Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbon nanotube thin film transistors for biomedical applications.

CARBON NANOTUBE THIN FILM TRANSISTORS FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS Vanessa Velasco August 5, 2010 The application of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has captivated the curiosity of today's experts due to the escalating potential in the field of electronic detection of biomolecules. Their extreme environmental sensitivity and small size make them ideal candidates for future biosensing technologies. Recent studies have shown that the binding of receptor proteins (biomolecules located at the membrane of cells) with their corresponding antibodies immobilized on a carbon nanotube surface causes changes in the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes and have been measured with a carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNTFET). This specific molecular interaction and sensitivity is promising for the direct detection of live cells in blood. In this study, a biosensor was developed based on carbon nanotube thin film transistors for the purpose of electrically detecting breast cancer cells (MCF-7) in blood. The electrical response of specific and non-specific interactions between anchored antibodies onto the carbon nanotube film surface and breast cancer cells mixed with
Prediction of longer-term outcome of treatment-resistant depression in tertiary care.

BACKGROUND Systematic studies on the outcome of treatment-resistant depression are scarce. AIMS To describe the longer-term outcome and predictors of outcome in treatment-resistant depression. METHOD Out of 150 patients approached, 118 participants with confirmed treatment-resistant depression (unipolar, n = 77; bipolar, n = 27; secondary, n = 14) treated in a specialist in-patient centre were followed-up for between 8 and 84 months (mean = 39, s.d. = 22). RESULTS The majority of participants attained full remission (60.2%), most of whom (48.3% of total sample) showed sustained recovery (full remission for at least 6 months). A substantial minority had persistent subsyndromal depression (19.5%) or persistent depressive episode (20.3%). Diagnosis of bipolar treatment-resistant depression and poorer social support were associated with early relapse, whereas strong social support, higher educational status and milder level of treatment resistance measured with the Maudsley Staging Method were associated with achieving quicker remission. Exploratory analysis of treatment found positive associations between treatment with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) in unipolar treatment-resistant depression and attaining remission at discharge and at final follow-up, and duloxetine use predicted attainment of remission at final follow-up. CONCLUSIONS Although many patients with treatment-resistant depression experience persistent symptomatology even after intensive, specialist treatment, most can achieve remission. The choice of treatment and presence of good social support may affect remission rates, whereas those with low social support and a bipolar diathesis should be considered at higher risk of early relapse. We suggest that future work to improve the long-term outcome in this disabling form of depression might focus on social interventions to improve support, and the role of neglected pharmacological interventions such as MAOIs.
The life cycle of platelet granules

Platelet granules are unique among secretory vesicles in both their content and their life cycle. Platelets contain three major granule types—dense granules, α-granules, and lysosomes—although other granule types have been reported. Dense granules and α-granules are the most well-studied and the most physiologically important. Platelet granules are formed in large, multilobulated cells, termed megakaryocytes, prior to transport into platelets. The biogenesis of dense granules and α-granules involves common but also distinct pathways. Both are formed from the trans-Golgi network and early endosomes and mature in multivesicular bodies, but the formation of dense granules requires trafficking machinery different from that of α-granules. Following formation in the megakaryocyte body, both granule types are transported through and mature in long proplatelet extensions prior to the release of nascent platelets into the bloodstream. Granules remain stored in circulating platelets until platelet activation triggers the exocytosis of their contents. Soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptor (SNARE) proteins, located on both the granules and target membranes, provide the mechanical energy that enables membrane fusion during both granulogenesis and exocytosis. The function of these core fusion engines is controlled by SNARE regulators, which direct the site, timing, and extent to which these SNAREs interact and consequently the resulting membrane fusion. In this review, we assess new developments in the study of platelet granules, from their generation to their exocytosis.
Desmoteplase 3 to 9 Hours After Major Artery Occlusion Stroke: The DIAS-4 Trial (Efficacy and Safety Study of Desmoteplase to Treat Acute Ischemic Stroke)

Background and Purpose— The DIAS-3 trial (Efficacy and Safety Study of Desmoteplase to Treat Acute Ischemic Stroke [phase 3]) did not demonstrate a significant clinical benefit of desmoteplase administered 3 to 9 hours after stroke in patients with major artery occlusion. We present the results of the prematurely terminated DIAS-4 trial together with a post hoc pooled analysis of the concomitant DIAS-3, DIAS-4, and DIAS-J (Japan) trials to better understand the potential risks and benefits of intravenous desmoteplase for the treatment of ischemic stroke in an extended time window. Methods— Ischemic stroke patients with occlusion/high-grade stenosis in major cerebral arteries were randomly assigned to intravenous treatment with desmoteplase (90 &mgr;g/kg) or placebo. The primary outcome was modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score of 0 to 2 at day 90. Safety assessments included mortality, symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage, and other serious adverse events. Results— In DIAS-4, 52 of 124 (41.9%) desmoteplase-treated and 46 of 128 (35.9%) placebo-treated patients achieved an mRS score of 0 to 2 (odds ratio, 1.45; 95% confidence interval, 0.79; 2.64; P=0.23) with equal mortality, frequency of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage, and other serious adverse events in both the treatment arms. In the pooled analysis, mRS score of 0 to 2 was achieved by 184 of 376 (48.9%) desmoteplase-treated versus 171 of 381 (44.9%) placebo-treated patients (odds ratio, 1.33; 95% confidence interval, 0.95; 1.85; P=0.096). Treatment with desmoteplase was safe and increased the recanalization rate (107/217 [49.3%] versus 85/222 [38.3%]; odds ratio, 1.59; 95% confidence interval, 1.08–2.35; P=0.019). Recanalization was associated with favorable outcomes (mRS 0–2) at day 90 in both the treatment arms. Conclusions— Late treatment with intravenous 90 µg/kg desmoteplase is safe, increases arterial recanalization, but does not significantly improve functional outcome at 3 months. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00856661.
Do Smoking Bans Improve Neonatal Health?

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE To estimate the effects of smoking bans on neonatal health outcomes and maternal smoking behavior during pregnancy. DATA SOURCES Restricted-use 1991-2009 Natality Detail Files, a Clean Air Dates Table Report, and the Tax Burden of Tobacco. STUDY DESIGN A quasi-experimental study using difference-in-differences estimation based on legislative history of smoking restrictions or bans by type/place/county/state level. Dependent variables included average monthly percentage of healthy neonates, of term neonates born with low and very low birth weight, of premature births, of maternal smokers, and average number of cigarettes smoked daily during pregnancy. The analyses were restricted to singleton births and those that occurred in the same county as mother's county of residence. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS The data from three data sources were combined using Federal Information Processing Standard codes. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Results of the overall and stratified by maternal smoking status, educational level, and age regression analyses suggested no appreciable effect of smoking bans on neonatal health. Smoking bans had also no effect on maternal smoking behavior. CONCLUSION While there are health benefits to the general population from smoking bans, their effects on neonatal health outcomes and maternal smoking during pregnancy seem to be limited.
QoI-Aware Multitask-Oriented Dynamic Participant Selection With Budget Constraints

By using increasingly popular smartphones, participatory sensing systems can collect comprehensive sensory data to retrieve context-aware information for different applications (or sensing tasks). However, new challenges arise when selecting the most appropriate participants when considering their different incentive requirements, associated sensing capabilities, and uncontrollable mobility, to best satisfy the quality-of-information (QoI) requirements of multiple concurrent tasks with different budget constraints. This paper proposes a multitask-oriented participant selection strategy called “DPS,” which is used to tackle the aforementioned challenges, where three key design elements are proposed. First is the QoI satisfaction metric, where the required QoI metrics of the collected data are quantified in terms of data granularity and quantity. Second is the multitask-orientated QoI optimization problem for participant selection, where task budgets are treated as the constraint, and the goal is to select a minimum subset of participants to best provide the QoI satisfaction metrics for all tasks. The optimization problem is then converted to a nonlinear knapsack problem and is solved by our proposed dynamic participant selection (DPS) strategy. Third is how to compute the expected amount of collected data by all (candidate) participants, where a probability-based movement model is proposed to facilitate such computation. Real and extensive trace-based simulations show that, given the same budget, the proposed participant selection strategy can achieve far better QoI satisfactions for all tasks than selecting participants randomly or through the reversed-auction-based approaches.
Transfusion-Related Acute Lung Injury in Patients With Burns

Transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI) has not been systematically described in patients with burn injury, and the characterization of TRALI in patients with pre-existing acute lung injury (ALI) or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) also is lacking. Our aim was to identify TRALI in burn patients and to attempt to characterize transfusion (TXN)-related pulmonary deterioration in burn patients with pre-existing ALI or ARDS. We undertook a retrospective review of mechanically ventilated and transfused burn patients at an adult regional burn center between January 1, 2003, and January 5, 2005. A blinded intensivist independently rated pre- and post-TXN chest radiographs (CXRs). There were 25 patients (age 51 ± 19 years, %TBSA burns 30 ± 19, full thickness %BSA 17 ± 19, with a 24% incidence of smoke inhalation) who received 124 TXNs. New ALI developed within 6 hours after four TXNs. In one TXN, there were no other precipitating causes (eg, infection, inhalation injury), suggesting possible TRALI (incidence 0.8%). Existing ALI or ARDS was present before 63 (51%) of the TXNs. Definite worsening of the CXR and deterioration in the PaO2/FiO2 ratio (18% ± 4%) within 6 hours of TXN occurred after six transfusions. In two of the TXNs, there were no other precipitating causes, suggesting possible TXN-related pulmonary deterioration (incidence 3.2%). Vigilance must be maintained for TRALI in burn patients. For patients with existing ALI or ARDS, we suggest that worsening of the CXR and reduction in the PaO2/FiO2 ratio by 20% or more within 6 hours of transfusion should be investigated for possible TRALI with appropriate donor investigations.
Generative caption for diabetic retinopathy images

For a long time, the detection of diabetic retinopathy has always been a great challenge. People want to find a fast and effective computer-aided treatment to diagnose the disease. In recent years, the rapid development of the deep learning makes it gradually become an effective technique for the analysis of medical images. In this paper, we propose a method to deal with diabetic retinopathy images with generative caption technique of images to generate a simple sequence to explain the abnormal contents in fundus images. The generative technique of images is a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines convolution neural network (CNN) which is currently state-of-the-art for object recognition and detection with long-short-term-memory (LSTM) which is applied with great success to machine translation and sequence generation, and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The target of the model in training is to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given from the training images. The model built on dataset DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1 and Messidor can achieve good performance and generate fluent sequences. In addition, the experimental results show that the accuracy of diagnosis for individual abnormal discoveries is up to 88.53% and the diagnosis accuracy is more than 90%.
Experimental splenectomies and malaria in mice.

PURPOSE To evaluate the importance of spleen in malaric infection in murino model, comparing the parasitemia and the titles of immunoglobulins in the different groups. METHODS It was used female mice non-isogenic, inoculated with Plasmodium berghei, cepa ANKA, intraperitoneally. The parasitemia was analyzed in 23rd, 25th, 27th and 32nd day of the experiment, being the stained blood exam colored by Giemsa. The titles of the total serum immunoglobulins IgM and IgG were analyzed by Dot-ELISA technique, at 6th, 22nd and 32nd day, when the animals were sacrificed. RESULTS The parasitemia was gradual in all the inoculated groups. In the end of the experiment, the animals with partial parasitemia present superior parasitemia, but next to the non-splenectomized, while the asplenics present difference bigger than the double. The levels of total serum IgM and IgG didn't have significant changes with the removal partial or total splenic. CONCLUSION The techniques conservatives in splenic trauma are possible and necessary. The importance of remaining spleen in the clearance of red blood cells parasitized by Plasmodium berghei showed being efficient, in order to avoid serious complications resulting of the malaria in mice.
GOI-Based Information Service Architecture in Grid

Grid information service (GIS) provides the function of discovering and monitoring resources, which is the foundation of the grid infrastructure. It is important to ensure its reliability and efficiency. This paper proposes a novel information service architecture based on group of interest (GOI) mechanism, which is completely distributed and has high scalability and reliability. In a GOI, all GIS nodes have the uniform view of information by exchanging their information periodically for efficient service discovery and fault-tolerance. A super GIS node is selected in each GOI to take full responsibility for the queries submitted to this GOI. This mechanism can reduce the query distance and enhance the query efficiency. Experimental results show that the mechanism satisfies the expectations
Using Terahertz Spectroscopy to Study Nanomaterials

A bstract: The microscopic details of carrier transport in nanocrystalline colloidal thin films is required for complete understanding of a variety of photochemical and photoelectrochemical cells utilizing interpenetrating networks. Measuring the photoconductivity and charge transport properties in these materials, however, is a challenging problem because of the inherent difficulty of attaching wires to nanometer-sized objects. Furthermore, picosecond (ps) carrier dynamics play an important role in efficient charge separation and transport, but the low temporal resolution of traditional methods used to determine the photoconductivity precludes their use in studying sub-ps to ps dynamics. Time-resolved THz spectroscopy (TRTS), on the other hand, is a non-contact electrical probe capable of measuring the photoconductivity on a sub-ps to nanosecond (ns) timescale. In this talk, TRTS is employed to determine the transient photoconductivity of ZnO nanowires, polycrystalline, and nanoparticle films, as well as dye-sensitized nanocrystalline colloidal TiO2 films. Electron injection occurs on sub-ps time scales. Decay kinetics (on hundreds of ps to ns time scales) indicate that surfaces and interfaces are the dominant sources of recombination. The photoconductivity deviates strongly from Drude behavior and is explained by disorder-induced carrier localization and/or backscattering of the photogenerated carriers. Trends as a function of material and morphology will be discussed.
Prediction of myocardial infarction using K-medoid clustering algorithm

Data Mining is a technique for obtaining hidden information from various databases. Data mining method is helpful for analyzing a data from various proportions and for determining the relationships. Now a day's Myocardial Infarction (MI) is a very familiar disease in the world. The main goal of this research is to predict the myocardial infarction using data mining clustering techniques. This system can recognize and select hidden intelligence from historical myocardial infarction datasets. Clustering is the method of grouping a data object that is corresponding to one another within the cluster. They even grouped different objects into another cluster. It is otherwise named as data distribution in some application because it divides enormous data set into groups according to the resemblance. This paper has been examined the prediction of heart attack with more quantity of input attributes. The organization exploits medical terms like age, gender, blood pressure, cholesterol and so on for predicting the patients who obtained heart disease. Feature Selection in data mining is an approach to minimizing the number of input attributes underestimation. Originally the number of attributes was 14 and after feature selection, the number of attributes was reduced to 8.
Dynamics of volume‐averaged intracellular Ca2+ in a rat CNS nerve terminal during single and repetitive voltage‐clamp depolarizations

The intracellular concentration of free calcium ions ([Ca2+]i) in a nerve terminal controls both transmitter release and synaptic plasticity. The rapid triggering of transmitter release depends on the local micro‐ or nanodomain of highly elevated [Ca2+]i in the vicinity of open voltage‐gated Ca2+ channels, whereas short‐term synaptic plasticity is often controlled by global changes in residual [Ca2+]i, averaged over the whole nerve terminal volume. Here we describe dynamic changes of such global [Ca2+]i in the calyx of Held – a giant mammalian glutamatergic nerve terminal, which is particularly suited for biophysical studies. We provide quantitative data on Ca2+ inflow, Ca2+ buffering and Ca2+ clearance. These data allow us to predict changes in [Ca2+]i in the nerve terminal in response to a wide range of stimulus protocols at high temporal resolution and provide a basis for the modelling of short‐term plasticity of glutamatergic synapses.
Psychological Outcomes of Cyber-Violence on Victims, Perpetrators and Perpetrators/Victims

Adolescents can take different roles in cyber- violence, and one of the most common classifications recognises victims, perpetrators, perpetrators/victims and uninvolved individuals. These groups experience some common outcomes, but there are also psychological outcomes that are specific to a particular role. In the relevant literature, depressive symptoms and low self-esteem are found as common outcomes for both victims and perpetrators, while distress is related only to being a victim. Since perpetrators/victims display both types of roles in cyber-violence, they are assumed to be the group with the most negative outcomes, the group that per se experiences lower academic achievement. In the present research, youths with different roles in cyber-violence were compared regarding various psychological outcomes (depressive symptoms, stress, anxiety and self-esteem), hours spent on the Internet and academic achievement. In total, 1, 176 participants were divided into groups of victims, perpetrators, perpetrators/victims and uninvolved individuals. Perpetrators/victims differed in all variables from uninvolved individuals and had more negative results, supporting the claim that they constitute the group with the most negative outcomes, followed by victims. Perpetrators only showed a higher level of stress and had lower grades than the uninvolved group, suggesting lower costs of committing cyber-violence than experiencing it. The results provide insights into psychological outcomes, suggesting that perpetrators/victims comprise the group that should be included in selective or even indicated prevention programmes focused on reducing involvement in cyberviolence and its known outcomes, especially depression, anxiety and stress. Indicated prevention programmes for perpetrators should probably be tailored differently, for example, by problematising the lack of guilt and promoting empathy for victims while reducing the positive outcomes of cyber- violence (e.g., gaining social status via violence).
Genome Editing in Cardiovascular Biology

Genome editing has emerged as a powerful tool in research and is entering the stage of therapeutic applications. In the cardiovascular field, its role in basic and translational research is well established. However, biological and technical barriers currently hamper the therapeutic potential of genome editing for cardiovascular diseases. This viewpoint discusses possible routes for promoting therapeutic use of genome editing in the cardiovascular system. Genome editing has rapidly emerged as a powerful tool in basic and translational research. Zinc finger nucleases and TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases) catalyzed the field initially. With the development of the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR-associated protein 9) system, the field is expanding even more rapidly because of its efficacy, specificity, and ease of use (Figure [A]). Generally, genome editing tools induce site-specific DNA double-strand breaks at a specific genomic site, resulting in the activation of the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) and homologous recombination (HR) cellular endogenous double-strand break repair machinery (Figure [B]). Recent advances of the CRISPR technology also allow for RNA recognition, making it possible to cleave RNA, enhance or inhibit translation, support isolation of specific RNA:protein complexes, or induce specific post-transcriptional modifications.1 Genome editing tools can also be used to control gene expression on the transcriptional level. Deactivation of the catalytic site of CRISPR/Cas9 (dCas9) results in specific binding to the DNA without inducing double-strand breaks. Fusion of dCas9 to DNA-binding domains, such as activator or repressor domains, results in transcriptional activation or inhibition of a specific gene, respectively.2 Despite the major impact genome editing already has on basic and translational research, regulatory processes have delayed therapeutic applications from reaching the clinic. Nevertheless, effective new therapies are anticipated in the near future for various disease conditions, especially if major issues around safety and toxicity are resolved. Figure. Genome editing …