Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Donor Rejection Before Living Donor Liver Transplantation: Causes and Cost Effective Analysis in an Egyptian Transplant Center.

Background: In the living donor liver transplant setting, the preoperative assessment of potential donors is important to ensure the donor safety. Objectives: The aim of this study was to identify causes and costs of living liver-donors rejection in the donation process. Materials and Methods: From June 2010 to June 2012, all potential living liver donors for 66 liver transplant candidates were screened at the Ain Shams Center for Organ Transplantation. Potential donors were evaluated in 3 phases, and their data were reviewed to determine the causes and at which phase the donors were rejected. Results: One hundred and ninety two potential living liver donors, including 157 (81.7%) males, were screened for 66 potential recipients. Of these, 126 (65.6%) were disqualified for the donation. The causes of rejection were classified as surgical (9.5 %) or medical (90.5 %). Five donors (3.9 %) were rejected due to multiple causes. Factor V Leiden mutation was detected in 29 (23 %) rejected donors (P = 0.001), 25 (19.8 %) donors had positive results for hepatitis serology (P = 0.005), and 16 (12.7 %) tested positive for drug abuse. Portal vein trifurcation (n = 9, 7.1%) and small size liver graft estimated by CT volumetric analysis (n = 6, 4.8 %) were the main surgical causes which precluded the donation. Conclusions: Among potential Egyptian living liver donors, Factor V Leiden mutation was a significant cause for live donor rejection. A stepwise approach to donor assessment was found to be cost-effective.
Why the social cost of carbon will always be disputed

Any social cost of carbon (SCC) calculated from an integrated assessment model of global climate‐economy interactions will always be disputed. This is because a key model input–namely the valuation of centennial climate damage–is highly unknowable for fundamental reasons discussed here. Problems with damage valuation are highlighted by the implicit implausibility to climate scientists of a leading model's (centennial) damage function, and by strong criticisms of damage functions by many climate economists. The claim that statistical analyses of past weather impacts on local economies, combined with structural modeling of sectoral impacts, can significantly improve centennial damage valuation rests on untestable, far‐out‐of‐sample extrapolation. Testing centennial climate (natural) science projections is generally harder than testing predictions in astronomy, geology and other earth sciences, because of Earth's uniqueness, and the unprecedented degree of likely climate change; but stable underlying laws make climate modeling based on past observations meaningful. By contrast, the added complexity of human behavior means there are no quantitatively stable laws for modeling the value of centennial climate damage. I suggest that any carbon prices used to inform climate policies, be they carbon prices used as policy instruments, or complementary, non‐carbon‐price policies, should instead be based on marginal abatement costs, found by modeling low‐cost pathways to socially agreed, physical climate targets. A pathway approach to estimating carbon prices poses challenges to many economists, and is no panacea, but it avoids any illusion of optimality, and facilitates detailed analysis of sectoral policies.
Combining the SMTP tar pit simulator with white listing

This invention relates to new pyranoderivatives of the formula: wherein X1 is H, Cl or Br and Z stands for: wherein X2 is H, Cl or Br, T is O or S and Y stands for an arabinose, xylose or ribose moiety, the acetylated form of the same, with either a pyranose or furanose configuration and bound to the R moiety of either the alpha or the beta anomer, to a preparation process of said compounds from stoichiometric proportions of the compound R-H and of the selected ose, and to therapeutic compositions, the active ingredient of which comprises at least one of these compounds associated with an appropriate diluent or carrier.
Dual Energy CT Attenuation Correction Methods for Quantitative Assessment of Response to Cancer Therapy with PET/CT Imaging

We hypothesize that improved quantification for PET imaging of high atomic number materials can be achieved by combining low-dose x-ray imaging with dual energy CT for PET attenuation correction. Improved quantification of tracer uptake will lead to improved patient outcomes by providing more accurate information for therapeutic choices. Accurate PET/CT measurements of early response will be critical in determining the best cancer therapy option for each patient in a timely manner and in sparing patients the morbidity and cost of ineffective treatments. We first evaluate the potential errors in PET images arising from CT-based attenuation correction when iodine-based contrast is incorrectly classified as bone when forming the linear attenuation coefficient image. We then investigate two methods of reducing errors in the linear attenuation image: an approximate, but fast, hybrid classification/scaling algorithm and a model-based dual-energy CT method that incorporates the polyenergetic spectrum and a noise model in an iterative reconstruction method. Both methods are shown to reduce errors in the estimated linear attenuation coefficient image, but require further study to determine the effects of noise propagation if low-dose CT scans are used for the estimation of the linear attenuation image.
Neurotransplantation Therapy and Cerebellar Reserve.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Neurotransplantation has been recently the focus of interest as a promising therapy to substitute lost cerebellar neurons and improve cerebellar ataxias. However, since cell differentiation and synaptic formation are required to obtain a functional circuitry, highly integrated reproduction of cerebellar anatomy is not a simple process. Rather than a genuine replacement, recent studies have shown that grafted cells rescue surviving cells from neurodegeneration by exerting trophic effects, supporting mitochondrial function, modulating neuroinflammation, stimulating endogenous regenerative processes, and facilitating cerebellar compensatory properties thanks to neural plasticity. On the other hand, accumulating clinical evidence suggests that the self-recovery capacity is still preserved even if the cerebellum is affected by a diffuse and progressive pathology. We put forward the period with intact recovery capacity as "restorable stage" and the notion of reversal capacity as "cerebellar reserve". CONCLUSION The concept of cerebellar reserve is particularly relevant, both theoretically and practically, to target recovery of cerebellar deficits by neurotransplantation. Reinforcing the cerebellar reserve and prolonging the restorable stage can be envisioned as future endpoints of neurotransplantation.
AODE for Source Code Metrics for Improved Software Maintainability

Software metrics are collected at various phases of the whole software development process, in order to assist in monitoring and controlling the software quality. However, software quality control is complicated, because of the complex relationship between these metrics and the attributes of a software development process. To solve this problem, many excellent techniques have been introduced into software maintainability domain. In this paper, we propose a novel classification method--Aggregating One-Dependence Estimators (AODE) to support and enhance our understanding of software metrics and their relationship to software quality. Experiments show that performance of AODE is much better than eight traditional classification methods and it is a promising method for software quality prediction. Furthermore, we present a Symmetrical Uncertainty (SU) based feature selection method to reduce source code metrics taking part in classification, make these classifiers more efficient and keep their performances not undermined meanwhile. Our empirical study shows the promising capability of SU for selecting relevant metrics and preserving original performances of the classifiers.
Extreme Value Statistics and Traveling Fronts: An Application to Computer Science

We study the statistics of height and balanced height in the binary search tree problem in computer science. The search tree problem is first mapped to a fragmentation problem that is then further mapped to a modified directed polymer problem on a Cayley tree. We employ the techniques of traveling fronts to solve the polymer problem and translate back to derive exact asymptotic properties in the original search tree problem. The second mapping allows us not only to again derive the already known results for random binary trees but to obtain exact results for search trees where the entries arrive according to an arbitrary distribution, not necessarily randomly. Besides it allows us to derive the asymptotic shape of the full probability distribution of height and not just its moments. Our results are then generalized to m-ary search trees with arbitrary distribution.
Protein crystallization by design: chymotrypsinogen without precipitants.

Protein crystals are usually obtained by an empirical approach based on extensive screening to identify suitable crystallization conditions. In contrast, we have used a systematic predictive procedure to produce data-quality crystals of bovine chymotrypsinogen A and used them to obtain a refined X-ray structure to 3 A resolution. Measurements of the osmotic second virial coefficient of chymotrypsinogen solutions were used to identify suitable solvent conditions, following which crystals were grown for approximately 30 hours by ultracentrifugal crystallization, without the use of any precipitants. Existing structures of chymotrypsinogen were obtained in solutions including 10-30 % ethanol, whereas simple buffered NaCl solutions were used here. The protein crystallized in the tetragonal space group P4(1)2(1)2, with one molecule per asymmetric unit. The quality of the refined map was very high throughout, with the main-chain atoms of all but four residues clearly defined and with nearly all side-chains also defined. Although only minor differences are seen compared to the structures previously reported, they indicate the possibility of structural changes due to the crystallization conditions used in those studies. Our results show that more systematic crystallization of proteins is possible, and that the procedure can expand the range of conditions under which crystals can be grown successfully and can make new crystal forms available.
Evaluating the Suitability of Groundwater for Irrigation uses at Al-Salhubia Area, Al-Muthana Governorate, Southern Iraq

Al-Salhubia, area is located within the arid region in southern Iraq. Although no surface water is available in this area, the groundwater is considered the basis in the area, it is available in both good quality and quantity. For that reason, it is of prime importance to examine water type in the unconfined aquifer to determine suitability of groundwater for irrigation purposes. The groundwater type in the studied area is Ca-Mg dominant SO4 facies according to Piper and Stiff diagrams. Based on SAR, Na%, RSC, EC, and PI, the groundwater quality in the study area is suitable for irrigation in general.
Classification with reject option in gene expression data

MOTIVATION The classification methods typically used in bioinformatics classify all examples, even if the classification is ambiguous, for instance, when the example is close to the separating hyperplane in linear classification. For medical applications, it may be better to classify an example only when there is a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, rather than classify all examples with decent accuracy. Moreover, when all examples are classified, the classification rule has no control over the accuracy of the classifier; the algorithm just aims to produce a classifier with the smallest error rate possible. In our approach, we fix the accuracy of the classifier and thereby choose a desired risk of error. RESULTS Our method consists of defining a rejection region in the feature space. This region contains the examples for which classification is ambiguous. These are rejected by the classifier. The accuracy of the classifier becomes a user-defined parameter of the classification rule. The task of the classification rule is to minimize the rejection region with the constraint that the error rate of the classifier be bounded by the chosen target error. This approach is also used in the feature-selection step. The results computed on both synthetic and real data show that classifier accuracy is significantly improved. AVAILABILITY Companion Website. http://gsp.tamu. edu/Publications/rejectoption/
Agricultural Plots, Labor Allocation, and Income Hiding in Ethiopia

Past research has found that pressures to share income with family members and relatives can incentivize individuals to hide income, possibly distorting labor allocation and leading to inefficiencies. Due to the difficulty of observing hidden income, the majority of this research has used lab-in-the-field experiments, which raises concerns of external validity. In this paper, I present a novel way to observe hidden income on agricultural plots using household data from Ethiopia. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first paper to test income hiding hypotheses on agricultural plots. I develop a simple model which predicts income hiding is quadratic in distance from the plot to the dwelling, first increasing in distance and then decreasing. I construct a proxy for hidden income based on the difference between output per hectare constructed using enumerator-measured (crop-cut) yields and output per hectare constructed using self-reported yields. Analyses confirm the predictions of the model. Additional analyses suggest these findings are not driven by unobserved heterogeneity in plots. Ease of hiding income and the ability to translate output into cash are also important predictors of income hiding: plots with a single decision-maker and plots located in areas with easy access to markets are most likely to see the quadratic pattern predicted by the model. Finally, women appear to be more likely to hide income than men.
Supporting teaching and learning of situational empathy by technology

Detecting and supporting interpersonal and emotional aspects of behaviour is a growing area of research within HCI. However, most of this work is still based primarily on single persons' data, and there is little research on supporting complex interpersonal aspects such as empathy. To address this gap, the goal of my PhD work is to explore ways in which technology can facilitate learning and teaching of situational empathy, with particular focus on counselling students.
Human cytochrome P450 maximal activities in pediatric versus adult liver.

Drug clearance is often higher in children than in adults, particularly when normalized to body weight. We previously showed that liver volume normalized to body weight was inversely related to age, but that the systemic clearance of a nonspecific cytochrome P450 (CYP) substrate (antipyrine) was higher in young children compared with adults even when normalized per liver volume. Our purpose herein was to evaluate whether P450 catalytic activities, expressed as maximal catalytic rates per milligram of microsomal protein, differed in up to 37 normal livers from subjects <10 (range 0.5-9 years of age), >10 but <60 years of age (range 10-59 years), and >60 year (range 63-93 years of age). There were no age-related differences in the oxidation of ethoxyresorufin (P =.83) (CYP1A2), ethoxycoumarin (P =.52) (CYP2E1 and other P450s), teniposide (P =. 58), midazolam (P =.47) (CYP3A4/3A5), or paclitaxel (P =.24) (at the 17alpha position, CYP2C8). Tolbutamide hydroxylation tended to be lower in children versus adults (P =.047) (CYP2C9), but did not reach statistical significance after correcting for multiple comparisons. No relationship was found to exist between age and microsomal recovery (P =.98); thus, recovery did not account for the lack of age-related differences in catalytic activity. We conclude that increased intrinsic cytochrome P450 activity is unlikely to account for increased clearance of most P450 drug substrates in children.
Photonic crystal slow light devices fabricated by CMOS-compatible process

We have studied wideband dispersion-free slow light in photonic crystal waveguides and other photonic nanostructures, which allows tunable delays in short optical pulses and the enhancement of light-matter interaction. This paper demonstrates the state-of-the-art devices fabricated by CMOS-compatible process, where compact devices of 200 – 400 μm lengths are integrated with Si photonics components and controlled by DC and AC electronics. They are applied for dispersion controllers, optical correlators, DQPSK receivers, retiming of pulse train, two-photon absorption photo-diodes and Mach-Zehnder modulators.
Cross-reactivity of self-HLA-restricted Epstein-Barr virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes for allo-HLA determinants

Epstein-Barr (EB) virus-specific cytotoxic T cells, prepared from virus- immune donors by reactivation in vitro and maintained thereafter as IL- 2-dependent T cell lines, have been tested against large panels of EB virus-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines of known HLA type. Whilst the pattern of lysis of the majority of targets was always consistent with HLA-A and HLA-B antigen restriction of effector function, in several cases it was noticed that certain HLA-mismatched targets were also reproducibly lysed. When this "anomalous" lysis was investigated in detail, it was found to be directed against allodeterminants on class I HLA antigens; thus, mitogen-stimulated as well as EB virus- transformed lymphoblasts from the relevant target cell donors were sensitive to the killing, and in each case the lysis could be specifically blocked by monoclonal antibodies to class I HLA antigens. In one example the target for this alloreactive lysis could be identified as a single serologically defined antigen, HLA-Bw57, while in another example lysis was directed against a "public" epitope common to HLA-Bw35, -Bw62, and a subset of -B12 antigens. Both cold target inhibition experiments and limiting dilution analysis strongly suggested that this alloreactive lysis was being mediated by the same effector T cells that recognize EB viral antigens in the context of self-HLA. This is the first demonstration in man that alloreactive responses can be derived from within the antigen-specific, self MHC- restricted T cell repertoire.
Audio retrieval by segment-based manifold-ranking

This paper proposes a new approach for the query-byexample audio retrieval, named as segment-based manifoldranking algorithm. Our approach adopts the audio segment, instead of the whole audio, as the basic unit for the manifold-ranking process. We formulate the query-byexample audio retrieval as a manifold-ranking problem in two stages: initial ranking and re-ranking. In the initial ranking stage, we use the existing distance functions to rank all audios according to their similarity values with the query. In the re-ranking stage, each audio is divided into some segments by the detected change points, and then the segment-based manifold-ranking algorithm is employed to re-rank the initial retrieved audios. Experimental results show the proposed approach is effective to improve the ranking capability of the existing distance functions, and the audio segment is a more appropriate unit for the manifoldranking algorithm than the whole audio.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Transmitter Release at Nicotinic Synapses Are Differentially Regulated by Postsynaptic PSD-95 Proteins

The rate and timing of information transfer at neuronal synapses are critical for determining synaptic efficacy and higher network function. Both synchronous and asynchronous neurotransmitter release shape the pattern of synaptic influences on a neuron. The PSD-95 family of postsynaptic scaffolding proteins, in addition to organizing postsynaptic components at glutamate synapses, acts transcellularly to regulate synchronous glutamate release. Here we show that PSD-95 family members at nicotinic synapses on chick ciliary ganglion neurons in culture execute multiple functions to enhance transmission. Together, endogenous PSD-95 and SAP102 in the postsynaptic cell appear to regulate transcellularly the synchronous release of transmitter from presynaptic terminals onto the neuron while stabilizing postsynaptic nicotinic receptor clusters under the release sites. Endogenous SAP97, in contrast, has no effect on receptor clusters but acts transcellularly from the postsynaptic cell through N-cadherin to enhance asynchronous release. These separate and parallel regulatory pathways allow postsynaptic scaffold proteins to dictate the pattern of cholinergic input a neuron receives; they also require balancing of PSD-95 protein levels to avoid disruptive competition that can occur through common binding domains.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress Cross-cultural Adaptation and Reliability Testing of the Tilburg Frailty Indicator for Optimizing Care of Polish Patients with Frailty Syndrome

Background: Frail older people are at high risk of developing adverse outcomes, such as disability , mortality, hospitalization, and institutionalization. Previous research suggests that the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI) is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring frailty. The aim of this study was to adapt and to test the reliability of the Polish version of the TFI. Method: A standard guideline was used for translation and cultural adaptation of the English version of the TFI into Polish. The study included 100 Polish patients (mean age 68.2±6.5 years), among them 42 men and 58 women. Cronbach's alpha was used for analysis of the internal consistency of the TFI. Results: The mean total TFI score was 6.7±3.1. Forty patients scored 5, which corresponded to being frail. Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients of the instrument ranged from 0.68 to 0.72 and item-total correlation ranged from 0.12 to 0.52. Conclusion: The TFI is valid and reproducible for assessment of frailty syndrome among a Polish population. The Polish adaptation of the TFI proved a useful and fast tool for assessing frailty.
CASTLE: Crowd-Assisted System for Text Labeling and Extraction

The amount of text data has been growing exponentially and with it the demand for improved information extraction (IE) efforts to analyze and query such data. While automatic IE systems have proven useful in controlled experiments, in practice the gap between machine learning extraction and human extraction is still quite large. In this paper, we propose a system that uses crowdsourcing techniques to help close this gap. One of the fundamental issues inherent in using a large-scale human workforce is deciding the optimal questions to pose to the crowd. We demonstrate novel solutions using mutual information and token clustering techniques in the domain of bibliographic citation extraction. Our experiments show promising results in using crowd assistance as a cost-effective way to close up the ”last mile” between extraction systems and a human annotator.