Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outcome of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer treated with or without adjuvant trastuzumab in the Finland Capecitabine Trial (FinXX)

Abstract Background. Little information is available about survival outcomes of patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer treated with adjuvant capecitabine-containing chemotherapy with or without trastuzumab. Patients and methods. One thousand and five hundred patients with early breast cancer were entered to the Finland Capecitabine trial (FinXX) between January 2004 and May 2007, and were randomly assigned to receive either three cycles of adjuvant TX (docetaxel, capecitabine) followed by three cycles of CEX (cyclophosphamide, epirubicin, capecitabine; TX-CEX) or three cycles of docetaxel followed by three cycles of CEF (cyclophosphamide, epirubicin, fluorouracil; T-CEF). The primary endpoint was recurrence-free survival (RFS). The study protocol was amended in May 2005 while study accrual was ongoing to allow adjuvant trastuzumab for patients with HER2-positive cancer. Of the 284 patients with HER2-positive cancer accrued to FinXX, 176 (62.0%) received trastuzumab after amending the study protocol, 131 for 12 months and 45 for nine weeks. The median follow-up time was 6.7 years. Results. Patients with HER2-positive cancer who received trastuzumab had better RFS than those who did not (five-year RFS 89.2% vs. 75.9%; HR 0.41, 95% CI 0.23–0.72; p = 0.001). Patients treated with trastuzumab for 12 months or nine weeks had similar RFS. There was no significant interaction between trastuzumab administration and the type of chemotherapy. Four (2.3%) patients treated with trastuzumab had heart failure or left ventricular dysfunction, three of these received capecitabine. Conclusion. Adjuvant trastuzumab improves RFS of patients treated with TX-CEX or T-CEF. Few patients had cardiac failure.
Optimal frequencies for electric stimulation using medium-frequency alternating current.

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of single cycles of alternating current of various frequencies on sensory and motor thresholds and on relative thresholds (motor threshold/sensory threshold). DESIGN Repeated-measures design. SETTING Laboratory setting. PARTICIPANTS University student and staff volunteers (N=16; mean age, 34y). INTERVENTIONS Single cycles of sinewave frequencies between 1 and 35kHz were delivered at 50Hz. The frequencies were applied in a random order. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The motor and sensory thresholds were recorded at each applied frequency. RESULTS Both sensory and motor thresholds showed a smooth decrease to a minimum at approximately 3kHz. The relative threshold reached a minimum close to 9kHz. Comparison with previous studies showed that although absolute thresholds reach a minimum at a frequency that depends on electrode size, the frequency at which the relative threshold is a minimum was independent of electrode size and independent of whether the stimulus was applied as single pulses or in burst mode. CONCLUSIONS The optimal frequency for transcutaneous stimulation using medium-frequency alternating current depends on the outcome measure used. It would therefore be desirable for clinical stimulators to provide a selection of carrier frequencies.
Large Scale Hard Sample Mining with Monte Carlo Tree Search

We investigate an efficient strategy to collect false positives from very large training sets in the context of object detection. Our approach scales up the standard bootstrapping procedure by using a hierarchical decomposition of an image collection which reflects the statistical regularity of the detector's responses. Based on that decomposition, our procedure uses a Monte Carlo Tree Search to prioritize the sampling toward sub-families of images which have been observed to be rich in false positives, while maintaining a fraction of the sampling toward unexplored sub-families of images. The resulting procedure increases substantially the proportion of false positive samples among the visited ones compared to a naive uniform sampling. We apply experimentally this new procedure to face detection with a collection of 100,000 background images and to pedestrian detection with 32,000 images. We show that for two standard detectors, the proposed strategy cuts the number of images to visit by half to obtain the same amount of false positives and the same final performance.
Neuronal and nonneuronal expression of neurotrophins and their receptors in sensory and sympathetic ganglia suggest new intercellular trophic interactions

Nerve growth factor promotes the survival of populations of sensory and sympathetic neurons. Although ganglia have been used for classical assays of neurotrophin action, knowledge is incomplete regarding the spatial arrangements through which neurotrophins are delivered to responsive cells within the ganglia and their attached nerve trunks. Whereas populations of ganglionic neurons may be capable of responding to a particular neurotrophin in vitro, the spectrum of receptor components and neurotrophins expressed by the various neuronal and nonneuronal cells comprising the ganglia in adult rats remains to be elucidated in vivo.
OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF SKIN, SUBCUTANEOUS, AND MUSCLE TISSUES: A REVIEW

The development of optical methods in modern medicine in the areas of diagnostics, therapy, and surgery has stimulated the investigation of optical properties of various biological tissues, since the efficacy of laser treatment depends on the photon propagation and fluence rate distribution within irradiated tissues. In this work, an overview of published absorption and scattering properties of skin and subcutaneous tissues measured in wide wavelength range is presented. Basic principles of measurements of the tissue optical properties and techniques used for processing of the measured data are outlined.
Prognostic factors for local and distant control in Ewing sarcoma family of tumors.

BACKGROUND Advances in the treatment of Ewing sarcoma family of tumors (ESFT) are the result of improvements in systemic and local therapies. The individual contributions of each treatment component cannot be analyzed separately; improvements in local and systemic control can influence each other. PATIENTS AND METHODS We reviewed the records of 220 patients treated on institutional protocols from 1979 to 2004. Factors predictive of local and distant recurrence were analyzed. RESULTS The median age at diagnosis was 13.7 years. Ninety-five patients relapsed at a median of 1.6 years. The 5-year overall survival estimate was 63.5% +/- 3.5%. The estimated 5-year cumulative incidence (CI) of local failure was 25.1% +/- 3.0%. Local failure was associated with treatment era (P < 0.001), tumor size (P = 0.037) and type of local control (P = 0.021). Systemic treatment intensification improved local control. The estimated 5-year CI of distant recurrence was 22.5% +/- 2.9%. Patients with localized disease (P < 0.001), smaller tumors (P = 0.018) and those who received surgery +/- radiation for local control (P = 0.023) had lower CI of distant failure. CONCLUSIONS Successful treatment of ESFT requires optimal systemic and local therapy. Both treatment modalities are intertwined and the control of both local and distant disease is the result of the combined approach.
Environmental Awareness and Feminist Progress

This article uses insights from a fieldwork study in southeastern Florida to compare two types of women activists--those identifying as environmentalists and those identifying as feminists--and to draw implications about the necessary foundation for coalition politics from an ecofeminist perspective. These two groups of women experienced very different recruitment processes. The environmentalists received continuous support from early childhood for their beliefs and actions, while the feminists experienced a serious disjunction from old views to take on a new feminist identity. The environmentalists are, perhaps as a consequence, more likely to take a holistic life view, seeing issues of race, class, gender, and environmental degradation as interconnected, in effect adopting major portions of an ecofeminist world view that include the awareness of an underlying matrix of oppression that encompasses the same four issues: race, class, gender, and environmental degradation. The article considers implications of developing such a perspective for use in coalition politics within the feminist movement.
Biomechanical Energy Harvesting: Generating Electricity During Walking with Minimal User Effort

We have developed a biomechanical energy harvester that generates electricity during human walking with little extra effort. Unlike conventional human-powered generators that use positive muscle work, our technology assists muscles in performing negative work, analogous to regenerative braking in hybrid cars, where energy normally dissipated during braking drives a generator instead. The energy harvester mounts at the knee and selectively engages power generation at the end of the swing phase, thus assisting deceleration of the joint. Test subjects walking with one device on each leg produced an average of 5 watts of electricity, which is about 10 times that of shoe-mounted devices. The cost of harvesting—the additional metabolic power required to produce 1 watt of electricity—is less than one-eighth of that for conventional human power generation. Producing substantial electricity with little extra effort makes this method well-suited for charging powered prosthetic limbs and other portable medical devices.
Towards Simplicity: An Introduction

With the rapid development of mobile devices, wired and wireless communication technologies, and network based services, people are able to access information ubiquitously using a variety of devices. At the same time, users are often overwhelmed by the complexity of interacting with different sorts of devices and services available to them. Moreover, the lack of agreements and standardisation complicates the design and deployment of adaptive services by service providers and network operators. This excessive complexity prevents novel information technologies from being quickly accepted by end users and widely adopted by service providers. In this paper we argue that a flexible and extensible framework is required to extricate different parties from the burden of this complexity. The European Union funded Simplicity research project introduces the notion of a Simplicity Device to end users. Simplicity Devices allow them to store personal profiles and preferences in a secure way and enable them to customise devices and services with minimal effort. Simplicity offers a flexible and extensible Brokerage Architecture to service providers and network operators, facilitating uniform treatment of device personalisation and service adaptation by employing policy based decision mechanism. This simple framework can be used by third party application components to acquire the necessary information for configuring and adapting themselves. Moreover, Simplicity is able to provide support for heterogeneous platforms on a wide range of devices, e.g., PCs, PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players, TV sets and smart spaces.
Sedation Practice in Veno-Venous Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation: An International Survey

Sedation practice in extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is challenging, and some studies suggest that pharmacokinetics of sedative drugs are altered by the circuitry components. We conducted an international survey of sedation practice in centers offering veno-venous ECMO for adult patients in collaboration with the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization. A total 102 respondents participated representing various experienced centers from around the world. Fifty-eight percent responded that patients on ECMO have a higher or much higher sedation requirement than other critically ill patients, whilst 51% achieved a responsive or cooperative level of sedation. Midazolam (79%), morphine (43%) and fentanyl (45%) were most frequently used. Alpha-2 agonists were prescribed in 66% while propofol was used infrequently (36%). Thirty-five percent did not use continuous muscle relaxants. Responses from experienced users differed to those who reported less experience. Sedation practice in ECMO varies widely. Cooperative or responsive levels of sedation can frequently be achieved, and the drugs used differ from those used in non-ECMO patients.
Fast text searching: allowing errors

T h e string-matching problem is a very c o m m o n problem. We are searching for a string P = PtP2. "Pro i n s i d e a la rge t ex t f i le T = t l t2. t . , b o t h sequences of characters from a f i n i t e character set Z. T h e characters may be English characters in a text file, DNA base pairs, lines of source code, angles between edges in polygons, machines or machine parts in a production schedule, music notes and tempo in a musical score, and so fo r th . We w a n t to f i n d a l l occurrences of P i n T; n a m e l y , we are searching for the set of starting posit ions F = {i[1 --i--n m + 1 s u c h t h a t titi+ l " " t i + m 1 = P } " T h e two most famous algorithms for this problem are t h e B o y e r M o o r e algorithm [3] and t h e K n u t h Morris Pratt algorithm [10]. There are many extensions to t h i s problem; for example, we may be looking for a set of patterns, a pattern w i t h "wi ld cards," or a regular expression. String-matching tools are included in every reasonable text editor, word processor, and many other applications.
Building a Smart Hospital using RFID Technologies

Technologies of identiflcation by radio frequencies (RFID) experience a fast development and healthcare is predicted to be one of its major growth areas. After brie∞y introducing the common terminology of the RFID fleld and its current standards, this paper describes how this emerging technology can be used to build a smart hospital. Indeed, used in combination with mobile devices in eHealth applications, RFID helps optimizing business processes in healthcare and improve patient safety. The second part of this article shows how to use an assets tracking application, called the RFIDLo- cator, to improve the quality of the hospital services. We developed the RFIDLocator to support the high requirements for scalability and reliability one can expect for such an application. An overview of its distributed software architecture is given. A short cookbook presents the required steps for its conflguration to the concrete case of the hospital. Some critical remarks about RFID technology, the important questions it raises and the barriers it has to overcome to be fully integrated in eHealth applications conclude this paper.
Secured communication service strategic planning using itil v3 framework case study: X service

'X Service' is a secured communication network service that is maintained by one of the national intelligence agencies which responsible for securing national classified information, 'agent A'. As a communication service provider that is highly related to IT, 'X Service Unit' has not been applying IT service management (ITSM) practices properly. This has resulted in dissatisfaction from service users and inability to perform the required level of information security. In this paper, ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) v3 has been chosen as a guidance to plan the service strategy for 'X Service'. The design process is preceded with a literary study to have a good understanding in ITSM and ITIL v3. The next step is a field study that is done to understand the existing condition of 'X Service Unit'. After analyzing the results of the mentioned studies, a strategic planning guidance based on ITIL v3 is designed with four strategy components, 4P, namely: Perspective, Position, Plan, and Pattern. This strategic planning guidance then has been successfully applied to design the strategic planning for service X for 2016-2020. In this paper, ITIL v3 Service Strategy [1] will be used as a main framework to design service strategy planning for the ,'X Service'.
Forecasting New Customers' Behaviour by Means of a Fuzzy Unsupervised Method

The use of unsupervised fuzzy learning classi.cations techniques allows defining innovative classi.cations to be applied on marketing customer's segmentation. Segmenting the clients' portfolio in this way is important for decision-making in marketing because it allows the discovery of hidden profiles which would not be detected with other methods. Different strategies can be established for each defined segment. In this paper a case study is conducted to show the value of unsupervised fuzzy learning methods in marketing segmentation, obtaining fuzzy segmentations via the LAMDA algorithm. The use of an external decision variable related to the loyalty of the current customers will provide useful criteria to forecast potentially valuable new customers. The use of the introduced methodology should provide firms with a significant competitive edge, enabling them to design and adapt their strategies to customers' behaviour.
Application of Group Key Agreement Based on Authenticated Diffie-Hellman for Bluetooth Piconet

Through the analysis of the characteristics of Bluetooth piconet and Bluetooth's security architecture, this paper gives out a scheme of group key agreement based on Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. It affords a method that nodes can authenticate each other in the Bluetooth piconet and defeat threats derived from Bluetooth link-level. In the last place, the feasibility of the scheme is verified.
How to Improve a Handwriting Recognition System

The recognition of handwritten characters, words, and text arouses great interest today. To develop the best working system is subject of many papers published. With this paper, methods to improve the performance of existing word recognition systems are discussed. The availability of a sufficient data sets for training and testing the system assumed, optimization algorithms are presented. The usage of different feature sets and the combination of different recognizers are proposed. Tests with Arabic handwriting recognition systems using the reference IfN/ENIT-database show the usefulness of the proposed methods. An improvement of the recognition rate of up to 28% of the best single system is achieved.
VIP: a visual approach to user authentication

This paper addresses knowledge-based authentication systems in self-service technology, presenting the design and evaluation of the Visual Identification Protocol (VIP). The basic idea behind it is to use pictures instead of numbers as a means for user authentication. Three different authentication systems based on images and visual memory were designed and compared with the traditional Personal Identification Number (PIN) approach in a longitudinal study involving 61 users. The experiment addressed performance criteria and subjective evaluation. The study and associated design exploration revealed important knowledge about users, their attitudes towards and behaviour with novel authentication approaches using images. VIP was found to provide a promising and easy-to-use alternative to the PIN. The visual code is easier to remember, preferred by users and potentially more secure than the numeric code. Results also provided guidelines to help designers make the best use of the natural power of visual memory in security solutions.
Evaluating ‘Best Practice’ in Integrated Rural Tourism: Case Examples from the England-Wales Border Region

In this paper we explore and evaluate the concept of integrated rural tourism (IRT) by drawing upon a networks approach and the notion of best practice. By integrating the two an attempt is made to understand the processes that generate the sharing, exchange and transfer of knowledge and skills. The case examples of tourism-focused networks from the England–Wales border region highlight how the innovative practices of individual actors have shaped local resources into tourism products, providing a long-term focus for economic development and local restructuring. It is concluded that the development aspect of best practice, as a pathway to developing IRT, offers a tool to capture the ‘intangibles’ or noneconomic aspects of networking that promote economic growth and development.
The Golgin GMAP210/TRIP11 Anchors IFT20 to the Golgi Complex

Eukaryotic cells often use proteins localized to the ciliary membrane to monitor the extracellular environment. The mechanism by which proteins are sorted, specifically to this subdomain of the plasma membrane, is almost completely unknown. Previously, we showed that the IFT20 subunit of the intraflagellar transport particle is localized to the Golgi complex, in addition to the cilium and centrosome, and hypothesized that the Golgi pool of IFT20 plays a role in sorting proteins to the ciliary membrane. Here, we show that IFT20 is anchored to the Golgi complex by the golgin protein GMAP210/Trip11. Mice lacking GMAP210 die at birth with a pleiotropic phenotype that includes growth restriction, ventricular septal defects of the heart, omphalocele, and lung hypoplasia. Cells lacking GMAP210 have normal Golgi structure, but IFT20 is no longer localized to this organelle. GMAP210 is not absolutely required for ciliary assembly, but cilia on GMAP210 mutant cells are shorter than normal and have reduced amounts of the membrane protein polycystin-2 localized to them. This work suggests that GMAP210 and IFT20 function together at the Golgi in the sorting or transport of proteins destined for the ciliary membrane.
Essential Gene Pathways for Glioblastoma Stem Cells: Clinical Implications for Prevention of Tumor Recurrence

Glioblastoma (World Health Organization/WHO grade IV) is the most common and most aggressive adult glial tumor. Patients with glioblastoma, despite being treated with gross total resection and post-operative radiation/chemotherapy, will almost always develop tumor recurrence. Glioblastoma stem cells (GSC), a minor subpopulation within the tumor mass, have been recently characterized as tumor-initiating cells and hypothesized to be responsible for post-treatment recurrence because of their enhanced radio-/chemo-resistant phenotype and ability to reconstitute tumors in mouse brains. Genome-wide expression profile analysis uncovered molecular properties of GSC distinct from their differentiated, proliferative progeny that comprise the majority of the tumor mass. In contrast to the hyperproliferative and hyperangiogenic phenotype of glioblastoma tumors, GSC possess neuroectodermal properties and express genes associated with neural stem cells, radial glial cells, and neural crest cells, as well as portray a migratory, quiescent, and undifferentiated phenotype. Thus, cell cycle-targeted radio-chemotherapy, which aims to kill fast-growing tumor cells, may not completely eliminate glioblastoma tumors. To prevent tumor recurrence, a strategy targeting essential gene pathways of GSC must be identified and incorporated into the standard treatment regimen. Identifying intrinsic and extrinsic cues by which GSC maintain stemness properties and sustain both tumorigenesis and anti-apoptotic features may provide new insights into potentially curative strategies for treating brain cancers.
Dimensions of health‐related dispositions in elderly people: relationships with health behaviour and personality traits

The principal aim of this study was to examine a health‐related disposition construct in elderly Italians by explorative factor analysis of the Multidimensional Health Questionnaire. The questionnaire had a two‐factor structure. The first factor was loaded by cognitive variables such as Health‐Efficacy, Health Control, Optimism, etc.; it predicted compliance with self‐rating health seeking behaviours and it was correlated with personality traits such as Emotional Stability and the Lie scale. The second factor comprised emotional dispositions including Health Anxiety, Health Depression, Health Preoccupation, etc. and it was negatively associated with Conscientiousness and Energy. Interesting results emerged for sex by age differences in both health factors. Moreover, men and women showed different correlation patterns between the health factors and the Five Factor Model. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.