Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human hippocampal theta power indicates movement onset and distance travelled

Significance Rodent hippocampal theta-band oscillations are observed throughout translational movement, implicating theta in the encoding of self-motion. Interestingly, increases in theta power are particularly prominent around movement onset. Here, we use intracranial recordings from epilepsy patients navigating in a desktop virtual reality environment to demonstrate that theta power is also increased in the human hippocampus around movement onset and throughout the remainder of movement. Importantly, these increases in theta power are greater both before and during longer paths, directly implicating human hippocampal theta in the encoding of translational movement. These findings help to reconcile previous studies of rodent and human hippocampal theta oscillations and provide additional insight into the mechanisms of spatial navigation in the human brain. Theta frequency oscillations in the 6- to 10-Hz range dominate the rodent hippocampal local field potential during translational movement, suggesting that theta encodes self-motion. Increases in theta power have also been identified in the human hippocampus during both real and virtual movement but appear as transient bursts in distinct high- and low-frequency bands, and it is not yet clear how these bursts relate to the sustained oscillation observed in rodents. Here, we examine depth electrode recordings from the temporal lobe of 13 presurgical epilepsy patients performing a self-paced spatial memory task in a virtual environment. In contrast to previous studies, we focus on movement-onset periods that incorporate both initial acceleration and an immediately preceding stationary interval associated with prominent theta oscillations in the rodent hippocampal formation. We demonstrate that movement-onset periods are associated with a significant increase in both low (2–5 Hz)- and high (6–9 Hz)-frequency theta power in the human hippocampus. Similar increases in low- and high-frequency theta power are seen across lateral temporal lobe recording sites and persist throughout the remainder of movement in both regions. In addition, we show that movement-related theta power is greater both before and during longer paths, directly implicating human hippocampal theta in the encoding of translational movement. These findings strengthen the connection between studies of theta-band activity in rodents and humans and offer additional insight into the neural mechanisms of spatial navigation.
Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) of Tuberculosis (TB) Patients in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

Background: Efforts to combat tuberculosis in Nigeria focus on evaluation of strategies for treatment and prevention, with little attention paid to the impact of the burden of illness and its therapy on the HRQoL of TB patients. This study evaluated the quality of life (QoL) of TB patients in relation to their financial, psychological and social well-being. Method: In 2011, following an active case finding for TB in Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria, a structured questionnaire for evaluating HRQoL was distributed to TB patients who had been on treatment in four DOTs centres of the state for at least three months. The questions were to elicit responses that conveyed the respondents’ perspective of the disease. One hundred and eight TB patients (54 males and 54 females) aged 15 - 80 years were studied. Results: Negative emotions including fear, frustration and worry characterized the reactions of all subjects following news of their diagnosis with TB. However, following treatment, 62% of subjects expressed high expectation of being cured. Inability to continue functioning in their roles at home or as heads of households was recorded in 48.1% (52/108) and 59% (23/39) of respondents respectively and contributed to the negative emotions expressed above. Lack of basic supplies such as food and finances to meet personal and family needs constituted the most important socio-economic challenges. Socio-economic status of respondents revealed that 61% had no regular means of income with at least 94% earning less than $50 (8000 naira) a month. Subsistent farmers and petty traders constituted more than 66% of the respondents: 98% obtained less than or equivalent of high school education. Socially, all health workers and 87% of family members were sympathetic and supportive compared to friends, with 42% exhibiting stigmatization. The most frequent forms of support from family members were financial (25%) and provision of food (37%). Up to 28% were regularly prompted by family to take their medication. Conclusion: In the midst of obvious socio-economic challenges confronting TB patients in this study, the initial negative emotions declined following the supportive roles of mainly health care workers and family members. Patients were optimistic of achieving cure at the end of the treatment.
TITLE ( PROVISIONAL ) Reduction in Myocardial Infarction Admissions in Liverpool after the Smoking Ban : Potential Socio-Economic Implications for Policymaking

BMJ Open publishes all reviews undertaken for accepted manuscripts. Reviewers are asked to complete a checklist review form (see an example) and are provided with free text boxes to elaborate on their assessment. These free text comments are reproduced below. Some articles will have been accepted based in part or entirely on reviews undertaken for other BMJ Group journals. These will be reproduced where possible. THE STUDY This paper uses data from Liverpool to evaluate changes in hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarction and other cardiac conditions following implementation of England " s smokefree law. Consistent with earlier work, it shows a drop in AMI hospital admissions. In a new result, it examines the effects of the law on health disparities and finds consistent effects across all economic groups. Both questions are important and the data are fine, but there are several issues with the analysis. First, there is no need to smooth the data before doing the regression analysis. Doing so artificially reduces the variance in the data and makes the fit look better than it is. There is also the chance that the period used for the moving average smoother could affect the assessment of break points in the data. Second, the use of jointpoint regression with 5 breakpoints seems overkill, especially given that there is no reason to expect so many sudden changes in AMI rates. The authors would be better served to use the approach that most others have of modeling the possibility of a sudden change followed by a slope change after the law. Alternatively, they could allow for two slope changes, one immediately following the law and one some time later. (Which of these approaches is most reasonable can be better assessed when considering the unsmoothed data.) Estimating the incident rate ratios by comparing two year periods before and after the law is a poor way to do the analysis because it does not account for any underlying secular trends. It would be much better to treat the data as a time series and directly estimate the IRR using a negative binomial regression. Doing so would also
Cardioprotection by opening of the K(ATP) channel in unstable angina. Is this a clinical manifestation of myocardial preconditioning? Results of a randomized study with nicorandil. CESAR 2 investigation. Clinical European studies in angina and revascularization.

AIMS To assess the anti-ischaemic and anti-arrhythmic effects and overall safety of nicorandil, an ATP sensitive potassium (K+) channel opener, with 'cardioprotective' effects, in patients with unstable angina. METHODS In a multicentre, randomized, double-blind, parallel-group, placebo-controlled study, oral nicorandil 20 mg twice daily or a matching placebo was administered for a minimum of 48 h to patients admitted with unstable angina. Treatment was standardized to include, where tolerated, oral aspirin, a beta-blocker and diltiazem. Continuous Holter ECG monitoring was performed for 48 h to assess the frequency and duration of transient myocardial ischaemia and any tachyarrhythmia, as the predefined end-points of the study. A pain chart recorded the incidence and severity of chest pain throughout the study period. Patients with myocardial infarction identified retrospectively from troponin-T analysis were excluded. RESULTS Two hundred and forty-five patients were recruited into the study. Forty-three patients were excluded with an index diagnosis of myocardial infarction, two were not randomized and 12 had unsatisfactory tape data. In the remaining 188 patients, six out of 89 patients (6.7%) on nicorandil experienced an arrhythmia, compared with 17 out of 99 patients (17.2%) on placebo (P=0.04). Three nicorandil patients experienced three runs of non-sustained ventricular tachycardia compared to 31 runs in 10 patients on placebo (P=0.087 patients; P<0.0001 runs). Three nicorandil patients had four runs of supraventricular tachycardia, compared to 15 runs in nine patients on placebo (P=0.14 patients; P=0.017 runs). Eleven (12.4%) patients on nicorandil had 37 episodes of transient myocardial ischaemia (mostly silent) compared with 74 episodes in 21 (21.2%) patients on placebo (P=0.12 patients; P=0.0028 episodes). In the overall safety analysis, which included all patients who received at least one dose of study medication, there were no significant differences in the rates of myocardial infarction or death between the nicorandil or placebo-treated groups. CONCLUSIONS Nicorandil, added to aggressive anti-anginal treatment for unstable angina, reduces transient myocardial ischaemia, non-sustained ventricular, and supraventricular arrhythmia compared to placebo. The anti-arrhythmic activity with nicorandil is probably a secondary effect resulting from its anti-ischaemic action and we suggest that this may be related to its effect on the ATP sensitive potassium channel causing pharmacological preconditioning.
PeerPressure: A Statistical Method for Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting

Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of today’s desktop PCs [20]. An important element of technical support is troubleshooting misconfigured applications. Misconfiguration troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because configuration information is shared and altered by multiple applications. In this paper, we present a novel troubleshooting algorithm, PeerPressure, which uses statistics from a set of sample machines to diagnose the root-cause misconfigurations on a sick machine. This is in contrast with methods that require manual identification on a healthy machine for diagnosing misconfigurations [24]. The elimination of this manual operation makes a significant step towards automated misconfiguration troubleshooting. In PeerPressure, we introduce a ranking metric for misconfiguration candidates. This metric is based on empirical Bayesian estimation . We have developed a PeerPressure troubleshooting system and used a database of 87 machine configuration snapshots to evaluate its performance. With 20 real-world troubleshooting cases, PeerPressure can effectively pinpoint the root-cause misconfigurations for 12 of them. For the remaining ones, PeerPressure significantly narrows down the number of root-cause candidates by three orders of magnitude.
Rapid mobilization of murine and human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells with AMD3100, a CXCR4 antagonist

Improving approaches for hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) and hematopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) mobilization is clinically important because increased numbers of these cells are needed for enhanced transplantation. Chemokine stromal cell derived factor-1 (also known as CXCL12) is believed to be involved in retention of HSCs and HPCs in bone marrow. AMD3100, a selective antagonist of CXCL12 that binds to its receptor, CXCR4, was evaluated in murine and human systems for mobilizing capacity, alone and in combination with granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF). AMD3100 induced rapid mobilization of mouse and human HPCs and synergistically augmented G-CSF–induced mobilization of HPCs. AMD3100 also mobilized murine long-term repopulating (LTR) cells that engrafted primary and secondary lethally-irradiated mice, and human CD34+ cells that can repopulate nonobese diabetic-severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mice. AMD3100 synergized with G-CSF to mobilize murine LTR cells and human SCID repopulating cells (SRCs). Human CD34+ cells isolated after treatment with G-CSF plus AMD3100 expressed a phenotype that was characteristic of highly engrafting mouse HSCs. Synergy of AMD3100 and G-CSF in mobilization was due to enhanced numbers and perhaps other characteristics of the mobilized cells. These results support the hypothesis that the CXCL12-CXCR4 axis is involved in marrow retention of HSCs and HPCs, and demonstrate the clinical potential of AMD3100 for HSC mobilization.
Indomethacin Promotes Germinal Matrix Microvessel Maturation in the Newborn Beagle Pup

Background and Purpose Although indomethacin has been demonstrated to prevent germinal matrix and intraventricular hemorrhage in clinical and animal studies, the mechanism of action of this agent to prevent hemorrhage remains unclear. Previous studies have demonstrated both that the microvessels in the germinal matrix of newborn beagle pups undergo basement membrane maturation during the first 4 postnatal days and that indomethacin may promote laminin deposition in tumor cell culture systems. Methods We employed the newborn beagle pup model to test the hypothesis that indomethacin may stimulate laminin deposition in germinal matrix microvessels. Newborn pups were randomized to receive either 0.1 mg/ kg/dose i.p. indomethacin or an equal volume of saline diluent. Pups received doses of study medication once a day for 1, 2, or 3 days and were studied on postnatal days 1, 2, 3, or 4. Pups were anesthetized and systemically perfused with buffered formalin; the brains were removed and prepared for immunohistochemical study. Results Sections stained with Bandeiraea lectin demonstrated that there was no difference in germinal matrix vessel density among the postnatal ages studied; similarly, there were no differences in vessel density between saline- and indomethacin-treated animals at any postnatal age. Quantification of germinal matrix stained intensity by confocal microscopy demonstrated significant increases in indomethacin- treated pups for both laminin staining at postnatal days 2 (p=0.05) and 3 (p=0.0009) and type V collagen staining at postnatal day 2 (p=0.011). Although staining for β1 integrins increased across postnatal ages, there were no differences between saline- and indomethacin-treated animals. Conclusions These data suggest that indomethacin may stimulate basement membrane deposition in the germinal matrix microvessels of newborn beagle pups to prevent germinal matrix and/or intraventricular hemorrhage.
On the use of VHDL-based behavioral synthesis for telecom ASIC design

VHDL-based behavioral synthesis is appearing on the market but it still has to prove that it can have a significant impact. In the past, most applications for behavioral synthesis came from the DSP area and from the academic world. In contrast, this paper describes the results of an investigation and evaluation of several behavioral synthesis tools, carried out on recent designs of Alcatel-Bell, leading to a more detailed study of relevant industrial telecom non-DSP circuits, that were suitable for behavioral synthesis. From our expertise in telecom system hardware design, we can conclude that, taking into account that today world-wide about 6,000 licenses for logic synthesis are in use, there is distinctly a market potential for design-entries at higher levels of abstraction, due to the still increasing design complexities that can be expected in the near future. Behavioral synthesis can play a key role in this prospect, as stand-alone hardware CAD tool, or integrated in a global system design flow strategy for HW/SW-codesign. However, we experienced that efficient use of behavioral synthesis tools for telecom non-DSP circuits requires functionality that goes beyond simply generating an RTL-synthesizable description. This functionality is discussed, together with a system level design methodology for efficient use of behavioral synthesis tools.
Genetic Variation in the HSD17B1 Gene and Risk of Prostate Cancer

Steroid hormones are believed to play an important role in prostate carcinogenesis, but epidemiological evidence linking prostate cancer and steroid hormone genes has been inconclusive, in part due to small sample sizes or incomplete characterization of genetic variation at the locus of interest. Here we report on the results of a comprehensive study of the association between HSD17B1 and prostate cancer by the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium, a large collaborative study. HSD17B1 encodes 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase 1, an enzyme that converts dihydroepiandrosterone to the testosterone precursor Δ5-androsterone-3β,17β-diol and converts estrone to estradiol. The Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium researchers systematically characterized variation in HSD17B1 by targeted resequencing and dense genotyping; selected haplotype-tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (htSNPs) that efficiently predict common variants in U.S. and European whites, Latinos, Japanese Americans, and Native Hawaiians; and genotyped these htSNPs in 8,290 prostate cancer cases and 9,367 study-, age-, and ethnicity-matched controls. We found no evidence that HSD17B1 htSNPs (including the nonsynonymous coding SNP S312G) or htSNP haplotypes were associated with risk of prostate cancer or tumor stage in the pooled multiethnic sample or in U.S. and European whites. Analyses stratified by age, body mass index, and family history of disease found no subgroup-specific associations between these HSD17B1 htSNPs and prostate cancer. We found significant evidence of heterogeneity in associations between HSD17B1 haplotypes and prostate cancer across ethnicity: one haplotype had a significant (p < 0.002) inverse association with risk of prostate cancer in Latinos and Japanese Americans but showed no evidence of association in African Americans, Native Hawaiians, or whites. However, the smaller numbers of Latinos and Japanese Americans in this study makes these subgroup analyses less reliable. These results suggest that the germline variants in HSD17B1 characterized by these htSNPs do not substantially influence the risk of prostate cancer in U.S. and European whites.
Optimizing time warp simulation with reinforcement learning techniques

Adaptive time warp protocols in the literature are usually based on a pre-defined analytic model of the system, expressed as a closed form function that maps system state to control parameter. The underlying assumption is that this model itself is optimal. In this paper we present a new approach that utilizes reinforcement learning techniques, also known as simulation-based dynamic programming. Instead of assuming an optimal control strategy, the very goal of reinforcement learning is to find the optimal strategy through simulation. A value function that captures the history of system feedbacks is used, and no prior knowledge of the system is required. Our reinforcement learning techniques were implemented in a distributed VLSI simulator with the objective of finding the optimal size of a bounded time window. Our experiments using two benchmark circuits indicated that it was successful in doing so.
Interleukin-1 receptor antagonist gene polymorphism and coronary artery disease.

BACKGROUND Cytokine gene variations are contributory factors in inflammatory pathology. Allele frequencies of interleukin (IL)-1 cluster genes [IL-1A(-889), IL-1B(-511), IL-1B(+3953), IL-1RN Intron 2 VNTR] and tissue necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha gene [TNFA(-308)] were measured in healthy blood donors (healthy control subjects), patients with angiographically normal coronary arteries (patient control subjects), single-vessel coronary disease (SVD), and those with multivessel coronary disease (MVD). METHODS AND RESULTS Five hundred fifty-six patients attending for coronary angiography in Sheffield were studied: 130 patient control subjects, 98 SVD, and 328 MVD. Significant associations were tested in an independent population (London) of 350: 57 SVD, 191 MVD, and 102 control subjects. IL-1RN*2 frequency in Sheffield patient control subjects was the same as in 827 healthy control subjects. IL-1RN*2 was significantly overrepresented in Sheffield SVD patients (34% vs 23% in patient control subjects); IL-1RN*2 homozygotes in the SVD population (chi2 carriage=8.490, 1 df, P=0.0036). This effect was present though not quite significant in the London population (P=0. 0603). A summary trend test of the IL-1RN SVD genotype data for Sheffield and London showed a significant association with *2 (P=0. 0024). No significant effect of genotype at IL-1RN was observed in the Sheffield or London MVD populations. Genotype distribution analysis comparing the SVD and MVD populations at IL-1RN showed a highly significant trend (P=0.0007) with the use of pooled data. No significant associations were seen for the other polymorphisms. CONCLUSIONS IL-1RN*2 was significantly associated with SVD. A difference in genetic association between SVD and MVD was also apparent.
Persistent delivery with deferred binding to descriptively named destinations

Disruption-tolerant networks aim at reliable delivery of messages to their intended destinations even when continuous end-to-end paths are not available. Frequent network disruptions result in poor connectivity to name servers that can resolve destination names to specific network identifiers such as DNS names, IP addresses, or phone numbers. Disruptions also make it virtually impossible to keep dynamic distributed name databases residing on such name servers synchronized. Furthermore, in increasingly heterogeneous and multi-modal DTNs with a plethora of name spaces, a message source may not always be able to pre-determine the specific network address for a destination (as with DNS) or the mode of communication to reach it. In this paper, we describe a disruption-tolerant architecture and use cases for persistent message delivery to descriptively named destinations. We propose an intentional naming scheme that allows destinations to be described by their attributes (e.g., roles, services, or location) and predicates on them rather than by specific network identifiers. An intentional name denotes, in essence, a query on one or more namespaces which can result in specific endpoint identifiers (EID) of appropriate destination nodes. In our architecture, since it may not be possible to bind an intentional name to specific EID(s) at source, its resolution is deferred until the message is routed to one or more nodes that can successfully complete the process. We present a distributed progressive resolution procedure called GRAIN that persistently delivers messages to intentional names with geographic and role attributes, e.g., ldquoFirst responders within a kilometer of a specified locationrdquo. We describe results from a demonstration of GRAIN at a military facility.