Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of the loop electrosurgical excisional procedure for cervical intraepithelial lesions on female sexual function.

INTRODUCTION Very limited knowledge exists concerning the impact of Loop Electrosurgical Excisional Procedure (LEEP) on female sexual function in women with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia AIM To investigate sexual function in women who underwent LEEP for the treatment of cervical intraepithelial lesions, using a validated questionnaire (Female Sexual Function Index [FSFI]). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES FSFI questionnaire on six domains of female sexuality (desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain). METHODS Consecutive sexually active women, who underwent LEEP for the treatment of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia were enrolled in this study. All women were asked to complete a copy of FSFI questionnaire, at the time of LEEP and after 6 months. We finally compared the results of the pre-LEEP questionnaire and the post-LEEP questionnaire for each patient. RESULTS A total of 67 sexually active women undergoing LEEP for the treatment of cervical intraepithelial lesions were enrolled. Nine of these patients (13.4%) completed only the questionnaire regarding their sexual function before LEEP; thus we did not include them for final analysis. In our study population, data showed a sexual function overall unchanged after LEEP; only the variable "desire" (sexual interest) became significantly worse (P = 0.02). CONCLUSIONS LEEP for the treatment of cervical intraepithelial lesions doesn't affect women's sexuality, when compared with sexual function before surgery. In our study, all FSFI sexual function domains but desire, did not show significant change after LEEP.
External dacryocystorhinostomy: Tips and tricks

Dacryocystorhinostomy or DCR is one of the most common oculoplastics surgery performed. It is a bypass procedure that creates an anastomosis between the lacrimal sac and the nasal mucosa via a bony ostium. It may be performed through an external skin incision or intranasally with or without endoscopic visualization. This article will discuss the indications, goals, and simple techniques for a successful outcome of an external DCR.
Resonant optical transmission through the sub-wavelength air-hole arrays in a gold thin film for sensing applications

We have investigated numerically the optical spectral properties of resonant transmission of light through sub-wavelength air-holes in a gold thin film by using the finite element method. The enhanced transmission can be comprehended in the light of interfering surface-wave-like modes propagating in the sub-wavelength air-holes. The effects of geometrical and material properties of the sub-wavelength air-holes in the transmission spectrum were characterized. The proposed structure can be operated as refractive index (RI) sensor with a sensitivity of 524.8 nm/RIU (RIU = refractive index unit) ranging from the visible to the near-infrared. This feature provides a remarkable scheme of nanoscale sensing for the RI variations of the environmental media such as applications in liquid and gas sensing.
Computed Tomography and Ultrasounds for the Follow-up of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Ablation: What You Need to Know

Image-guided tumor ablation provides curative treatment in properly selected patients or appropriate therapeutic options whenever surgical techniques are precluded. Tumor response assessment post ablation is important in determining treatment success and future therapy. Accurate interpretation of post-ablation imaging findings is crucial for therapeutic and follow-up strategies. Computed Tomography (CT) and Ultrasound (US) play important roles in patients’ follow-up post liver thermal ablation therapies. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) can provide valuable information on the ablation effects faster and at a lower cost than computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. However, a disadvantage is that the technique cannot examine total liver parenchyma for disease progression as CT and Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging can. Follow-up strategies for assessment of tumor response includes contrast enhanced multiphasic (non-contrast, arterial, portal, delayed phases) imaging with Computed Tomography at three, six, and 12 months post ablation session and annually ever since in order to prove sustained effectiveness of the ablation or detect progression.
The Geometric Dehn-Sommerville Relations

The geometric Dehn-Sommerville relations for simplicial polytopes and their various analogs are derived from the geometric incidence algebra of polytopes over the ring of Minkowski multiplication. These relations are expressed in terms of indicator functions of interior and exterior cones respectively. Similar relations are obtained for simple and cubical polytopes.
PAni-coated LiFePO4 Synthesized by a Low Temperature Solvothermal Method

The composite LiFePO4/polyaniline was prepared by chemical synthesis to promote the intensification of the electrochemical properties for use as cathodes in lithium ion batteries. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) of LiFePO4 synthesized by solvothermal method were indexed to the orthorhombic structure, according to the JCPDS 40-1499. The spectra Raman and FTIR showed a high degree of ordering of LiFePO4 with interaction between LiFePO4 surface with structure conjugate of conducting polymers. The cyclic voltammogram of the composite synthesized chemically showed a significant reduction in the value of ΔEp (ΔEp = 0.20 V) when compared to LiFePO4 (ΔEp = 0.41 V), with lower charge transfer resistance values, indicating favoring electron transfer rate in the composite. Thus, the alternative synthesis route of the LiFePO4 / PAni composite was easy to handle and allowed an increase in the electrochemical properties of the LiFePO4, compared to the traditional methods that require additional thermal treatments.
Novel agents for the treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma

Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is highly curable lymphoma with combined multiagent chemotherapy with or without radiation. In spite of higher cure rates, approximately 20–30% cases will be either refractory or relapse after first line therapy. For relapse/refractory HL, salvage chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplant remains the standard of care. Because of early and late toxicities of multiagent chemotherapy, there are ongoing efforts to find less toxic therapies to treat HL. Brentuximab vedotin is an antibody drug conjugate targeting CD30 with high response rates in HL. In the last decade, immune oncology has changed the treatment paradigm of cancers. Biologically, Reed–Sternberg cells evade immune system by exploiting checkpoint pathways. Inhibition of checkpoint pathway has shown promising activity in HL. Recently, phosphatidyl-inositide 3 kinase inhibitors and Janus kinase inhibitors have shown impressive responses in HL. In this article, we discuss novel agents in HL.
Robust inducible Cre recombinase activity in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum enables efficient gene deletion within a single asexual erythrocytic growth cycle

Asexual blood stages of the malaria parasite, which cause all the pathology associated with malaria, can readily be genetically modified by homologous recombination, enabling the functional study of parasite genes that are not essential in this part of the life cycle. However, no widely applicable method for conditional mutagenesis of essential asexual blood‐stage malarial genes is available, hindering their functional analysis. We report the application of the DiCre conditional recombinase system to Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of the most dangerous form of malaria. We show that DiCre can be used to obtain rapid, highly regulated site‐specific recombination in P. falciparum, capable of excising loxP‐flanked sequences from a genomic locus with close to 100% efficiency within the time‐span of a single erythrocytic growth cycle. DiCre‐mediated deletion of the SERA5 3' UTR failed to reduce expression of the gene due to the existence of alternative cryptic polyadenylation sites within the modified locus. However, we successfully used the system to recycle the most widely used drug resistance marker for P. falciparum, human dihydrofolate reductase, in the process producing constitutively DiCre‐expressing P. falciparum clones that have broad utility for the functional analysis of essential asexual blood‐stage parasite genes.
Engineering of holonic multi agent intelligent forest fire monitoring system

In this paper we describe holonic multi agent architecture of iForestFire Intelligent Forest Fire Monitoring System through phases and activities of the holonic software engineering process. iForestFire is a web-based information system used in all aspects of forest fire management. Its central part is an artificial perception system, observer network, whose aim is early detection of forest fires. Although the agents that the system consists of are inseparably connected, they can be clustered in several independent systems that can be used separately. Independent holons are built from agents that are part of the observer network, as well as other agents with auxiliary functionalities.
Quasi-cyclic unit memory convolutional codes

Unit memory convolutional codes with generator matrices, which are composed of circulant submatrices, are introduced. This structure facilitates the analysis of efficient search for good codes. Equivalences among such codes and some of the basic structural properties are discussed. In particular, catastrophic encoders and minimal encoders are characterized and dual codes treated. Further, various distance measures are discussed, and a number of good codes, some of which result from efficient computer search and some of which result from known block codes, are presented. >
First Report of Swim Bladder-Associated Microbiota in Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

The aim of the present study was to identify major bacteria associated with the swim bladder in the rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss. We extracted DNA from the swim bladder and gut contents in order to perform a temporal temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TTGE) analysis of 16S rRNA amplicons for bacterial identification to further compare both profiles. Arthrobacter and Cellulosimicrobium were the major genera observed in the swim bladder in fish, but were not present in fish gut contents; Mycoplasma were instead observed in these samples. Further research to investigate the possible symbiotic roles of the swim bladder-associated microbiota in salmonids is needed.
Effects of cold dark matter decoupling and pair annihilation on cosmological perturbations

Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are part of the lepton-photon plasma in the early universe until kinetic decoupling, after which time the particles behave like a collisionless gas with nonzero temperature. The Boltzmann equation for WIMP-lepton collisions is reduced to a Fokker-Planck equation for the evolution of the WIMP distribution including scalar density perturbations. This equation and the Einstein and fluid equations for the plasma are solved numerically including the acoustic oscillations of the plasma before and during kinetic decoupling, the frictional damping occurring during kinetic decoupling, and the free-streaming damping occurring afterwards and throughout the radiation-dominated era. An excellent approximation reduces the solution to quadratures for the cold dark matter density and velocity perturbations. The subsequent evolution is followed through electron pair annihilation and the radiation-matter transition; analytic solutions are provided for both large and small scales. For a 100 GeV WIMP with bino-type interactions, kinetic decoupling occurs at a temperature T{sub d}=23 MeV. The transfer function in the matter-dominated era leads to an abundance of small cold dark matter halos; with a smooth window function the Press-Schechter mass distribution is dn/dlnM{proportional_to}M{sup -1/3} for M<10{sup -4}(T{sub d}/10 MeV){sup -3}M{sub {center_dot}}.
Health Survey of Numbness/Pain and Its Associated Factors in Kotohira, Japan

We conducted a survey of adults in Kotohira, a town of about 10,000 people located in the Nakatado District of Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. The survey was distributed to 8184 individuals, and effective responses were received from 3863 persons (response rate, 47.2%) during the survey period. Results regarding numbness and pain showed numbness alone in 7.7%, pain alone in 7.2%, both numbness and pain in 6.0%, and neither numbness nor pain in 79.6%. Spine and spinal cord damage was reported present by 5.4%, and absent by 94.6%. Analysis using the Short-Form Health Survey questionnaire, with comparison between subjects reporting both numbness and pain in the extremities and subjects with either numbness or pain alone, showed lower scores for in Short-Form Health Survey subscales (physical functioning, role [physical, emotional], bodily pain, vitality, and mental health). Subjects with numbness alone generally reported no disability in daily life. In a secondary survey, analysis of neurological findings by specialists identified 6 cases of “pain following spinal cord damage” in which spinal cord-related pain developed in the hands or feet. This represented 0.15% of the survey population starting from the primary survey.
Temperature self-compensation refractometer based on cascaded SNS-FBG structure for multipoint measurement

A fiber optic refractive index (RI) sensor that consists of cascaded single mode fiber-no core fiber-single mode fiber (SNS) structure followed by a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) was proposed and demonstrated. Because the SNS structure and FBG have similar temperature characteristics and the FBG is not sensitivity to the RI, temperature self-compensation during the RI measurement can be realized by calculating the difference between the characteristic wavelengths of the SNS and FBG. Three SNS-FBG-based sensors with different lengths of the NCF and different Bragg wavelengths were cascaded to achieve wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in the range of 1510nm-1590nm. Experimental results show that three-point independent RI measurement can be accomplished with the maximum sensitivity of 211.088, 243.429 and 242.511nm/RIU (RI unit) in the RI range from 1.333 to 1.405, respectively. The RI errors caused by temperature are only 4.548×10-5RIU/°C, 3.779×10-5RIU/°C and 4.458×10-5RIU/°C respectively. These sensors feature the advantages of good reproducibility, small size, low cost, high sensitivity and very low temperature cross-sensitivity, which have a good practical prospect in the simultaneous multi-point RI measurement application area.
A Concept Lattice for Semantic Integration of Geo-Ontologies Based on Weight of Inclusion Degree Importance and Information Entropy

Constructing a merged concept lattice with formal concept analysis (FCA) is an important research direction in the field of integrating multi-source geo-ontologies. Extracting essential geographical properties and reducing the concept lattice are two key points of previous research. A formal integration method is proposed to address the challenges in these two areas. We first extract essential properties from multi-source geo-ontologies and use FCA to build a merged formal context. Second, the combined importance weight of each single attribute of the formal context is calculated by introducing the inclusion degree importance from rough set theory and information entropy; then a weighted formal context is built from the merged formal context. Third, a combined weighted concept lattice is established from the weighted formal context with FCA and the importance weight value of every concept is defined as the sum of weight of attributes belonging to the concept’s intent. Finally, semantic granularity of concept is defined by its importance weight; we, then gradually reduce the weighted concept lattice by setting up diminishing threshold of semantic granularity. Additionally, all of those reduced lattices are organized into a regular hierarchy structure based on the threshold of semantic granularity. A workflow is designed to demonstrate this procedure. A case study is conducted to show feasibility and validity of this method and the procedure to integrate multi-source geo-ontologies.
Is laparoscopic approach safe for radical nephrectomy for tumors larger than 7 cm?

In medicine, a gold standard is a benchmark that is regarded as definitive. Similarly, a standard of care is a treatment process that a clinician should follow for a certain type of patient, illness, or clinical circumstance. A medical practitioner who does not treat a patient in accordance with the accepted gold standard in his community is often viewed as negligent or even guilty of malpractice. Practice of medicine is evidence-based and evidence is tenuous to generalize the laparoscopic approach to be a standard of care for all renal tumors irrespective of the size.
Blind equalization of space-time-turbo trellis coded/continuous phase modulation over Rician fading channels

In this paper, to improve bit error performance and bandwidth efficiency, we combine space-time block codes (STBC), turbo trellis codes and continuous phase modulation and denote space-time-turbo trellis coded/continuous phase modulation (ST-TTC/CPM). For high data transmission over wireless fading channels, STBC provide the maximal possible diversity advantage for multiple decoding algorithms. We present continuous phase modulation (CPM) for ST-TTC signals, since CPM provides low-spectral occupancy and is suitable for power and bandwidth-limited channels. In our model, to utilize STBC efficiently, we need to estimate the channel parameters, which influence the signals having continuity property. Therefore, we develop a blind maximum likelihood channel estimation algorithm for signals propagating through a Rician fading channel. Here, Baum-Welch (BW) algorithm, based on hidden Markov model (HMM), is modified to provide computationally efficient channel parameter estimation. We also investigate the performance of ST-TTC/CPM in the case of no channel state information (CSI) for various Rician parameters K and Doppler frequency. Copyright © 2004 AEI.
A flexible toolkit for rapid GPU-based generation of DRRs for 2D-3D registration

This paper presents initial performance results for a software toolkit that implements GPU-based parallel computation of digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) from volumetric imaging data for 2D-3D registration. The computational parallelism is achieved using NVIDIA’s CUDA implementation of general purpose computing on the graphics processing unit. The sample volumetric imaging data shown here is from CT imaging of a cadaveric foot, but the toolkit can be applied equally well to other volumetric imaging data. An efficient implementation requires launching hundreds of simultaneous, independent computational threads and fast thread access to the global memory where they need to read and write data. We have implemented fast DRR generation by launching a computational thread for each pixel in the image, and achieve efficient memory access by using 3D texture memory to store the volumetric data and constant memory to store global information such as intensifier coordinates. The Thrust software library was used to store individual bone DRRs, which enables efficient memory transfer and use of built-in device operators during image compositing and similarity quantification. By storing individual DRRs, the toolkit can support independent kinematics for up to 32 segmented objects. We show that the algorithm scales with the number of processors and compare timings for three commercially available GPUs. Here we present our initial fast DRR computations to demonstrate that the toolkit can produce useful results for a full 160 × 339 × 439 stack of floating point density data on a high resolution 1152 × 896 pixel screen in 1.3 ms and on a 512 × 512 pixel screen in less than 0.6 ms.
Correlation between radiographically diagnosed osteophytes and magnetic resonance detected cartilage defects in the patellofemoral joint

OBJECTIVE To assess the correlation between radiographically diagnosed osteophytes in the axial and lateral view of the patellofemoral joint (PFJ) and (1) magnetic resonance (MR) detected cartilage defects in the same joint and (2) knee pain. METHODS Fifty seven pepole with chronic knee pain, (aged 41–58 years, mean 50 years) were examined with axial and lateral radiograms when standing of the right and the left PFJ. The presence and grade of osteophytes was assessed. On the same day, a MR examination was performed of the signal knee with proton density and T2 weighted turbo spin-echo sequences in the sagittal and axial view on a 1.0 T imager. Cartilage defects in the PFJ were noted. The subjects were questioned for current knee pain for each knee. RESULTS Osteophytes at the PFJ had a specificity varying between 59 and 100% and a positive predictive value between 74 and 100% for MR detected cartilage defects. The corresponding values for osteophytes at the lateral aspect of the femoral trochlea were both 100%. In PFJ with narrowing (<5 mm) osteophytes had a sensitivity and a positive predictive value of 90 and 95% respectively for MR detected cartilage defects, while in PFJ with non-narrowing (⩾5 mm) the corresponding values were 75 and 65% and the specificity was 50%. A correlation (p<0.05) between osteophytes at the inferior pole of the patella and knee pain was found. CONCLUSIONS Osteophytes at the PFJ are associated with MR detected cartilage defects in the same joint. The relation was strong for osteophytes at the lateral femoral trochlea and in the PFJ with narrowing (<5 mm), but weak in the PFJ with non-narrowing (⩾5 mm).
An evolutionary analysis of mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To use the evolutionary method of concept analysis to identify attributes, antecedents and consequences of mealtime difficulties providing direction for assessment and management in older adults with dementia. BACKGROUND Mealtimes encompass more than the physical act of feeding a person with dementia. Social and contextual considerations are vital considerations to improving nutritional intake. While feeding difficulties in dementia have been analysed in the literature, this paper proposes a broader scope of mealtime considerations to alleviate nutritional deficiencies often associated with dementia. DESIGN Evolutionary method of concept analysis. METHODS In 2008, literature searches using keywords (meal, history, sociology, mealtime, culture, habit, dementia, dementia) were done in CINAHL, Academic Search Premiere, MasterFILE, Americal Life and History, Communication and Mass Media Complete, EJS, Health Source Plus-Academic, PsychARTICLES and PsychINFO, ScienceDirect, Sociological Abstracts and Google. Year limits were from 1988-2008. A total of 659 abstracts were reviewed, Google, books and textbooks with relevant content. RESULTS Fourty-eight sources were used in the final analysis of mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia. A model of mealtime difficulties delineates attributes, antecedents and consequences. CONCLUSIONS Mealtime difficulties in dementia emerged as a concept with supporting evidence-based practice guidelines in 2003. Most research has been conducted in institutional settings, but community research is growing as the shifting demographics of ageing demand attention for this setting. Interventions vary in effectiveness for alleviating sequelae of mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE The conceptual model of mealtime difficulties provides a broader scope of mealtime difficulties in dementia that considers environmental, social, cultural and contextual implications with nutritional intake. The model can be used to guide future research to alleviate mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia.