Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Limitations of serum creatinine level and creatinine clearance as filtration markers in cirrhosis.

BACKGROUND Several studies carried out in a limited number of patients demonstrated a wide range of overestimation of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) by serum creatinine level and creatinine clearance (Ccr) in liver disease. METHODS We simultaneously evaluated Ccr, inulin clearance, and predicted GFR calculated from serum creatinine level in 56 cirrhotic patients. Inulin clearance was considered the gold standard for GFR evaluation. RESULTS The sensitivity of serum creatinine level, predicted GFR, and Ccr in detecting renal failure was 18.5%, 51%, and 74%, respectively. On the basis of inulin clearance, patients were divided into two groups: those with normal GFR (mean, 106 +/- 34 mL/min per 1.73 m2) (group 1, 29 patients) and those with reduced GFR (mean, 56 +/- 19 mL/min per 1.73 m2) (group 2, 27 patients). Predicted GFR and Ccr were accurate markers of GFR in group 1 patients, while both overestimated GFR by about 50% in group 2 patients. An increased tubular secretion of creatinine accounted for the disparity between Ccr and inulin clearance in these patients. CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that renal failure is greatly underestimated on the basis of serum creatinine level and Ccr in cirrhotic patients. Clinical implications of this observation include excessive dosage of potentially nephrotoxic drugs and failure to recognize renal impairment induced by such medical treatments as diuretic therapy or paracentesis.
Robotic Ablation of Atrial Fibrillation

Background: Pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) is an established treatment for atrial fibrillation (AF). During PVI an electrical conduction block between pulmonary vein (PV) and left atrium (LA) is created. This conduction block prevents AF, which is triggered by irregular electric activity originating from the PV. However, transmural atrial lesions are required which can be challenging. Re-conduction and AF recurrence occur in 20 - 40% of the cases. Robotic catheter systems aim to improve catheter steerability. Here, a procedure with a new remote catheter system (RCS), is presented. Objective of this article is to show feasibility of robotic AF ablation with a novel system. Materials and Methods: After interatrial trans-septal puncture is performed using a long sheath and needle under fluoroscopic guidance. The needle is removed and a guide wire is placed in the left superior PV. Then an ablation catheter is positioned in the LA, using the sheath and wire as guide to the LA. LA angiography is performed over the sheath. A circular mapping catheter is positioned via the long sheath into the LA and a three-dimensional (3-D) anatomical reconstruction of the LA is performed. The handle of the ablation catheter is positioned in the robotic arm of the Amigo system and the ablation procedure begins. During the ablation procedure, the operator manipulates the ablation catheter via the robotic arm with the use of a remote control. The ablation is performed by creating point-by-point lesions around the left and right PV ostia. Contact force is measured at the catheter tip to provide feedback of catheter-tissue contact. Conduction block is confirmed by recording the PV potentials on the circular mapping catheter and by pacing maneuvers. The operator stays out of the radiationfield during ablation. Conclusion: The novel catheter system allows ablation with high stability on low operator fluoroscopy exposure.
Googling children's health: reliability of medical advice on the internet

Aim To assess the reliability and accuracy of medical advice, over a range of types of websites, found using the Google search engine, thus simulating a patient's experience. Design Advice was sought for five common paediatric questions using the Google search engine. The first 100 results of each question were classified as either being consistent or inconsistent with current recommendations or as ‘no answer given’. Record of the type of site and its visibility was noted. Results 39% of the 500 sites searched gave correct information; 11% were incorrect and 49% failed to answer the question. Where an answer was available, 78% of sites gave the correct information. The accuracy of information varied depending on the topic and ranged from 51% (mumps, measles and rubella and autism) to 100% (breast feeding with mastitis/the sleeping position of a baby). Governmental sites gave uniformly accurate advice. News sites gave correct advice in 55% of cases. No sponsored sites were encountered that gave the correct advice. Implications The authors have shown that the advice on the internet is very variable. Patients are known to use the internet for their own research and as such the authors encourage healthcare workers to recommend government or NHS websites.
Correlation between InVitro Activity of Posaconazole and InVivo Efficacy against Rhizopus oryzae Infection in Mice

ABSTRACT We have evaluated the in vitro activity of posaconazole (PSC) against 50 clinical strains of Rhizopus oryzae using a broth microdilution method, the Neo-Sensitabs tablet diffusion method, and minimal fungicidal concentration (MFC) determination. In general, PSC showed low MICs against this fungus, and the MICs correlated with the inhibition zone diameters. Most of the MFCs, however, were from 1 to 4 dilutions higher than their corresponding MICs. We then investigated the efficacies of several different doses of PSC in a murine model. All treatments began 24 h after challenge and lasted for 7 days. The drug was administered twice a day to mice infected with three strains that showed intermediate PSC susceptibility (MIC = 2 μg/ml) and three PSC-susceptible strains (MIC = 0.25 μg/ml). A dose of 10 mg/kg of body weight was ineffective, while doses of 20 and 30 mg/kg prolonged the survival of the mice. The 50 strains tested were segregated into two groups on the basis of the in vitro data. For the group with the most strains (85%), the strains had low PSC MICs, mice infected with the strains showed higher rates of survival (30 to 40%), and PSC was able to reduce the fungal load in the kidney and less regularly in the brain. For the second group (15% of the strains), the strains had intermediate PSC MICs, mice infected with the strains had lower survival rates (10 to 20%), and PSC treatment resulted in variable and no reductions in the fungal loads in the kidneys and brains, respectively.
LAMB WAVE NON-DESTRUCTIVE INSPECTION OF REPAIRED COMPOSITE LAMINATED STRUCTURES

The evaluation of structural integrity using Lamb waves has long been acknowledged as a very promising technique [2,3]. Lamb waves are two-dimensional acoustic waves that can be generated in relatively thin solid plates with free boundaries and are also known as plate waves [4, 5]. They can be divided into symmetric Sn and anti-symmetric An modes according to their displacement pattern. Lamb waves excite the whole volume of the structure along the line between the transmitter and receiver and can propagate over considerably long distances. However, their dispersive nature and the existence of many modes simultaneously can complicate the interpretation of the acquired signal.
Delay estimation for transform domain acoustical echo cancellation

Acoustic echo cancellation can be used to remove the annoying talker feedback in hands-free (teleconferencing) systems. The echo canceller identifies the response between the loudspeaker and the microphone, and produces an echo replica which is then subtracted from the signal. Adaptive filtering techniques are employed to determine the echo path response. The speech signal (or the reference signal) is used to train the algorithm. Fast convergence and good tracking capabilities can not be achieved by classical transform domain adaptive filtering algorithms when the reference signal has variable rank autocorrelation matrix. In this thesis, we examine the DCT-LMS algorithm and we emphasize on the role played by the Discrete Cosine Transform. This fixed transformation reduces the eigenvalue spread of the input autocorrelation matrix by partially decorrelating the inputs. The autocorrelation matrix of speech signals is often rank-deficient. During the low rank phases, some of the transform-domain tap coefficients become irrelevant to the adaptation process and stop adapting. When the autocorrelation matrix gains full rank, there will be no longer any “frozen” weights. However, the weights that have been frozen are “far” from the optimal point; they require additional convergence time to track again the changes in the room impulse response. In this dissertation, we present a new method that uses the information contained in the other coefficients to move the frozen weights closer to the optimal point and, consequently, reduce the overall convergence time. By modeling the changes in the impulse response that result from an alteration in the spacing between the microphone and the loudspeaker by a single delay, we were able to develop the “Spectrum Delay Update” method. It consists of replacing, during low-rank phase, each frozen coefficient by a delayed version of the previous full-rank solution. To estimate the corresponding delay, a novel DCT-domain delay estimation algorithm was derived. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of SDU for acoustic echo cancellation, the gain in Echo Return Loss is substantial. The experimental performance analysis confirms the expected reduction in the Euclidean Distance between the filter weights and the actual room impulse response DCT. Furthermore, it shows that spectrally updating the filter weights reduces the MSE jump when the autocorrelation matrix gains full rank.
“Food Addiction” in Patients with Eating Disorders is Associated with Negative Urgency and Difficulties to Focus on Long-Term Goals

Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate if eating disorder patients differ in specific personality traits depending on a positive screening of food addiction (FA) and to find a model to predict FA in eating disorder patients using measures of personality and impulsivity. Methods: Two hundred seventy eight patients, having an eating disorder, self-reported on FA, impulsivity, personality, eating and general psychopathology. Patients were then split into two groups, depending on a positive or negative result on the FA screening. Analysis of variance was used to compare means between the two groups. Stepwise binary logistic regression was used to obtain a predictive model for the presence of FA. Results: Patients with FA had lower self-directedness, and more negative urgency and lack of perseverance than patients not reporting addictive eating. The probability of FA can be predicted by high negative urgency, high reward dependence, and low lack of premeditation. Conclusion: Eating disorder patients who have more problems to pursue tasks to the end and to focus on long-term goals seem to be more likely to develop addictive eating patterns.
Mercury as a Global Pollutant: Sources, Pathways, and Effects

Mercury (Hg) is a global pollutant that affects human and ecosystem health. We synthesize understanding of sources, atmosphere-land-ocean Hg dynamics and health effects, and consider the implications of Hg-control policies. Primary anthropogenic Hg emissions greatly exceed natural geogenic sources, resulting in increases in Hg reservoirs and subsequent secondary Hg emissions that facilitate its global distribution. The ultimate fate of emitted Hg is primarily recalcitrant soil pools and deep ocean waters and sediments. Transfers of Hg emissions to largely unavailable reservoirs occur over the time scale of centuries, and are primarily mediated through atmospheric exchanges of wet/dry deposition and evasion from vegetation, soil organic matter and ocean surfaces. A key link between inorganic Hg inputs and exposure of humans and wildlife is the net production of methylmercury, which occurs mainly in reducing zones in freshwater, terrestrial, and coastal environments, and the subsurface ocean. Elevated human exposure to methylmercury primarily results from consumption of estuarine and marine fish. Developing fetuses are most at risk from this neurotoxin but health effects of highly exposed populations and wildlife are also a concern. Integration of Hg science with national and international policy efforts is needed to target efforts and evaluate efficacy.
A Comparison Of Memetic Recombination Operators For The Traveling Salesman Problem

Several memetic algorithms (MAs) - evolutionary algorithms incorporating local search - have been proposed for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Much effort has been spent to develop recombination operators for MAs which aim to exploit problem characteristics to achieve a highly effective search. In this paper, several recombination operators for the TSP are compared. For the purpose of identifying the important properties of a recombination operator, a new generic recombination operator (GX) is proposed which is comprised of four phases. These phases can be controlled by parameters reflecting the most important properties of recombination operators. It is shown that GX recombination is superior to MPX and DPX when all common edges are preserved in the offspring.
N ov 2 01 0 Horizons in de-Sitter

We classify all pseudo-supersymmetric extremal near-horizon geometries in minimal five-dimensional de-Sitter supergravity. It is shown that the only such nearhorizon geometry is the near-horizon geometry of the de-Sitter BMPV solution, and hence there are no regular extremal pseudo-supersymmetric asymptotically de-Sitter black rings.
Non-commutative computations: lower bounds and polynomial identity testing

In the setting of non-commutative arithmetic computations, we define a class of circuits that generalize algebraic branching programs (ABP). This model is called unambiguous because it captures the polynomials in which all monomials are computed in a similar way (that is, all the parse trees are isomorphic). We show that unambiguous circuits of polynomial size can compute polynomials that require ABPs of exponential size, and that they are incomparable with skew circuits. Generalizing a result of Nisan [17] on ABPs, we provide an exact characterization of the complexity of any polynomial in our model, and use it to prove exponential lower bounds for explicit polynomials such as the determinant. Finally, we give a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for polynomial identity testing (PIT) on unambiguous circuits over R and C, thus providing the largest class of circuits so far in a noncommutative setting for which we can derandomize PIT. ∗Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, LIAFA, UMR 7089 CNRS, F-75205 Paris, France. Email: guillaume.lagarde@liafa.univ-paris-diderot.fr. †Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, IMJ-PRG, UMR 7586 CNRS, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, F-75013, Paris, France. Email: malod@math.univ-paris-diderot.fr. ‡Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, LIAFA, UMR 7089 CNRS, F-75205 Paris, France. Email: sylvain.perifel@liafa.univ-paris-diderot.fr.
International military operations and mental health – A review

Background: Volunteering in international military missions has been scrutinized for its effects on mental health. Different kinds of exposures to traumatic events are associated with a variety of mental disorders, mainly heightened rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol abuse. Aims: Based on the literature we discuss risk and protective factors concerning the psychological well-being of soldiers attending to international military operations. Methods: A systematic literature search was carried out using relevant search terms to identify the articles for this review. Results and conclusions: The ability to recognize and treat acute stress reactions during deployments is important. Post-deployment psychosocial support and services have a role in lowering barriers to care, diminishing stigma and also in recognizing individuals who suffer from psychological distress or psychiatric symptoms, to connect them with appropriate care. Further investigation of gender differences and the role of stigmatization is warranted. Most of those participating in international military operations are repatriated without problems, but repeated exposure to combat situations and other stressors may affect mental health in various ways. Stigmatization is still a barrier to care.
Efficient Physical Embedding of Topologically Complex Information Processing Networks in Brains and Computer Circuits

Nervous systems are information processing networks that evolved by natural selection, whereas very large scale integrated (VLSI) computer circuits have evolved by commercially driven technology development. Here we follow historic intuition that all physical information processing systems will share key organizational properties, such as modularity, that generally confer adaptivity of function. It has long been observed that modular VLSI circuits demonstrate an isometric scaling relationship between the number of processing elements and the number of connections, known as Rent's rule, which is related to the dimensionality of the circuit's interconnect topology and its logical capacity. We show that human brain structural networks, and the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans, also obey Rent's rule, and exhibit some degree of hierarchical modularity. We further show that the estimated Rent exponent of human brain networks, derived from MRI data, can explain the allometric scaling relations between gray and white matter volumes across a wide range of mammalian species, again suggesting that these principles of nervous system design are highly conserved. For each of these fractal modular networks, the dimensionality of the interconnect topology was greater than the 2 or 3 Euclidean dimensions of the space in which it was embedded. This relatively high complexity entailed extra cost in physical wiring: although all networks were economically or cost-efficiently wired they did not strictly minimize wiring costs. Artificial and biological information processing systems both may evolve to optimize a trade-off between physical cost and topological complexity, resulting in the emergence of homologous principles of economical, fractal and modular design across many different kinds of nervous and computational networks.
On finite-time stabilization via relay feedback control

The problem of finite-time stabilization of multi-input linear system by means of relay feedback is considered. A new control design procedure, which combines convex embedding technique with implicit Lyapunov function method, is developed. The issues of practical implementation of the obtained implicit relay feedback are discussed. Theoretical result is supported by numerical simulation.
Plasma lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase deficiency in a child with terminal pulmonary hyaline membrane disease.

Harkness, R. A. , Darling, J. A. B. , Bain, A. D. , and Syme, J. (1973). Archives of Disease in Childhood, 48, 906. Plasma lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase deficiency in a child with terminal pulmonary hyaline membrane disease. The clinical and biochemical findings are described in a term infant who showed oedema, then severe diarrhoea, and finally pulmonary hyaline membrane disease. He died at the age of 38 days. Investigation of necropsy material showed a deficiency of the plasma enzyme lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT), which catalyses the transfer of fatty acids from lecithin to cholesterol to form cholesterol esters. Other evidence obtained before and at necropsy was consistent with this diagnosis, though this rare isolated enzyme deficiency has so far generally been associated with disease in adults. The possible relevance of the above findings to classical pulmonary hyaline membrane disease which occurs in premature infants is discussed, since this condition is also associated with changes in phospholipid metabolism. The present findings provide further support for the hypothesis that LCAT is important in the maintenance of membrane function.
Elastic scattering of two Na atoms.

Interaction potentials for the [ital X] [sup 1][Sigma][sub g][sup +] and [ital a] [sup 3][Sigma][sub u][sup +] states of Na[sub 2] are constructed and used in calculations of the elastic scattering of two Na atoms at ultralow temperatures. The sensitivity to retardation effects (or Casimir corrections) is explored. The calculated elastic and spin-change cross sections are very large, of the order of 10[sup [minus]12]--10[sup [minus]13] cm[sup 2] at zero temperature. The predicted scattering lengths are both positive, 34.9 [ital a][sub 0] for the [ital X] [sup 1][Sigma][sub g][sup +] state and 77.3 [ital a][sub 0] for the [ital a] [sup 3][Sigma][sub u][sup +] state. Pronounced shape resonances appear for the [ital l]=3 and 7 partial waves for the singlet and [ital l]=6 for the triplet states.
Towards improving Khoja rule-based Arabic stemmer

Stemming algorithms are used to remove irrelevant morphological variations from different words, and extract the stem or the root from which the inputted word is derived. Stemming can then help to standardize terms referring to the same concept. These algorithms are widely used in information retrieval systems and Web search engines, in addition to other systems such as: Machine translation, text clustering, text summarization, question answering, indexing, text mining, text classification. etc. Khoja stemmer is a standard Arabic stemmer, which has a number of flaws. Previous studies and this one show that Khoja stemmer is better than other two competitive ones evaluated in this study. The Khoja stemmer and the other two evaluated Arabic stemmers depend mainly in their work on (Patterns, Forms). Therefore the identification of the flaws leads to identification of missing Patterns not used by Khoja stemmer. So the enhancement to Khoja stemmer is restricted to adding missing patterns, and this leads to around 5% improvement to the accuracy of Khoja stemmer.
Control Patterns - Bridging The Gap Between Is Controls And BPM

While playing an increasingly important role across various industries, the efficient management of legal and regulatory compliance requirements remains a challenge in modern organizations. Commonly, compliance is handled by separate organizational units and not well integrated with core business processes. Based on the area of information systems (IS) controls as mechanism to fulfil given requirements, this paper proposes a concept to bridge this gap between regulatory compliance and business process management. The presented concept enables linking process models with internal control systems and provides a common language for all parties involved. An approach is developed to identify and extract reusable control elements for regulatory compliance from real-world process specifications. These artefacts are formalized as “Control Patterns” (CPs). Inductive analysis methods are employed to identify reusable patterns. As a proof of concept, based on a sample of proven implementations of the software change management process, the paper analyses possibilities to extract, generalize and explicitly model IS controls.