Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence of blood-brain barrier alteration and activation in HIV-1 gp120 transgenic mice.

OBJECTIVE To verify whether HIV envelope protein gp120 changes the blood-brain barrier in vivo, as a fundamental mechanism of early central nervous system damage by HIV-1. DESIGN Analysis of the functional integrity and immune activation of the blood-brain barrier in brains of HIV-1 gp120 transgenic mice secreting circulating gp120 at levels similar to those detected in AIDS patients. METHODS Number of vessels/mm2 section area with perivascular albumin and percentage of vessels expressing adhesion molecules (ICAM-1 and VCAM-1) were determined by immunohistochemistry in frozen brains from autopsied transgenic and non-transgenic mice. The percentage of vessels showing substance P immunoreactivity was also calculated, as this neuropeptide is known to mediate the increase in permeability of the rat brain endothelium in vitro caused by HIV-1 gp120. RESULTS The number of vessels with albumin extravasation was significantly higher in transgenic than non-transgenic mice brains (P = 0.0003). A greater percentage of ICAM-1- and VCAM-1-positive brain vessels in transgenic than non-transgenic mice was shown (P = 0.0017 and P = 0.0008 respectively). Significant immunoreactivity for substance P was detected in brain vessels in transgenic mice and a significant correlation was found between the percentage of substance P-positive and ICAM-1-positive brain vessels (P < 0.0001) in transgenic mice. CONCLUSIONS These findings demonstrate that HIV-1 gp120 is capable of changing and activating in vivo the vascular component of the blood-brain barrier.
In-vivo tests of a 16-channel implantable wireless neural stimulator

Wireless stimulation of neural tissue could enable many emerging neural prosthesis designs, and eliminate problems associated with percutaneous wires and connectors. Our laboratory has developed a 16-channel wireless floating microelectrode array (WFMA) for chronic implantation. Here, we report on its first use within in-vivo experiments, using a rat sciatic nerve model. Stimulus currents and associated muscular movements were determined for electrodes of two WFMA devices implanted into four animal subjects.
CS229 Final Project - Medical Record Understanding

After completing an examination or treatment with a patient, doctors record detailed notes known as medical records. These records typically include a summary of past medical history, medications, a brief hospital course, discharge diagnoses, etc. The ICD coding system is a relatively comprehensive system with support for most symptoms, operations, and diseases (the ICD-9 system has over 17,000 codes, and the ICD-10 system has over 100,000). ICD codes are important because they are a computer-readable summary that is invaluable for collecting statistics, and hospitals use these codes to predict risk factors, mortality rates, etc. The problem of automatic ICD coding gained significant interest in the biomedical informatics research community following the release of the ”2007 Computational Medicine Center International Challenge: Classifying Clinical Free Text Using Natural Language Processing”. In particular, two styles of approaches were popular, rulebased algorithms (such as [5]), and machine learning algorithms. Rule-based methods were found to be surprisingly effective [1]. Previous work on using text-based machine learning algorithms have typically relied on using bag-of-words features and expert-crafted rules [4]. However, such methods have been shown to scale poorly with the large label space [3], and no results to date have achieved a practically usable accuracy on this problem. Recent work has applied intuitions about the structure of the problem, such as using hierarchical SVMs [2] to leverage the fact that the many labels are specific instantiations of others. The goal of our project is to understand the errors made by previous work on this problem, discover additional structure in the data, and leverage Figure 1: The distribution of codes on the MIMIC III dataset. The x-axis is the number of codes, and the y-axis is the percentage of coverage over the dataset.
Prospective trial of high-frequency oscillation in adults with acute respiratory distress syndrome

ObjectiveTo evaluate the safety and efficacy of high-frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) in adult patients with the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and oxygenation failure. DesignProspective, clinical study. SettingIntensive care and burn units of two university teaching hospitals. PatientsTwenty-four adults (10 females, 14 males, aged 48.5 ± 15.2 yrs, Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II score 21.5 ± 6.9) with ARDS (lung injury score 3.4 ± 0.6, Pao2/Fio2 98.8 ± 39.0 mm Hg, and oxygenation index 32.5 ± 19.6) who met one of the following criteria: Pao2 ≤65 mm Hg with Fio2 ≥0.6, or plateau pressure ≥35 cm H2O. InterventionsHFOV was initiated in patients with ARDS after varying periods of conventional ventilation (CV). Mean airway pressure (Paw) was initially set 5 cm H2O greater than Paw during CV, and was subsequently titrated to maintain oxygen saturation between 88% and 93% and Fio2 ≤0.60. Measurements and Main ResultsFio2, Paw, pressure amplitude of oscillation, frequency, blood pressure, heart rate, and arterial blood gases were monitored during the transition from CV to HFOV, and every 8 hrs thereafter for 72 hrs. In 16 patients who had pulmonary artery catheters in place, cardiac hemodynamics were recorded at the same time intervals. Throughout the HFOV trial, Paw was significantly higher than that applied during CV. Within 8 hrs of HFOV application, and for the duration of the trial, Fio2 and Paco2 were lower, and Pao2/Fio2 was higher than baseline values during CV. Significant changes in hemodynamic variables following HFOV initiation included an increase in pulmonary artery occlusion pressure (at 8 and 40 hrs) and central venous pressure (at 16 and 40 hrs), and a reduction in cardiac output throughout the course of the study. There were no significant changes in systemic or pulmonary pressure associated with initiation and maintenance of HFOV. Complications occurring during HFOV included pneumothorax in two patients and desiccation of secretions in one patient. Survival at 30 days was 33%, with survivors having been mechanically ventilated for fewer days before institution of HFOV compared with nonsurvivors (1.6 ± 1.2 vs. 7.8 ± 5.8 days;p = .001). ConclusionsThese findings suggest that HFOV has beneficial effects on oxygenation and ventilation, and may be a safe and effective rescue therapy for patients with severe oxygenation failure. In addition, early institution of HFOV may be advantageous.
Gain control in the electrosensory system mediated by descending inputs to the electrosensory lateral line lobe

The electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELLL) of weakly electric fish, the primary electrosensory processing station, receives a large descending input from the midbrain in addition to the input from the electroreceptor afferents. The role of a major component of this descending input in determining the properties of ELLL output neurons was investigated. The descending input was reduced or eliminated by microinjections of the local anesthetic lidocaine or by small lesions. This treatment increased the responses of the ELLL output neurons to suprathreshold stimuli by about 300% and also increased the size of the neurons' receptive fields for moving electrolocation targets and the resolution with which they encode target distance. The neurons' threshold sensitivity and tuning to amplitude modulation frequency were unchanged by removal of the descending input. The results of this study show that this portion of the descending input to the ELLL normally mediates an inhibition that controls the responsiveness of ELLL output neurons. This descending input could function as a gain control mechanism, allowing the animal to modulate the sensitivity of the electrosensory system in response to changing environmental conditions.
Rapid detection of maintenance induced changes in service performance

Service quality in operational IP networks can be impacted due to planned or unplanned maintenance. During any maintenance activity, the responsibility of the operations team is to complete the work order and perform a check-up to ensure there are no unexpected service disruptions. Once the maintenance is complete, it is crucial to continuously monitor the network and look for any performance impacts. What operations lack today are effective tools to rapidly detect maintenance induced performance changes. The large scale and heterogeneity of network elements and performance metrics makes the problem extremely challenging. In this paper, we present PRISM, a new tool for detecting maintenance induced performance changes in a timely fashion. PRISM uses association between maintenance and the network elements to identify performance metrics for time-series analysis. It uses a new <u>M</u>ultiscale <u>R</u>obust <u>L</u>ocal <u>S</u>ubspace algorithm (MRLS) to accurately identify changes in performance even when the baseline is contaminated. We systematically evaluate PRISM using data collected at four large operational networks: a tier-1 backbone, VoIP, IPTV and 3G cellular and show that it achieves good accuracy. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of PRISM in real operational environments through interesting case study findings.
Which health services reduce maternal mortality? Evidence from ratings of maternal health services

We report cross‐national regressions for maternal mortality in 49 developing countries, using indices of the adequacy of maternal health services derived from ratings by at least 10 experts per country. As in previous such regressions, a socioeconomic factor – in this case per capita income – has a significant effect, but having a trained attendant at delivery does not. Instead, the ratings index for access to services has a consistent, significant effect regardless of which estimates of maternal mortality ratios are predicted. Further analysis suggests that access to treatment for pregnancy complications and to services that help avoid pregnancy and birth are most closely related to lower mortality. Service ratings are interdependent, however, so that focusing only on individual services may not be productive.
A Ranking Based Model for Automatic Image Annotation in a Social Network

We propose a relational ranking model for learning to tag images in social media sharing systems. This model learns to associate a ranked list of tags to unlabeled images, by considering simultaneously content information (visual or textual) and relational information among the images. It is able to handle implicit relations like content similarities, and explicit ones like friendship or authorship. The model itself is based on a transductive algorithm thats learns from both labeled and unlabeled data. Experiments on a real corpus extracted from Flickr show the effectiveness of this model.
Characterization of Crosstalk in Ultra-Low-Crosstalk Multi-Core Fiber

We describe a newly-developed method to measure inter-core crosstalk of single-mode multi-core fiber (MCF) statistically, and characteristics of the crosstalk of a previously fabricated MCF. To measure the crosstalk lower than -60 dB, we suppressed power floor of the measurement system by employing trench-assisted fiber as launching and receiving fibers. We measured statistical crosstalk distributions by utilizing wavelength dependence of the crosstalk, and the mean crosstalk between the neighboring cores was observed to be about -70 dB after 17.4-km propagation at 1625 nm. The measurement results were in good agreement with the previously proposed model. Based on the measurement results and the model, the crosstalk after 10000-km propagation was estimated to be less than -30 dB. We also confirmed that the crosstalk was varied stochastically depending on polarization state, and on mechanical shock and stress on the MCF.
OFDM-MSK: A method for sidelobe suppression in OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems suffer from high sidelobes level. In some applications, as cognitive radios, this phenomenon can be a serious matter. This paper proposes Minimum shift keying (MSK)-OFDM to address this problem. The proposed method is an OFDM system using MSK modulation in each subcarrier. The corresponding transmitter and receiver are introduced. The method doesn't entail great changes in the main parts of OFDM. Like OFDM systems, the transceiver can be implemented using DFT/IDFT. Simulation results show great reduction in out of band radiation in comparison with conventional OFDM.
A Deubiquitylating Complex Required for Neosynthesis of a Yeast Mitochondrial ATP Synthase Subunit

The ubiquitin system is known to be involved in maintaining the integrity of mitochondria, but little is known about the role of deubiquitylating (DUB) enzymes in such functions. Budding yeast cells deleted for UBP13 and its close homolog UBP9 displayed a high incidence of petite colonies and slow respiratory growth at 37°C. Both Ubp9 and Ubp13 interacted directly with Duf1 (DUB-associated factor 1), a WD40 motif-containing protein. Duf1 activates the DUB activity of recombinant Ubp9 and Ubp13 in vitro and deletion of DUF1 resulted in the same respiratory phenotype as the deletion of both UBP9 and UBP13. We show that the mitochondrial defects of these mutants resulted from a strong decrease at 37°C in the de novo biosynthesis of Atp9, a membrane-bound component of ATP synthase encoded by mitochondrial DNA. The defect appears at the level of ATP9 mRNA translation, while its maturation remained unchanged in the mutants. This study describes a new role of the ubiquitin system in mitochondrial biogenesis.
The myth of the folk theorem

A well-known result in game theory known as "the Folk Theorem" suggests that finding Nash equilibria in repeated games should be easier than in one-shot games. In contrast, we show that the problem of finding any (approximate) Nash equilibrium for a three-player infinitely-repeated game is computationally intractable (even when all payoffs are in {-1,0,1}), unless all of PPAD can be solved in randomized polynomial time. This is done by showing that finding Nash equilibria of (k+1)-player infinitely-repeated games is as hard as finding Nash equilibria of k-player one-shot games, for which PPAD-hardness is known (Daskalakis, Goldberg and Papadimitriou, 2006; Chen, Deng and Teng, 2006; Chen, Teng and Valiant, 2007). This also explains why no computationally-efficient learning dynamics, such as the "no regret" algorithms, can be "rational" (in general games with three or more players) in the sense that, when one's opponents use such a strategy, it is not in general a best reply to follow suit.
Expectations and Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis Using Survey Data

Abstract Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in expected future economic activity are a quantitatively important driver of economic fluctuations: a perception that good times are ahead typically leads to a significant rise in current measures of economic activity and inflation. We also find that the short-term interest rate rises in response to expectations of good times as monetary policy tightens.
Vocal separation from monaural music using adaptive auditory filtering based on kernel back-fitting

Recently, kernel additive modeling with generalized spatial Wiener filtering (GW) was presented for music/voice separation. In this paper, an adaptive auditory filtering, called generalized weighted β -order MMSE estimation (WbE), is applied to the basic iterative kernel back-fitting algorithm for improving the separation performance of monaural music signal into music/voice components. In the proposed method, the perceptually weighting factor α and the singular value decomposition (SVD)-based factorized spectral amplitude exponent β for each kernel component are adaptively calculated for effective WbE-based auditory filtering performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better separation performance than GW and the existing Bayesian estimators.
Influence of monoclonal antiplatelet glycoprotein antibodies on in vitro human megakaryocyte colony formation and proplatelet formation.

The influence of antiplatelet glycoprotein (GP) antibodies on megakaryocytopoiesis in patients with idiopathic or immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) has been well studied. However, the influence of GP antibodies on proplatelet formation is poorly understood. Here we investigated whether in vitro human megakaryocyte colony formation and proplatelet formation are affected by various monoclonal antiplatelet GP antibodies (MoAb). The megakaryocyte colony formation inhibition assay was performed by methylcellulose culture with modifications, using peripheral blood nonadherent mononuclear cells. The proplatelet formation inhibition assay was performed by megakaryocytes derived from CD34(+) cells, stimulated with thrombopoietin + stem cell factor, which were then incubated with antiplatelet GP MoAb for 24 or 48 hours. Anti-GP-Ibalpha MoAb (CD42b; HIP1) slightly inhibited megakaryocyte colony formation (P < .05). and strongly inhibited proplatelet formation (after 24 hours incubation, P < .0002; after 48 hours incubation, P < .0007). Anti-GP-IIb MoAb (CD41; 5B12) inhibited only proplatelet formation (only after 24 hours incubation, P <. 03). Anti-integrin alphavbeta3 MoAb (CD51/CD61; 23C6) only slightly inhibited colony size (P < .05). However, anti-GP-IIIa MoAb (CD61; Y2/51) did not inhibit either colony formation or proplatelet formation. These results suggest that antiplatelet GP MoAbs have differing effects on in vitro megakaryocyte colony formation and proplatelet formation.
Interdomain traffic engineering on a bandwidth broker-supported diffserv internet

As the Internet evolves, and new bandwidth-consuming multimedia applications become more common, it becomes necessary to provide quality of service (QoS) in the Internet. QoS provides a basis for network providers to offer a variety of services to customers with different cost, bandwidth, latency, and jitter requirements, which makes the network resources more valuable. To utilize valuable network resources efficiently, service providers need to engineer intra-domain and inter-domain traffic. In this dissertation we are addressing the inter-domain traffic engineering problem with emphasis on inter-domain QoS routing, which is the most important component of traffic engineering. This dissertation introduces a novel inter-domain QoS routing scheme that can scale over large networks. Our scheme is based on the notion of regions, which are collections of autonomous systems, and we represent the overall Internet topology as a collection of regions. Without introducing a hierarchy, we employed a link-state based source specified routing protocol inside regions. Edge-to-edge paths are calculated as a concatenation of subpaths that are calculated by individual domains in different regions. We analyzed the scalability and path calculation capability of our routing approach. Analysis results indicate a tradeoff between the computation, communication, and storage scalability and the length of a calculated path; but the gain from the scalability always outweighs the loss from the increased path length. We extended an existing signaling protocol by adding explicit path setup, generic QoS support, and inter-domain label exchange capabilities. We also explained how this protocol can be used to exchange inter-domain labels, and how this can be used to establish an inter-domain label switched path. Finally we introduced an inter-domain traffic engineering architecture which comprises of the components we mentioned above, and explained how inter-domain QoS routing, signaling, and path establishment is coordinated through a Bandwidth Broker to provide an inter-domain traffic engineering capability. We analyzed the effectiveness of the traffic engineering approach through simulations, and results suggest that our architecture can efficiently utilize inter-domain resources if QoS requirements can be met.
Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change

The late Quaternary megafauna extinction was a severe global-scale event. Two factors, climate change and modern humans, have received broad support as the primary drivers, but their absolute and relative importance remains controversial. To date, focus has been on the extinction chronology of individual or small groups of species, specific geographical regions or macroscale studies at very coarse geographical and taxonomic resolution, limiting the possibility of adequately testing the proposed hypotheses. We present, to our knowledge, the first global analysis of this extinction based on comprehensive country-level data on the geographical distribution of all large mammal species (more than or equal to 10 kg) that have gone globally or continentally extinct between the beginning of the Last Interglacial at 132 000 years BP and the late Holocene 1000 years BP, testing the relative roles played by glacial–interglacial climate change and humans. We show that the severity of extinction is strongly tied to hominin palaeobiogeography, with at most a weak, Eurasia-specific link to climate change. This first species-level macroscale analysis at relatively high geographical resolution provides strong support for modern humans as the primary driver of the worldwide megafauna losses during the late Quaternary.
A functional analysis of the DNA glycosylase activity of mouse MUTYH protein excising 2-hydroxyadenine opposite guanine in DNA

2-Hydroxy-2-deoxyadenosine triphosphate (2-OH-dATP), generated by the oxidation of dATP, can be misincorporated by DNA polymerases opposite guanine in template DNA during DNA replication, thus causing spontaneous mutagenesis. We demonstrated that mouse MUTYH (mMUTYH) has a DNA glycosylase activity excising not only adenine opposite 8-oxoguanine (8-oxoG) but also 2-hydroxyadenine (2-OH-A) opposite guanine, using purified recombinant thioredoxin-mMUTYH fusion protein. mMUTYH formed a stable complex with duplex oligonucleotides containing an adenine:8-oxoG pair, but the binding of mMUTYH to oligonucleotides containing a 2-OH-A:guanine pair was barely detectable, thus suggesting that mMUTYH recognizes and interacts with these two substrates in a different manner which may reflect the difference in the base excision repair process for each substrate. Mutant mMUTYH with G365D amino acid substitution, corresponding to a G382D germline mutation of human MUTYH found in familial adenomatous polyposis patients, almost completely retained its DNA glycosylase activity excising adenine opposite 8-oxoG; however, it possessed 1.5% of the wild-type activity excising 2-OH-A opposite guanine. Our results imply that the reduced repair capacity of the mutant hMUTYH(G382D), which inefficiently excises 2-OH-A opposite guanine, results in an increased occurrence of somatic G:C to T:A transversion mutations in the APC gene as well as tumorigenesis in the colon.
Heath care fraud detection methods and new approaches

Fraud and abuse have caused significant cost in the health care systems of many countries. This paper aims to provide a review on health care fraud detection, based on big data approach. For this reason, available articles in the literature were reviewed with focuses on classifying techniques, identifying the major sources and characteristics of the data. The recent solutions and challenges in health care fraud and big data analytics were evaluated within some certain criteria. It can be concluded from this review, big data analytics and new obtained data sources would be hot topics in the near future to reduce the health care cost, to increase the efficiency of fraud detection and to provide high quality to health care systems.