hazards model. RESULTS Analysis of 87 women with uterine carcinosarcoma and 71 with ovarian carcinosarcoma was performed. Of those, 47% of the patients with uterine carcinosarcoma, compared to 14% of the patients with ovarian carcinosarcoma, were diagnosed with localized disease (p < 0.001). Age > 65 years old (p < 0.001), tumor extension (local versus regional versus distant, p < 0.001), and platinum-based chemotherapy (p = 0.05) were all independent predictors of survival. In a multivariate Cox regression model, age > 65 years old (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.5, p < 0.001), tumor extension (locoregional versus distant, HR = 3.9, p = 0.006), and uterine versus ovarian carcinosarcoma (HR = 2.2, p = 0.009) were identified as independent predictors of OS. CONCLUSION Uterine carcinosarcoma presents at an earlier stage than does ovarian carcinosarcoma. In the multivariate analysis uterine carcinosarcoma demonstrated shorter survival than did ovarian carcinosarcoma after adjustment for extent of disease spread, age, and platinum-based chemotherapy.
Bioactive essential oils from the Cameroonian rain forest: A review - Part II

Eighty-nine essential oil analyses carried out on Cameroonian plant material by gas chromatography are reviewed, and structures of sixty one main oil compounds are presented. Plant samples had been collected all over the rainforest area and further northwards, covering forty plant species belonging to ten families. For these plants, common names, traditional use as well as bioactivity and toxicity of their essential oils in vitro and in vivo are compiled. Data show that oils from leaves, bark, roots, fruit, rhizome or seeds display their own one to four main essential oil components. Each of them contributing more than 10% to over 90% of the oil s volume, which sums up to species-unique essential oil fingerprints and decreasing similarity of these fingerprints with increasing phylogenetic distance between species. This review article shows that the environmental factor include, temperature, rainfall (Littoral region), humidity (Center, South, East and West regions) and solar radiation (Adamaoua, North and Far-north regions) as well as the soil nutrients influence the secondary metabolite composition of the plants. Bioassays valorized traditional use of a good number of oils, for example against the dermatophytic fungus Trichophyton rubrum being twice as effective as amphothericin B®; against the chloroquine resistant Plasmodium falciparum; against cancer cell lines; and against a variety of human pathogen bacteria, being up to ten times as effective as ciproxin®, lidaprim®, tetracycline hydrochloride® and lidaprim®. Importantly, in an experiment employing the stored product beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, the leaf oil of Lippia adoensis (Verbenaceae) indicated neurotoxicity, so that preparations should be applied with care. Follow up work may focus on bioassays with commercial pure compounds, with the goal to improve effectivity and doses calculation for traditional essential oil medicines and agricultural products.
Clinical performance measures for adults hospitalized with acute ischemic stroke: performance measures for healthcare professionals from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.

To work toward the goal of building healthier lives, free of cardiovascular diseases and stroke, the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Stroke Association (ASA) have developed a multifaceted strategy for improving the quality of care for stroke. A key feature of this strategy is the development of professional guidelines for evidence-based stroke care. Recommendations are provided for acute management, primary and secondary prevention, rehabilitation, stroke systems of care, and other domains of stroke care.1–4 The strength of the evidence supporting these recommendations is given, according to a specified grading system. For many aspects of care, there is widespread consensus that the intervention is beneficial, usually supported by strong scientific evidence including randomized controlled trials. Professional guidelines improve the delivery of evidence-based care; however, despite these guidelines, gaps between best evidence-based practice and actual practice persist.5 To close these gaps in quality of care, several organizations have developed systems to allow practitioners and healthcare organizations such as hospitals to quantify the quality of their care through performance measures. A performance measure is defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as a “mechanism for assessing the degree to which a provider competently and safely delivers the appropriate clinical services to the patient within the optimal time period. ”6 The AHA and American College of Cardiology Foundation have additionally suggested that performance measures should be based on the highest level of supportive evidence and have the greatest impact on health outcomes.7 Performance measures, in addition to supporting quality improvement activities, are specifically suitable for public reporting, external comparisons, and possibly pay-for-performance programs. As steward of the professional guidelines for stroke care, with a large group of volunteer expert clinicians with expertise in guideline creation and performance measurement, the AHA/ASA is uniquely positioned to develop high-quality …
Yoda: The Young Observant Discovery Agent

The YODA Robot Project at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute consists of a group of young researchers who share a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap its knowledge from real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery. Our goal is to create a mobile agent that can autonomously learn from its environment based on its own actions, percepts, and mis-sions. Our participation in the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, served as the first milestone in advancing us toward this goal. YODA's software architecture is a hierarchy of abstraction layers, ranging from a set of behaviors at the bottom layer to a dynamic, mission-oriented planner at the top. The planner uses a map of the environment to determine a sequence of goals to be accomplished by the robot and delegates the detailed executions to the set of behaviors at the lower layer. This abstraction architecture has proven robust in dynamic and noisy environments, as shown by YODA's performance at the robot competition.
Neural network with ensembles

Pattern recognition systems usually have a relatively small number of patterns to be recognized. As a rule the number of handwritten symbols, number of phonemes or number of human faces are of the order of some dozens. But sometimes the pattern recognition task demands much more classes. For example, a continuous speech recognition system can be created on the base of syllables; a handwriting recognition system will be more efficient if the recognized units are not different letters, but triplets of letters. In these cases it is necessary to have various thousands of classes. In this paper we will consider the situation of the recognition problem that demands many thousands of classes to be recognized. For such problems we propose the use of the neural networks with ensembles. We give a short description of this type of neural network and calculate its storage capacity.
KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) and KIR 3DL1 protein expression in non-small cell lung cancer

Background Nature killer (NK) cells are the immune system's first line of defense against both viral infections and tumors. Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) are associated with susceptibility to different types of cancers. We investigated KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) and KIR 3DL1 protein expression and their association with survival in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Methods The expression of KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) (BC032422/ ADQ31987/ NP_002246/ NP_036446, ABCAM) and KIR 3DL1 (AA 1-444, ABCAM) protein was assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in 62 NSCLC patients. Results KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) and KIR 3DL1 were expressed both on NSCLC tumor cells and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). Fourteen samples (22.6%) stained positive for KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) on the tumor cells, and 10 (16.1%) had positive expression on the TILs. Thirty-three samples (53.2%) stained positive for KIR 3DL1 on the tumor cells, and 31 (50.0%) had positive expression on the TILs. Patients with negative KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) expression on tumor cells or TILs had longer overall survival (OS) than patients who are KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) positive on tumor cells (40.70 weeks, 95% CI 24.76-56.65 vs. 7.10 weeks, 95% CI 0.00-19.38, P = 0.014) or TILs (40.70 weeks, 95% CI 24.05-57.35 vs. 3.90 weeks, 95% CI 0.00-9.17, P < 0.001). Likewise, longer OS was significantly correlated with negative expression of KIR 3DL1 on tumor cells (62.30 weeks, 95% CI 0.00-177.37 vs. 13.10 weeks, 95% CI 3.42-22.78, P < 0.001) or TILs (62.30 weeks, 95% CI 0.00-152.05 vs. 12.10 weeks, 95% CI 2.61-21.59, P < 0.001). Cox regression analysis showed that KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) on TILs was correlated with OS (P = 0.032, Odds Ratio 2.628 95%CI 1.089-6.340). Conclusions KIR 2D (L1, L3, L4, S4) and KIR 3DL1 expression was correlated with poor prognosis in NSCLC patients.
Tribendimidine and Albendazole for Treating Soil-Transmitted Helminths, Strongyloides stercoralis and Taenia spp.: Open-Label Randomized Trial

Background Tribendimidine is an anthelminthic drug with a broad spectrum of activity. In 2004 the drug was approved by Chinese authorities for human use. The efficacy of tribendimidine against soil-transmitted helminths (Ascaris lumbricoides, hookworm, and Trichuris trichiura) has been established, and new laboratory investigations point to activity against cestodes and Strongyloides ratti. Methodology/Principal Findings In an open-label randomized trial, the safety and efficacy of a single oral dose of albendazole or tribendimidine (both drugs administered at 200 mg for 5- to 14-year-old children, and 400 mg for individuals ≥15 years) against soil-transmitted helminths, Strongyloides stercoralis, and Taenia spp. were assessed in a village in Yunnan province, People's Republic of China. The analysis was on a per-protocol basis and the trial is registered with controlled-trials.com (number ISRCTN01779485). Both albendazole and tribendimidine were highly efficacious against A. lumbricoides and, moderately, against hookworm. The efficacy against T. trichiura was low. Among 57 individuals who received tribendimidine, the prevalence of S. stercoralis was reduced from 19.3% to 8.8% (observed cure rate 54.5%, p = 0.107), and that of Taenia spp. from 26.3% to 8.8% (observed cure rate 66.7%, p = 0.014). Similar prevalence reductions were noted among the 66 albendazole recipients. Taking into account “new” infections discovered at treatment evaluation, which were most likely missed pre-treatment due to the lack of sensitivity of available diagnostic approaches, the difference between the drug-specific net Taenia spp. cure rates was highly significant in favor of tribendimidine (p = 0.001). No significant adverse events of either drug were observed. Conclusions/Significance Our results suggest that single-dose oral tribendimidine can be employed in settings with extensive intestinal polyparasitism, and its efficacy against A. lumbricoides and hookworm was confirmed. The promising results obtained with tribendimidine against S. stercoralis and Taenia spp. warrant further investigations. In a next step, multiple-dose schedules should be evaluated.
Denial of Service or Denial of Security? How Attacks on Reliability can Compromise Anonymity

We consider the eect attackers who disrupt anonymous communications have on the security of traditional high- and low-latency anonymous communication systems, as well as on the Hydra-Onion and Cashmere systems that aim to oer reliable mixing, and Salsa, a peer-to-peer anonymous communication network. We show that denial of service (DoS) lowers anonymity as messages need to get retransmitted to be delivered, presenting more opportunities for attack. We uncover a fundamental limit on the security of mix networks, showing that they cannot tolerate a majority of nodes being malicious. Cashmere, Hydra-Onion, and Salsa security is also badly aected by DoS attackers. Our results are backed by probabilistic modeling and extensive simulations and are of direct applicability to deployed anonymity systems.
Targeted inactivation of the X‐linked adrenoleukodystrophy gene in mice

In its severe form, X‐linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) is a lethal neurologic disease of children, characterized by progressive cerebral demyelination and adrenal insufficiency. Associated with a biochemical defect of peroxisomal β‐oxidation, very long‐chain fatty acids (VLCFA) build up in tissues that have a high turnover of lipids, such as central nervous system (CNS) white matter, adrenal cortex, and testis. Whether the abnormal accumulation of VLCFA is the underlying cause of demyelination or merely an associated biochemical marker is unknown. ALD is caused by mutations in the gene for a peroxisomal membrane protein (ALDP) that shares structural features with ATP‐binding‐cassette (ABC) transporters. To analyze the cellular function of ALDP and to obtain an animal model of this debilitating disease, we have generated transgenic mice with a targeted inactivation of the ald gene. Motor functions in ALDP‐deficient mice developed at schedule, and unexpectedly, adult animals appeared unaffected by neurologic symptoms up to at least 6 months of age. Biochemical analyses demonstrated impaired β‐oxidation in mutant fibroblasts and abnormal accumulation of VLCFAs in the CNS and kidney. In 6‐month‐old mutants, adrenal cortex cells displayed a ballooned morphology and needle‐like lipid inclusions, also found in testis and ovaries. However, lipid inclusions and demyelinating lesions in the CNS were not a feature. Thus, complete absence of ALDP expression results in a VLCFA storage disease but does not impair CNS function of young adult mice by pathologic and clinical criteria. This suggests that additional genetic or environmental conditions must be fulfilled to model the early‐onset and lethality of cerebral ALD in transgenic mice. J. Neurosci. Res. 50:829–843, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The use of APACHE III to evaluate ICU length of stay, resource use, and mortality after coronary artery by-pass surgery.

OBJECTIVE To identify patient characteristics that are associated with increased ICU length of stay, resource use, and hospital mortality after coronary artery bypass surgery. DESIGN Prospective, multicenter study. SETTING Six tertiary care hospitals. PARTICIPANTS A consecutive sample of 2,435 unselected ICU admissions following coronary artery by-pass surgery. MATERIALS AND METHODS Demographic, operative characteristics and APACHE III score were collected during the first postoperative day; and APACHE III scores and therapeutic interventions during the first three postoperative days. Hospital survival and ICU length of stay were also recorded. Multivariate equations were derived and cross-validated to predict hospital mortality, ICU length of stay, and ICU resource use. RESULTS Unadjusted hospital mortality rate was 3.9% (range 1.0% to 6.0%), mean ICU length of stay was 3.7 days (range 3.2 to 4.7 days), and first 3-day ICU resource use (TISS points) was 99 (range 68 to 116). The range of actual to predicted ICU length of stay varied from 0.86 to 1.26; and resource use from 0.71 to 1.16. CONCLUSIONS A limited number of operative characteristics, the post-operative acute physiology score (APS) of APACHE III and patient demographic data can predict hospital death rate, ICU length of stay, and resource use immediately following coronary by-pass surgery. These estimates may compliment assessments based on pre-operative risk factors in order to more precisely evaluate and improve the efficacy and efficiency of cardiovascular surgery.
Linear analysis of melt band formation by simple shear

Recent experiments by Holtzman et al. [2003] demonstrate that partially molten aggregates of many mantle materials undergoing simple shear (from ∼100–500% strain) will spontaneously develop localized melt‐rich bands. These bands develop at small strains but persist at low angles to the plane of shear (∼15–20°) even at large shear strains. The melt‐rich bands also appear to form localized weak regions that act as strain guides for the solid matrix flow. These experiments provide an opportunity to test the equations governing flow in deformable porous media developed by McKenzie [1984] and others. Here we present linear analysis of these equations for a solid with a porosity weakening viscosity undergoing simple shear. This analysis calculates the growth in porosity of a plane wave perturbation that initiates at an angle θ0 to the plane of shear after some amount of finite strain. For a strain of 300%, the maximum growing melt band initiates at 16.8° (but rotates to ∼70° in the linear analysis). We also calculate the additional solid shear induced by the localized weak regions and show that it develops a sense of shear consistent with observations only for melt bands less that 45°. These two results suggest that only low angle bands are favored under shear, consistent with the observations. The linear analysis, however, does not allow the porosity growth and shear to interact which causes the initially low angle bands to be rotated to higher angles by the background simple shear. To follow the further development of the bands requires solutions of the full nonlinear equations. Nevertheless, the linear analysis provides useful insights into the development of the shear bands and suggests that the theory is useful for describing partially molten systems.
Nutrient release and cycling in the soils of a continental lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Doug.) ecosystem, Bootleg Mountain, B.C.

Nutrient dynamics in a lodgepole pine forest at Bootleg Mountain, B.C., were investigated through the sampling of soil, snow and groundwater in six one-ha blocks. Nitrogen (NO3, NH4, TIN, TDN, TN), phosphorus (PO4, TDP, TP), and DOC were analyzed in addition to N mineralization and nitrification. Position and dispersion statistics were computed for each variable and correlations (Pearson and Spearman) were computed for each pair of variables. The overall heterogeneities of soil, snow, and groundwater were generally lower between 1-ha blocks than between plots. Productivity in the soil was generally N-limited with low input from snow precipitation. Very little N leached from soil to groundwater. Phosphorus contents were highly variable and were the limiting nutrient in the groundwater. Rates of net and gross N mineralization and nitrification were determined using buried bags and N isotope dilutions. Gross rates were greater than net rates and nitrification was low relative to high immobilization rates. The N cycle appears to be tightly regulated, thus further study will be needed to monitor the impact of harvesting on N cycling. Supervisors: Dr. Réal Roy and Dr. Asit Mazumder, (Department of Biology)
Identifying medical terms in patient-authored text: a crowdsourcing-based approach

Background and objective As people increasingly engage in online health-seeking behavior and contribute to health-oriented websites, the volume of medical text authored by patients and other medical novices grows rapidly. However, we lack an effective method for automatically identifying medical terms in patient-authored text (PAT). We demonstrate that crowdsourcing PAT medical term identification tasks to non-experts is a viable method for creating large, accurately-labeled PAT datasets; moreover, such datasets can be used to train classifiers that outperform existing medical term identification tools. Materials and methods To evaluate the viability of using non-expert crowds to label PAT, we compare expert (registered nurses) and non-expert (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; Turkers) responses to a PAT medical term identification task. Next, we build a crowd-labeled dataset comprising 10 000 sentences from MedHelp. We train two models on this dataset and evaluate their performance, as well as that of MetaMap, Open Biomedical Annotator (OBA), and NaCTeM's TerMINE, against two gold standard datasets: one from MedHelp and the other from CureTogether. Results When aggregated according to a corroborative voting policy, Turker responses predict expert responses with an F1 score of 84%. A conditional random field (CRF) trained on 10 000 crowd-labeled MedHelp sentences achieves an F1 score of 78% against the CureTogether gold standard, widely outperforming OBA (47%), TerMINE (43%), and MetaMap (39%). A failure analysis of the CRF suggests that misclassified terms are likely to be either generic or rare. Conclusions Our results show that combining statistical models sensitive to sentence-level context with crowd-labeled data is a scalable and effective technique for automatically identifying medical terms in PAT.
The average complexity of deterministic and randomized parallel comparison sorting algorithms

In practice, the average time of (deterministic or randomized) sorting algorithms seems to be more relevant than the worst case time of deterministic algorithms. Still, the many known complexity bounds for parallel comparison sorting include no nontrivial lower bounds for the average time required to sort by comparisons n elements with p processors (via deterministic or randomized algorithms). We show that for p ≥ n this time is Θ (log n/log(1 + p/n)), (it is easy to show that for p ≤ n the time is Θ (n log n/p) = Θ (log n/(p/n)). Therefore even the average case behaviour of randomized algorithms is not more efficient than the worst case behaviour of deterministic ones.