Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outcome of primary trabeculotomy ab interno (Trabectome) surgery in patients with steroid-induced glaucoma

AbstractTo determine the efficacy and safety of Trabectome surgery on patients with steroid response, ranging from ocular hypertension refractory to maximal medical therapy to the development of steroid-induced glaucoma.A nonrandomized, nonblinded, retrospective study of 20 subjects with steroid response was conducted. All 20 eyes underwent Trabectome surgery alone. Nine subjects had steroid response with unremarkable visual field, 3 had mild steroid-induced glaucoma, and 8 had advanced steroid-induced glaucoma. Outcome measures included intraocular pressure (IOP), number of glaucoma medications, need for secondary glaucoma surgery, and steroid regimen. Mann–Whitney U test was used to compare postoperative IOP and number of medications to preoperative IOP and number of medications. Kaplan–Meier was used for survival analysis, and success was defined as: IOP reduced by 20% or more on any 2 consecutive visits after 3 months; IOP ⩽21 mm Hg on any 2 consecutive visits after 3 months; and no secondary glaucoma surgery.The average preoperative IOP was 33.8 ± 6.9 mm Hg and average preoperative glaucoma medication usage was 3.85 ± 0.75 medications. At 12 months, the IOP was reduced to 15.00 ± 3.46 mm Hg (P = 0.03) and glaucoma medication was reduced to 2.3 ± 1.4 (P < 0.01). The survival rate at 12 months was 93%. At 12 months, 10 patients were continued on their preoperative steroid treatments, 5 were on tapered steroid treatments, and 5 had ceased steroid treatments entirely. One patient required secondary glaucoma surgery (glaucoma drainage device). No other complications were noted.The Trabectome procedure is safe and highly effective for steroid-response glaucoma, even in the context of continued steroid treatment.
Robust soft sensors based on integration of genetic programming, analytical neural networks, and support vector machines

A novel approach for development of inferential sensors based on integration of three key computational intelligence approaches (genetic programming, analytical neural networks, and support vector machines) is proposed. The advantages of this type of soft sensors are their good generalization capabilities, increased robustness, explicit input/output relationships, self-assessment capabilities, and low implementation and maintenance cost.
Metabolic Signature of Electrosurgical Liver Dissection

Background and Aims High frequency electrosurgery has a key role in the broadening application of liver surgery. Its molecular signature, i.e. the metabolites evolving from electrocauterization which may inhibit hepatic wound healing, have not been systematically studied. Methods Human liver samples were thus obtained during surgery before and after electrosurgical dissection and subjected to a two-stage metabolomic screening experiment (discovery sample: N = 18, replication sample: N = 20) using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Results In a set of 208 chemically defined metabolites, electrosurgical dissection lead to a distinct metabolic signature resulting in a separation in the first two dimensions of a principal components analysis. Six metabolites including glycolic acid, azelaic acid, 2-n-pentylfuran, dihydroactinidiolide, 2-butenal and n-pentanal were consistently increased after electrosurgery meeting the discovery (p<2.0×10−4) and the replication thresholds (p<3.5×10−3). Azelaic acid, a lipid peroxidation product from the fragmentation of abundant sn-2 linoleoyl residues, was most abundant and increased 8.1-fold after electrosurgical liver dissection (preplication = 1.6×10−4). The corresponding phospholipid hexadecyl azelaoyl glycerophosphocholine inhibited wound healing and tissue remodelling in scratch- and proliferation assays of hepatic stellate cells and cholangiocytes, and caused apoptosis dose-dependently in vitro, which may explain in part the tissue damage due to electrosurgery. Conclusion Hepatic electrosurgery generates a metabolic signature with characteristic lipid peroxidation products. Among these, azelaic acid shows a dose-dependent toxicity in liver cells and inhibits wound healing. These observations potentially pave the way for pharmacological intervention prior liver surgery to modify the metabolic response and prevent postoperative complications.
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity with Structural Representations

Measuring semantic textual similarity (STS) is at the cornerstone of many NLP applications. Different from the majority of approaches, where a large number of pairwise similarity features are used to represent a text pair, our model features the following: (i) it directly encodes input texts into relational syntactic structures; (ii) relies on tree kernels to handle feature engineering automatically; (iii) combines both structural and feature vector representations in a single scoring model, i.e., in Support Vector Regression (SVR); and (iv) delivers significant improvement over the best STS systems.
Satellite image segmentation: A novel adaptive mean-shift clustering based approach

Segmentation of satellite images using a novel adaptive non parametric mean-shift clustering algorithm is proposed in this paper. Image segmentation refers to the process of splitting up an image into its constituent objects. It is also an important step in bridging the semantic gap between low level image interpretation and high level visual analysis. Mean-shift technique is based on the concept of kernel density estimation. It has been applied successfully in diverse vision related tasks including segmentation. The performance of the mean shift algorithm is greatly affected by the size of the parzen window and the terminating criteria. These two issues have been taken care of here in a purely statistical framework. The efficiency of this newly developed adaptive clustering has been judged for segmentation of any initially oversegmented satellite image. The notion of object based image analysis is preserved by initially over segmenting the image by watershed technique. Extensive experiments on several multispectral satellite images have confirmed the effectivity of this proposed approach in comparison to some widely used state of the art segmentation methods.
The Upper Oligocene of Antigua: the volcanic to limestone transition in a limestone Caribbee

Antigua is a small island at the northern end of the Lesser Antilles chain. Its geology is largely limited to the Upper Oligocene and it records with unusual fidelity the transition from island arc volcanism to quiescence and limestone deposition. Despite the apparent limitation of a rock record confined to a short stratigraphical interval, Antigua has a geodiversity that ranges from thick andesites through silicified logs and freshwater snails in cherts to limestones that include both shallow and deeper water facies, and fine karstic features.
Creating entirely textured 3D models of real objects using surface flattening

We present a novel method to create entirely textured 3D models of real objects by combining partial texture mappings using surface flattening (surface parametrisation). Texturing a 3D model is not trivial. Texture mappings can be obtained from optical images, but usually one image is not sufficient to show tile whole object; multiple images are required to cover the surface entirely. Merging partial texture mappings in 3D is difficult. Surface flattening converts a 3D mesh into 2D space preserving its structure. Transforming optical images to flattening-based texture maps allows them to be merged based on the structure of the mesh. In this paper we describe a novel method for merging texture mappings using flattening and show its results on synthetic and real data.
Enhanced GPU-based distributed breadth first search

There is growing interest in studying large scale graphs having millions of vertices and billions of edges, up to the point that a specific benchmark, called Graph500, has been defined to measure the performance of graph algorithms on modern computing architectures. At first glance, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are not an ideal platform for the execution of graph algorithms that are characterized by low arithmetic intensity and irregular memory access patterns. For studying really large graphs, multiple GPUs are required to overcome the memory size limitations of a single GPU. In the present paper, we propose several techniques to minimize the communication among GPUs.
Current sensorless control for dual-boost half-bridge PFC converter

In this paper, the current sensorless control for dual-boost half-bridge (DBHB) converter with power factor correction (PFC) function is presented. The short-through problem can be avoided by the dual-boost structure for enhancing the reliability. It also reduces the power dissipation due to the body diodes' reverse recovery current of switches. Furthermore, the intrinsic voltage-doubler characteristic of half-bridge structure is often used in high voltage application. The conventional multiloop control needs many voltage and current feedback signals. In order to simply the control loops and reduce the number of sensors, the feasibility of current sensorless control strategy should be evaluated. Therefore, the electrical characteristics of the proposed current sensorless control scheme are completely analyzed in this paper. At last, some simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate and illustrate the performance of the proposed current sensorless control.
DNA Damage Triggers Genetic Exchange in Helicobacter pylori

Many organisms respond to DNA damage by inducing expression of DNA repair genes. We find that the human stomach pathogen Helicobacter pylori instead induces transcription and translation of natural competence genes, thus increasing transformation frequency. Transcription of a lysozyme-like protein that promotes DNA donation from intact cells is also induced. Exogenous DNA modulates the DNA damage response, as both recA and the ability to take up DNA are required for full induction of the response. This feedback loop is active during stomach colonization, indicating a role in the pathogenesis of the bacterium. As patients can be infected with multiple genetically distinct clones of H. pylori, DNA damage induced genetic exchange may facilitate spread of antibiotic resistance and selection of fitter variants through re-assortment of preexisting alleles in this important human pathogen.
“Sometimes It's Difficult to Have a Normal Life”: Results from a Qualitative Study Exploring Caregiver Burden in Schizophrenia

Objectives. As a disease typified by early onset and chronic disease course, caring for a person with schizophrenia may have a significant impact on caregivers' lives. This study aimed to investigate the subjective experiences of caregivers of people with schizophrenia as a means of understanding “caregiver burden” in this population. Methods. Face-to-face qualitative interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of 19 US-English speaking caregivers of people with schizophrenia (who were at least moderately ill). Interview transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory methods and findings used to inform the development of a preliminary conceptual model outlining caregivers' experiences. Results. Findings support assertions that people with schizophrenia were largely dependent upon caregivers for the provision of care and caregivers subsequently reported lacking time for themselves and their other responsibilities (e.g., family and work). Caregiver burden frequently manifested as detriments in physical (e.g., fatigue, sickness) and emotional well-being (e.g., depression and anxiety). Conclusions. Caring for a person with schizophrenia has a significant impact on the lives of informal (unpaid) caregivers and alleviating caregiver burden is critical for managing individual and societal costs. Future research should concentrate on establishing reliable and valid means of assessing burden among caregivers of persons with schizophrenia to inform the development and evaluation of interventions for reducing this burden.
Type inference in mathematics

In the theory of programming languages, type inference is the process of inferring the type of an expression automatically, often making use of information from the context in which the expression appears. Such mechanisms turn out to be extremely useful in the practice of interactive theorem proving, whereby users interact with a computational proof assistant to construct formal axiomatic derivations of mathematical theorems. This article explains some of the mechanisms for type inference used by the "Mathematical Components" project, which is working towards a verification of the Feit-Thompson theorem
Strain accumulation at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 1983–1998

A 14-station, 50-km aperture geodetic array centered on the proposed radioactive waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was surveyed in 1983, 1984, 1993, and 1998 to determine the rate of strain accumulation there. The coseismic effects of the 1992 (MS=5.4) Little Skull Mountain earthquake, which occurred within the array, were calculated from a dislocation model and removed from the data. The measured principal strain accumulation rates determined over the 1983–1998 interval are e1 = 2±12 nanostrain/yr N87°W±12° and e2 = −22±12 nanostrain/yr N03°E±12° (extension reckoned positive and quoted uncertainties are standard deviations). The N65°W extension rate is −2±12 nanostrain/yr, significantly less than the 1991–1997 N65°W rate of 50±9 nanostrain/yr reported by Wernicke et al. [1998]. The implied maximum right-lateral engineering-shear, strain accumulation rate is γ=e1−e2 = 23±10 nanostrain/yr, a marginally significant rate. Almost half (e1 = 6 nanostrain/yr N90°W, e2 = −6 nanostrain/yr N00°E, and γ = 12 nanostrain/yr ) of the measured strain rate can be attributed to strain accumulation on the Death Valley-Furnace Creek (50 km distant) and Hunter Mountain-Panamint Valley (90 km distant) faults. The residual strain rate after the removal of those fault contributions is not significant at the 95% confidence level.
Operational river velocity surveillance at whole reach-scale by implementing time-of-arrival algorithms on upstream-downstream conductivity signals

Digital signal processing and cross-correlation methods are implemented to extract transit velocities studying the time delay between signals provided by two stand-alone probes. By use of hightime resolution sensing in the river, non-periodical naturally present disturbances found in the fluvial water composition can serve as spontaneous tracers to determine the transit velocity in the considered river reach. In essence, the method has the potential to deliver tracer-grade velocity information, while not relying on actual tracer injection interventions. The method can also be operated, continuously, on a 24/7 basis. Different correlation methods (correlation coefficient, cross-correlation, least squared differences and phase transform) are implemented in Matlab and tested using as an input high time resolution records of parameters measured by YSI quality probes in a reach of the Zenne river (Central Belgium). data collected as part of such studies reflect limited hydrologic conditions over isolated periods and consequently the transit times and velocities determined are limited to these stream flow conditions. In this work, we propose implementation of Time-Of-Arrival (TOA) algorithms based on correlation upstream–downstream water quality signals for efficient, automated (continuous or semi-continuous) estimation of transit velocities in rivers. TOA concept is widely used in different applications such as in acoustics (speaker localization, speech recognition, activity detection, etc. Chen et al. 2006 and references therein), for target localization in radar and sonar systems (Quazi 1981) or for determination gas flow velocities in fire gases channeled under a ceiling (Cox 1977). In the river management context, in spite of its great potential, there are so far only few works considering TOA methodology. In Sheets et al. (2002) cross correlation for determination of travel times of bank filtration at a well field is applied and problem of TOA was addressed in work of Thomassin et al. (2004) and Thomassin et al. (2006) for the specific case of structures with combined feedback/feedforward control. The paper proceeds as follows. A description of the study site and used data is presented in section 2. Section 3 explains the basic concept of the methodological approach. Next, in the section 4, the results are shown and discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn at the end, in section 5.
Mortality and Cardiovascular Risk Across the Ankle-Arm Index Spectrum: Results From the Cardiovascular Health Study

Background— A low ankle-arm index (AAI) is a strong predictor of mortality and cardiovascular events. A high AAI also appears to be associated with higher mortality risk in select populations. However, mortality and cardiovascular risk across the AAI spectrum have not been described in a more broadly defined population. Methods and Results— We examined total and cardiovascular mortality and cardiovascular events across the AAI spectrum among 5748 participants in the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS). The mean age of the sample population was 73±6 years, and the sample included 3289 women (57%) and 883 blacks (15%). The median duration of follow-up was 11.1 (0.1 to 12) years for mortality and 9.6 (0.1 to 12.1) years for cardiovascular events. There were 2311 deaths (953 of which were cardiovascular) and 1491 cardiovascular events during follow-up. After adjustment for potential confounders, AAI measurements ≤0.60 (hazard ratio [HR] 1.82, 95% CI 1.42 to 2.32), 0.61 to 0.7 (HR 2.08, 95% CI 1.61 to 2.69), 0.71 to 0.8 (HR 1.80, 95% CI 1.44 to 2.26), 0.81 to 0.9 (HR 1.73 95% CI 1.43 to 2.11), 0.91 to 1.0 (HR 1.40, 95% CI 1.20 to 1.63), and >1.40 (HR 1.57, 95% CI 1.07 to 2.31) were associated with higher mortality risk from all causes compared with the referent group (AAI 1.11 to 1.20). The pattern was similar for cardiovascular mortality. For cardiovascular events, risk was higher at all AAI levels <1 but not for AAI levels >1.4 (HR 1.00, 95% CI 0.57 to 1.74). The association of a high AAI with mortality was stronger in men than in women and in younger than in older cohort members. Conclusions— In a cohort of community-dwelling elders, mortality risk was higher than the referent category of 1.11 to 1.2 among participants with AAI values above the traditional cutpoint of 0.9 (ie, 0.91 to 1.0 and >1.4), and the specific association of AAI with mortality varied by age and gender.
ChemSpot: a hybrid system for chemical named entity recognition

MOTIVATION The accurate identification of chemicals in text is important for many applications, including computer-assisted reconstruction of metabolic networks or retrieval of information about substances in drug development. But due to the diversity of naming conventions and traditions for such molecules, this task is highly complex and should be supported by computational tools. RESULTS We present ChemSpot, a named entity recognition (NER) tool for identifying mentions of chemicals in natural language texts, including trivial names, drugs, abbreviations, molecular formulas and International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry entities. Since the different classes of relevant entities have rather different naming characteristics, ChemSpot uses a hybrid approach combining a Conditional Random Field with a dictionary. It achieves an F(1) measure of 68.1% on the SCAI corpus, outperforming the only other freely available chemical NER tool, OSCAR4, by 10.8 percentage points. AVAILABILITY ChemSpot is freely available at: http://www.informatik. hu-berlin.de/wbi/resources.
Effcient Algorithms for Mining Maximal Flexible Patterns in Texts and Sequences

In this paper, we study the maximal pattern discovery problem in a given sequence for the class ERP of flexible patterns with applications to text mining, where a flexible pattern is a sequence of constant and wildcards for possibly empty strings such as AB*B*ABC, and also known as erasing regular patterns. We first discuss the framework of optimal pattern discovery for predictive mining and text classification, and then show its connection to maximal pattern discovery. Then, we introduce a new notion of maximality of patterns based on the position occurrences of patterns, called position-maximality. We present an efficient algorithm PosMaxFlexMotif that, given an input string of length n over an alphabet Σ, enumerates all maximal patterns of ERP without duplicates in O(kmn2) time per maximal pattern using O(mn) space, where m = |P | is the size of the pattern P to be enumerated, and k = O(m) is the number of variables in P . This implies as corollary that the position-maximal enumeration problem for flexible patterns is output-polynomial time solvable. Then, we apply the above result to maximal pattern discovery in terms of the maximality based on document occurrence as a sound pruning technique.
Airway epithelial miRNA expression is altered in asthma.

RATIONALE Changes in airway epithelial cell differentiation, driven in part by IL-13, are important in asthma. Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) regulate cell differentiation in many systems and could contribute to epithelial abnormalities in asthma. OBJECTIVES To determine whether airway epithelial miRNA expression is altered in asthma and identify IL-13-regulated miRNAs. METHODS We used miRNA microarrays to analyze bronchial epithelial brushings from 16 steroid-naive subjects with asthma before and after inhaled corticosteroids, 19 steroid-using subjects with asthma, and 12 healthy control subjects, and the effects of IL-13 and corticosteroids on cultured bronchial epithelial cells. We used quantitative polymerase chain reaction to confirm selected microarray results. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Most (12 of 16) steroid-naive subjects with asthma had a markedly abnormal pattern of bronchial epithelial miRNA expression by microarray analysis. Compared with control subjects, 217 miRNAs were differentially expressed in steroid-naive subjects with asthma and 200 in steroid-using subjects with asthma (false discovery rate < 0.05). Treatment with inhaled corticosteroids had modest effects on miRNA expression in steroid-naive asthma, inducing a statistically significant (false discovery rate < 0.05) change for only nine miRNAs. qPCR analysis confirmed differential expression of 22 miRNAs that were highly differentially expressed by microarrays. IL-13 stimulation recapitulated changes in many differentially expressed miRNAs, including four members of the miR-34/449 family, and these changes in miR-34/449 family members were resistant to corticosteroids. CONCLUSIONS Dramatic alterations of airway epithelial cell miRNA levels are a common feature of asthma. These alterations are only modestly corrected by inhaled corticosteroids. IL-13 effects may account for some of these alterations, including repression of miR-34/449 family members that have established roles in airway epithelial cell differentiation. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials. gov (NCT 00595153).
REPRODUCTION IN CAPTIVE WILD-CAUGHT COYOTES (CANIS LATRANS)

Abstract We assessed reproductive patterns of coyotes (Canis latrans) from a 12-year data set involving 24 pairs of captive animals acquired from Latah County, Idaho. None of the females had placental scars (fetal implantation sites) at 1 year of age, but over 80% had placental scars by 2 years of age. The fraction with placental scars remained at 80–90% through age 9 years and then declined to <40% by age 12 years. Similarly, mean number of placental scars per female rose rapidly through 2–3 years of age, remained stable until age 8 years, and then progressively declined to a very low level by age 12 years. Numbers of pups observed were typically smaller than numbers of placental scars, with fewer placental scars represented by pups among younger females than older females.