Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Subjective memory problems

#### Summary points The National Dementia Strategy for England, published in 2009,1 urges general practitioners to become skilled at recognising dementia at an early stage and to promptly refer those at risk to specialist memory services. The implementation of the strategy includes a public awareness campaign to reduce the stigma of dementia and encourage people to approach their GP if they have concerns about their memory. Subjective memory loss, which is seen as the cardinal symptom of dementia by the public, is likely to be the main problem reported by those who consult their doctor. However, the findings of the Kungsholmen cohort study, which included 1435 people aged 75-95 years without dementia, suggest that only 18% of future cases of dementia will be identified in the preclinical phase by investigating those who screen positive for memory problems.2 What evidence is available to guide GPs in management and referral decisions for patients with subjective memory loss? This clinical review is based on the findings of five systematic reviews, three of which3 4 5 investigated the association between subjective memory …
Perfusion‐based high‐resolution functional imaging in the human brain at 7 Tesla

Perfusion‐based MRI measures cerebral blood flow (CBF) at the capillary level and can be used for functional studies based on the tight spatial coupling between brain activity and blood flow. Obtaining functional CBF maps with high spatial resolution is a major challenge because the CBF signal is intrinsically low and the SNR is critical. In the present work, CBF‐based functional imaging was performed at a considerably smaller voxel size than previously reported in humans. High‐resolution CBF maps were obtained with voxel sizes as small as 0.9 × 0.9 × 1.5 mm3 in the human brain. High sensitivity was made possible by signal‐to‐noise gains at the high magnetic field of 7 T and by using a novel RF combination coil design. In addition, a reduction of the field‐of‐view was critical to achieve 0.9‐mm in‐plane resolution with gradient‐echo echo‐planar imaging in a single shot. Functional CBF data were compared with functional BOLD data to reveal that, for CBF, large contrast‐ to‐noise gains were obtained at high spatial resolution, indicating that the functional CBF response was more localized. High‐resolution functional CBF imaging is significant for neuroscience research because it provides better localization and more specific information than BOLD for monitoring brain function. Magn Reson Med 47:903–911, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Six-hour window of opportunity for calpain inhibition in focal cerebral ischemia in rats.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Stroke patients often experience a significant temporal delay between the onset of ischemia and the time to initiation of therapy. Thus, there is a need for neuroprotectants with a long therapeutic window of opportunity. The efficacy of a potent, central nervous system-penetrating calpain inhibitor (MDL 28,170) was evaluated in a temporary model of focal cerebral ischemia to determine the window of opportunity for intracellular protease inhibition. METHODS An ex vivo brain protease inhibition assay established pharmacodynamic dosing parameters for MDL 28,170. Middle cerebral artery (MCA) occlusion was accomplished by advancing a monofilament through the internal carotid artery to the origin of the MCA. Postmortem infarct volumes were determined by quantitative image analysis of triphenyltetrazolium-stained brain sections. RESULTS Maximal inhibition of brain protease activity was observed 30 minutes after injection of MDL 28,170 with an estimated pharmacodynamic half-life of 2 hours. MDL 28,170 caused a dose-dependent reduction in infarct volume when administered 30 minutes after MCA occlusion. A window of opportunity study was conducted to determine the maximal delay between the onset of ischemia and the initiation of efficacious therapy. MDL 28,170 reduced infarct volume when therapy was delayed for 0.5, 3, 4, and 6 hours after the initiation of ischemia. The protective effect of MDL 28,170 was lost after an 8-hour delay. CONCLUSIONS These data indicate that the therapeutic window of opportunity for calpain inhibition is at least 6 hours in a reversible focal cerebral ischemia model. This protection is observed despite the lethal hypoxic and excitotoxic challenge, suggesting that calpain activation may be an obligatory, downstream event in the ischemic cell death cascade.
Avoiding Transient Loops During the Convergence of Link-State Routing Protocols

When using link-state protocols such as OSPF or IS-IS, forwarding loops can occur transiently when the routers adapt their forwarding tables as a response to a topological change. In this paper, we present a mechanism that lets the network converge to its optimal forwarding state without risking any transient loops and the related packet loss. The mechanism is based on an ordering of the updates of the forwarding tables of the routers. Our solution can be used in the case of a planned change in the state of a set of links and in the case of unpredictable changes when combined with a local protection scheme. The supported topology changes are link transitions from up to down, down to up, and updates of link metrics. Finally, we show by simulations that sub-second loop-free convergence is possible on a large Tier-1 ISP network.
Genetic polymorphism and cancer susceptibility: Evidence concerning acetyltransferases and cancer of the urinary bladder

Acetyltransferase enzymes expressed in hepatic and extrahepatic tissues are products of an acetyltransferase gene locus. Acetylation capacity is regulated by simple autosomal Mendelian inheritance of two codominant alleles at this locus. Human slow acetylators are predisposed to bladder cancer from arylamine chemicals. The role of the bladder in arylamine metabolism and of bladder acetyltransferases in the etiology of bladder cancer is not fully understood, but the acetylator genotype‐dependent expression of arylamine N‐acetyltransferase and N‐hydroxyarylamine O‐acetyltransferase in bladder cytosol may contribute towards the genetic predisposition of human slow acetylators to arylamine‐induced bladder cancer.
pBACode: a random-barcode-based high-throughput approach for BAC paired-end sequencing and physical clone mapping

Abstract Applications that use Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) libraries often require paired-end sequences and knowledge of the physical location of each clone in plates. To facilitate obtaining this information in high-throughput, we generated pBACode vectors: a pool of BAC cloning vectors, each with a pair of random barcodes flanking its cloning site. In a pBACode BAC library, the BAC ends and their linked barcodes can be sequenced in bulk. Barcode pairs are determined by sequencing the empty pBACode vectors, which allows BAC ends to be paired according to their barcodes. For physical clone mapping, the barcodes are used as unique markers for their linked genomic sequence. After multi-dimensional pooling of BAC clones, the barcodes are sequenced and deconvoluted to locate each clone. We generated a pBACode library of 94,464 clones for the flounder Paralichthys olivaceus and obtained paired-end sequence from 95.4% of the clones. Incorporating BAC paired-ends into the genome preassembly improved its continuity by over 10-fold. Furthermore, we were able to use the barcodes to map the physical locations of each clone in just 50 pools, with up to 11 808 clones per pool. Our physical clone mapping located 90.2% of BAC clones, enabling targeted characterization of chromosomal rearrangements.
Enabling datacenter servers to scale out economically and sustainably

As cloud applications proliferate and data-processing demands increase, server resources must grow to unleash the performance of emerging workloads that scale well with large number of compute nodes. Nevertheless, power has become a crucial bottleneck that restricts horizontal scaling (scale out) of server systems, especially in datacenters that employ power over-subscription. When a data-center hits the maximum capacity of its power provisioning equipment, the owner has to either build another facility or upgrade existing utility power infrastructure — both approaches add huge capital expenditure, require significant construction lead time, and can further increase the owner's carbon footprint. This paper proposes Oasis, a power provisioning scheme for enabling power-/carbon-constrained datacenter servers to scale out economically and sustainably. Oasis naturally supports incremental power capacity expansion with near-zero environmental impact as it takes advantages of modular renewable energy system and emerging distributed battery architecture. It allows scale-out data-center to double its capacity using 100% green energy with up to 25% less overhead cost. This paper also describes our implementation of Oasis prototype and introduces our multi-source driven power management scheme Ozone. Ozone allows Oasis to identify the most suitable power supply control strategies and adjust server load cooperatively to maximize overall system efficiency and reli­ability. Our results show that Ozone could reduce the performance degradation of Oasis to 1%, extend Oasis battery lifetime by over 50%, and almost triple the average battery backup capacity which is crucial for mission-critical systems.
On the intractability of permuting a block code to minimize trellis complexity

An important problem in the theory and application of block code trellises is to find a coordinate permutation of a given code to minimize the trellis complexity. We show that the problem of finding a coordinate permutation that minimizes the number of vertices at a given depth in the minimal trellis for a binary linear block code is NP-complete.
Physical therapy approaches for strengthening the stifle and pelvic limb.

The physical therapy approach to stifle dysfunction and hindlimb weakness involves client education, increase in the activity level of the horse, and a stretching program followed by a specific ascending therapeutic strengthening exercise progression. A thorough examination by a veterinarian should first clear the horse for physical therapy treatment before initiation of this program. Horses recovering from lameness, surgery, or systemic diseases are appropriate for this program. The complementary use of modalities can be beneficial to this exercise program to decrease pain and inflammation and promote healing of tissues. Numerous training aids and therapeutic devices can contribute to this exercise program progression. This program is intensive for the owner and horse in terms of time and energy for successful outcomes. After the horse is symptom free, a crosstraining maintenance program should be used to prevent recurrence. Author’s address: Equine Rehabilitation Services, LLC, 23 Dupaw-Gould Road, Brookline, NH 03033; e-mail: jenequinept@ charter.net. © 2011 AAEP.
Towards Retrieving Force Feedback in Robotic-Assisted Surgery: A Supervised Neuro-Recurrent-Vision Approach

Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgeries have gained a lot of popularity over conventional procedures as they offer many benefits to both surgeons and patients. Nonetheless, they still suffer from some limitations that affect their outcome. One of them is the lack of force feedback which restricts the surgeon's sense of touch and might reduce precision during a procedure. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel force estimation approach that combines a vision based solution with supervised learning to estimate the applied force and provide the surgeon with a suitable representation of it. The proposed solution starts with extracting the geometry of motion of the heart's surface by minimizing an energy functional to recover its 3D deformable structure. A deep network, based on a LSTM-RNN architecture, is then used to learn the relationship between the extracted visual-geometric information and the applied force, and to find accurate mapping between the two. Our proposed force estimation solution avoids the drawbacks usually associated with force sensing devices, such as biocompatibility and integration issues. We evaluate our approach on phantom and realistic tissues in which we report an average root-mean square error of 0.02 N.
Decoding Linear Block Codes Using a Priority-First Search : Performance Analysis and Suboptimal Version

An efficient maximum-likelihood soft-decision decoding algorithm for linear block codes using a generalized Dijkstra's algorithm was proposed by Han, Hartmann, and Chen (1993). We prove that this algorithm is efficient for most practical communication systems where the probability of error is less than 10/sup -3/ by finding an upper bound of the computational effort of the algorithm. A suboptimal decoding algorithm is also proposed. The performance of this suboptimal decoding algorithm is within 0.25 dB of the performance of an optimal decoding algorithm for the (104, 52) binary extended quadratic residue code, and within 0.5 dB of the optimal performance for the (128, 64) binary BCH code, respectively.
Effects of homocysteine on smooth muscle cell proliferation in both cell culture and artery perfusion culture models.

BACKGROUND Hyperhomocysteinemia is associated with increased risk for vascular disease. However, the pathogenic mechanisms of homocysteine are largely unknown. We evaluated the effects of homocysteine on smooth muscle cell (SMC) and endothelial cell proliferation in cell culture and on SMC proliferation of balloon angioplasty-injured arteries in a perfusion culture model. METHODS Human and pig SMCs and endothelial cells were cultured with variable amounts of homocysteine for 72 h and the total cells were counted using a hemocytometer. Fresh pig carotid arteries were harvested from a local slaughterhouse and cultured in a newly designed artery perfusion culture system. Five groups of arteries (six per group) were cultured for 48 h under different conditions: normal control, balloon angioplasty injury alone, and injury with three different doses of homocysteine. Vessel viability was evaluated. SMC proliferation was assayed by bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) DNA labeling. RESULTS At concentrations equivalent to those in human hyperhomocysteinemia, homocysteine significantly stimulated both cultured human and pig SMC proliferation with a dose-dependent effect, while it inhibited cultured endothelial cell growth. Perfusion-cultured pig carotid arteries remained contractile in response to norepinephrine and relaxant to nitroglycerine, and viable cells were also isolated from the cultured arteries. SMC proliferation (BrdU index) showed significant differences among the groups. SMC proliferation was stimulated by vascular injury and further enhanced by homocysteine in a dose-dependent manner. The proliferative response occurred strongly on the luminal side of the vessel wall, with the effects tapering toward the adventitia. CONCLUSIONS Homocysteine had a mitogenic effect on vascular SMCs and a cytotoxic effect on endothelial cells. This differential effect of homocysteine on vascular cells may represent a pathogenic mechanism of vascular lesion formation in patients with hyperhomocysteinemia.
Alert Regarding Cisplatin-induced Severe Adverse Events in Cancer Patients with Xeroderma Pigmentosum

Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) is a genetic disease in which DNA repair mechanisms are impaired. Cisplatin (CDDP) exerts cytotoxic effects by forming mainly intrastrand DNA cross-links, and sensitivity to CDDP depends on the DNA repair system. Several in vitro studies have suggested that treatment with CDDP may cause enhanced adverse events as well as anti-tumor activity in cancer patients with XP. This article is the first to describe two cancer patients with XP showing severe adverse events following CDDP-based chemotherapy. Physicians should pay attention when administering CDDP in cancer patients with XP.
Aspect-oriented implementation method: progressive or non-progressive approach?

Object-oriented programming languages provide effective means to achieve better reuse and extensibility levels, which increases development productivity. However, the object-oriented paradigm has several limitations, sometimes leading to tangled code and spread code. For example, business code tangled with presentation code or data access code, and distribution, concurrency control, and exception handling code spread over several classes. This decreases readability, and therefore, system maintainability. Some extensions of the object-oriented paradigm try to correct those limitations allowing reuse and maintenance in practical situations where the original paradigm does not offer an adequate support. However, in order to guarantee that those benefits will be achieved by those techniques it is necessary to use them together with an implementation method. Our objective is to adapt and to analyze an object-oriented implementation method to use aspect-oriented programming in order to implement several concerns to a family of object-oriented system. In particular, we are interested in implementing persistence, distribution, and concurrency control aspects. At the moment we are particularly interested to present some results and get feed back about a performed experiment to identify if and when a progressive approach is better than a non-progressive one. In a progressive approach, persistence, distribution, and concurrency control are not initially considered in the implementation activities, but are gradually introduced, preserving the application's functional requirements. This approach helps in dealing with the inherent complexity of the modern applications, through the support to gradual implementations and tests of the intermediate versions of the application.
Synergistic and Antagonistic Effects of Thermal Shock, Air Exposure, and Fishing Capture on the Physiological Stress of Squilla mantis (Stomatopoda)

This study is aimed at assessing the effects of multiple stressors (thermal shock, fishing capture, and exposure to air) on the benthic stomatopod Squilla mantis, a burrowing crustacean quite widespread in the Mediterranean Sea. Laboratory analyses were carried out to explore the physiological impairment onset over time, based on emersion and thermal shocks, on farmed individuals. Parallel field-based studies were carried out to also investigate the role of fishing (i.e., otter trawling) in inducing physiological imbalance in different seasonal conditions. The dynamics of physiological recovery from physiological disruption were also studied. Physiological stress was assessed by analysing hemolymph metabolites (L-Lactate, D-glucose, ammonia, and H+), as well as glycogen concentration in muscle tissues. The experiments were carried out according to a factorial scheme considering the three factors (thermal shock, fishing capture, and exposure to air) at two fixed levels in order to explore possible synergistic, additive, or antagonistic effects among factors. Additive effects on physiological parameters were mainly detected when the three factors interacted together while synergistic effects were found as effect of the combination of two factors. This finding highlights that the physiological adaptive and maladaptive processes induced by the stressors result in a dynamic response that may encounter physiological limits when high stress levels are sustained. Thus, a further increase in the physiological parameters due to synergies cannot be reached. Moreover, when critical limits are encountered, mortality occurs and physiological parameters reflect the response of the last survivors. In the light of our mortality studies, thermal shock and exposure to air have the main effect on the survival of S. mantis only on trawled individuals, while lab-farmed individuals did not show any mortality during exposure to air until after 2 hours.
The effect of conceptual context changes on skill transfer performance

The effect of changing the conceptual context on task performance was examined. The aim was to evaluate whether power functions that describe improvement on old skills during practice can be used to predict further improvement on these skills when they are presented in a novel environment. This research was designed to extend Speelman and Kirsner's (under review) study, which involved testing the assumption made by many skill theories: that performance should continue to improve as if a change in task conditions had no effect. Eighty participants were randomly allocated to one of four distractor conditions: Operand Change (e.g., 2 x 9 = _), Operand Reversal (e.g., 2 x 6 = _), Operation Change (e.g., 6 x _ = 12), and Symbol Change (e.g., 12 + 6 = _), which were designed to vary the amount of conceptual change on a test task. The test items were single-digit multiplication problems from the six-times table ( e.g., 6 x 2 = _). Participants repeatedly solved items from the test task during the training phase, and then solved the same task combined with items from a distractor condition during the transfer phase. The results revealed that a change in the conceptual context disrupted immediate transfer performance on the test task in the Operation Change and Symbol Change conditions by slowing response time. A further analysis indicated that performance on the test task remained disrupted for the Operation Change condition, but returned to predicted levels for the Symbol Change condition. It also revealed that performance in the Operand Change condition was disrupted, with performance failing to improve with any further practice. No disruption occurred in the Operand Reversal condition. Accuracy levels remained consistently high and were not influenced by a change in task conditions. These results support Speelman and Kirsner's findings that a change in the presentation context of a task affects response time performance on an established skill, and that power law extrapolations cannot be used to reliably predict transfer performance. These results have implications on skill acquisition and transfer theories that have not accounted for this effect in their transfer predictions. Author: Kris Giesen Supervisor: Dr Craig Speelman Submitted: October 2000 .
Preclinical safety evaluation of submicronized sildenafil citrate nebulization solution in small experimental animals

ABSTRACT Purpose: Sildenafil citrate (SC) nebulization solution has the potential to treat pulmonary hypertension by delivering high concentration directly to the respiratory system while minimizing systemic drug exposure and associated toxicity. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the potential toxicity of aerosolized SC (inhaled) in Sprague dawley rats for 28 days. Materials and methods: The rats were randomly divided into five groups (n = 6). Placebo (normal saline) was inhaled to group I (control). Group II was exposed to therapeutic dose (TD): 20 mg/kg, while group 3 and group 4 were exposed to 3TD and 6TD, respectively, till 28 days and toxicokinetic parameters were evaluated in group V. The particle size of the nebulized solution of SC (1%) was measured by using Anderson Cascade Impactor. At the end of experiment, all animals were sacrificed. Endpoints used to evaluate potential toxicity of inhaled sildenafil citrate were clinical observations, body weight, and clinical pathology along with broncho-alveolar lavage (BAL) Fluid investigation. Results and conclusions: ACI study has shown that more than 70% aerosolized drug particles were in submicron range (0.3–0.5μm). There was no systemic toxicity or clinically limiting local respiratory toxicity associated with inhalation exposure to SC nebulization solution at 6TD. No significant changes were observed in the level of different blood and BALF parameters in treated groups in comparison to control. Histopathological examination revealed no abnormal findings in the animals of treated group. The data demonstrate that aerosolized sildenafil citrate is well tolerated in rats and suggest its use in humans.