Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endoscopic Mucosal Resection for Colonic Mucosal Neoplasia and Evaluation of Long-Term Recurrence: A Single-Center Experience of 500 Cases

Endoscopic mucosal resection of large colon polyps is an effective alternative to surgery. This study highlights the safety and efficacy of endoscopic mucosal resection for large laterally spreading colon polyps and quantifies the rate of complications and the risk factors associated with recurrence. Supplemental digital content is available in the text. Abstract Objectives Endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) is an alternative to surgery for the treatment of large laterally spreading lesions. Residual or recurrent adenoma is a major limitation. This study aimed to quantify early and late recurrences and to assess its associated risk factors. Methods The study was a single-center, multiendoscopist, longitudinal study conducted between January 1, 2013 and April 26, 2017. A total of 480 patients with 500 polyps who underwent an endoscopic resection were included. Surveillance colonoscopy (SC) was performed at 4 to 6 months (SC1) and 16 to 18 months (SC2). Results At SC1, early recurrence was noted in 77 of 354 (21.8%) lesions; 76 (98.7%) were treated endoscopically. The remaining 277 of 354 (78.2%) lesions had no recurrence at SC1; only 41 lesions (15%) were followed up at SC2. Recurrence at SC2 was found in 4 lesions (9.8%), all of which were treated endoscopically. Lesion size >40 mm was associated with recurrence. Recurrence at both SC1 and SC2 was successfully treated endoscopically in 78 of 81 lesions (96.3%). Conclusions EMR is an effective, minimally invasive technique for the treatment of large laterally spreading lesions. Although recurrence is a concern, its risk is low (21.8% on SC1 and 9.8% on SC2) and was managed endoscopically in 96.3% cases on follow-up endoscopy.
Photoautotrophic production of eicosapentaenoic acid

Abstract Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) is an omega-3 fatty acid which is an essential nutrient for both humans and animals. This review examines the global need for EPA, both in human nutrition and aquaculture. The potential shortfall in supply of this important nutrient as well as sustainability issues with wild-caught fish have generated increased interest into alternative sources of EPA. Various approaches are summarized, including heterotrophic production and the use of genetically modified microorganisms and plants. Studies on photoautotrophic production of EPA are extensively reviewed. Widely used species for large-scale production of EPA includes Phaeodactylum tricornutum and Nannochloropsis due to their robustness and relatively high growth rates and EPA content (typically 5% of dry biomass). Approaches for large-scale production have also been reviewed. Closed reactors like flat panels, tubular reactors and bubble columns may be the most suitable due to their high productivity. However, there is no agreement in the literature as to which design generates the lowest cost of production. The economics of the process has also been examined. The best estimates for large-scale (100 hectare) plants give EPA prices of the order 39–90 USD per kilogram. This is approximately ten times higher than the price of EPA derived from fish oil. Potential avenues for lowering the cost are highlighted, along with the need to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of different EPA production methods from a more holistic perspective.
What is the relationship between people with dementia and their caregiver’s illness perceptions post-diagnosis and the impact on help-seeking behaviour? A systematic review

Background: As the number of people with dementia increases, more families will be affected by the daily challenges of providing effective support, given its current incurable status. Once individuals are diagnosed with dementia, the earlier they access support, the more effective the outcome. However, once people receive a diagnosis, how they make sense of their dementia can impact on their help-seeking intentions. Exploring the illness beliefs of people with dementia and their caregivers and this relationship to help seeking may identify how best to facilitate early support. Aims: To systematically obtain and critically review relevant studies on the relationship between illness perceptions and help seeking of people with dementia and their caregivers. Method: A systematic search was conducted and included both quantitative and qualitative studies. The initial search was conducted in October 2018, with an adjacent search conducted in April 2020. Findings: A total of 14 articles met the inclusion criteria. Conceptually, the studies examined the association of illness perceptions and help-seeking post-diagnosis and revealed that people living with dementia and their caregivers sought help when symptoms became severe. Components of illness perceptions revealed that lack of knowledge, cultural beliefs, complexity of the healthcare system, threat to independence and acceptance were identified as major factors for delaying help seeking. Conclusion: Although research interest in the area of illness perceptions and their impact on help seeking for dementia is increasing, further work is needed to understand this area, particularly regarding the influence of the relationship between the person with dementia and their caregiver.
Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Spindle Maturation from Childhood through Late Adolescence

Sleep spindles are intermittent bursts of 11-15 Hz EEG waves that occur during non-rapid eye movement sleep. Spindles are believed to help maintain sleep and to play a role in sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Here we applied an automated sleep spindle detection program to our large longitudinal sleep EEG dataset (98 human subjects, 6-18 years old, >2000 uninterrupted nights) to evaluate maturational trends in spindle wave frequency, density, amplitude, and duration. This large dataset enabled us to apply nonlinear as well as linear age models, thereby extending the findings of prior cross-sectional studies that used linear models. We found that spindle wave frequency increased with remarkable linearity across the age range. Central spindle density increased nonlinearly to a peak at age 15.1 years. Central spindle wave amplitude declined in a sigmoidal pattern with the age of fastest decline at 13.5 years. Spindle duration decreased linearly with age. Of the four measures, only spindle amplitude showed a sex difference in dynamics such that the age of most rapid decline in females preceded that in males by 1.4 years. This amplitude pattern, including the sex difference in timing, paralleled the maturational pattern for δ (1–4 Hz) wave power. We interpret these age-related changes in spindle characteristics as indicators of maturation of thalamocortical circuits and changes in sleep depth. These robust age-effects could facilitate the search for cognitive-behavioral correlates of spindle waveforms and might also help guide basic research on EEG mechanisms and postnatal brain maturation. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The brain reorganization of adolescence produces massive changes in sleep EEG. These changes include the morphology and abundance of sleep spindles, an EEG marker of non-rapid eye movement sleep believed to reflect offline memory processes and/or protection of the sleep state. We analyzed >2000 nights of longitudinal sleep EEG from 98 subjects (age 6-18 years old) to investigate maturational changes in spindle amplitude, frequency, density, and duration. The large dataset enabled us to detect nonlinear as well as linear age changes. All measures showed robust age effects that we hypothesize reflect the maturation of thalamocortical circuits and decreasing sleep depth. These findings could guide further research into the cognitive-behavioral correlates of sleep spindles and their underlying brain mechanisms.
Effect of pregabalin on nociceptive thresholds and immune responses in a mouse model of incisional pain

Background It is known that some analgesics as well as pain can affect the immune system. The aim of this study was to investigate the analgesic effect and immunomodulation of pregabalin (PGB) in a mouse incisional pain model. Methods A postoperative pain model was induced by hind paw plantar incision in male BALB/c mice. Mice were randomly divided into four groups (n = 8) a saline-treated incision (incision), PGB-treated incision (PGB-incision), sham controls without incision or drug treatment (control), and a PGB-treated control (PGB-control). In the PGB treated groups, PGB was administered intraperitoneally (IP) 30 minutes before and 1 hour after the plantar incision. Changes of the mechanical nociceptive thresholds following incision were investigated. Mice were euthanized for spleen harvesting 12 hours after the plantar incision, and natural killer (NK) cytotoxicity to YAC 1 cells and lymphocyte proliferation responses to phytohemagglutinin were compared among these four groups. Results Mechanical nociceptive thresholds were decreased after plantar incision and IP PGB administration recovered these decreased mechanical nociceptive thresholds (P < 0.001). NK activity was increased by foot incision, but NK activity in the PGB-incision group was significantly lower than that in the Incision group (P < 0.001). Incisional pain increased splenic lymphocyte proliferation, but PGB did not alter this response. Conclusions Incisional pain alters cell immunity of the spleen in BALB/c mice. PGB showed antinocieptive effect on mouse incisional pain and attenuates the activation of NK cells in this painful condition. These results suggest that PGB treatment prevents increases in pain induced NK cell activity.
Volatile scent chemicals in the urine of the red fox, Vulpes vulpes

The red fox is a highly adaptable mammal that has established itself world-wide in many different environments. Contributing to its success is a social structure based on chemical signalling between individuals. Urine scent marking behaviour has long been known in foxes, but there has not been a recent study of the chemical composition of fox urine. We have used solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the urinary volatiles in 15 free-ranging wild foxes (2 female) living in farmlands and bush in Victoria, Australia. Foxes here are routinely culled as feral pests, and the urine was collected by bladder puncture soon after death. Compounds were identified from their mass spectra and Kovats retention indices. There were 53 possible endogenous scent compounds, 10 plant-derived compounds and 5 anthropogenic xenobiotics. Among the plant chemicals were several aromatic apocarotenoids previously found in greater abundance in the fox tail gland. They reflect the dietary consumption of carotenoids, essential for optimal health. One third of all the endogenous volatiles were sulfur compounds, a highly odiferous group which included thiols, methylsulfides and polysulfides. Five of the sulfur compounds (3-isopentenyl thiol, 1- and 2-phenylethyl methyl sulfide, octanethiol and benzyl methyl sulfide) have only been found in foxes, and four others (isopentyl methyl sulfide, 3-isopentenyl methyl sulfide, and 1- and 2-phenylethane thiol) only in some canid, mink and skunk species. This indicates that they are not normal mammalian metabolites and have evolved to serve a specific role. This role is for defence in musteloids and most likely for chemical communication in canids. The total production of sulfur compounds varied greatly between foxes (median 1.2, range 0.4–32.3 μg ‘acetophenone equivalents’/mg creatinine) as did the relative abundance of different chemical types. The urinary scent chemistry may represent a highly evolved system of semiochemicals for communication between foxes.
The kinetics of phenol degradation by immobilized pseudomonas sp in a repeated-batch process

The best operating conditions for phenol degradation by immobilized Pseudomonas sp in packed column were determined, and then evaluated in repeated batch cultures. The maximum degradation rate occurred in i) the support with 1.0 cm diameter or less, ii) loading rate of 2.5 ml/min, and iii) in culture supplemented with nutrient. At these conditions, the immobilized cells managed to remove 100% of 1000 ppm phenol within 24 hours, and repeated the same performance in the next six consecutive batches. This achievement was comparable to published data. The approach employed in this study provides a useful guideline in treating phenolic contaminants using packed reactor system. Keadaan terbaik untuk menjalankan degradasi fenol oleh Pseudomonas sp yang tersekatgerak dalam turus padat telah ditentukan dan dinilai dalam kultur kelompok berulang. Kadar penguraian yang paling tinggi berlaku i) dalam penyokong yang bersaiz 1.0 cm atau kurang, ii) kadar alir 2.5 ml/min, dan iii) dalam kultur yang dibekal nutrien. Pada keadaan terbaik ini, sel tersekatgerak ini berupaya mengurai 100% fenol yang berkepekatan 1000 ppm dalam masa 24 jam, dan mengulangi prestasi yang sama dalam enam kelompok seterusnya berturut-turut. Pencapaian ini setanding dengan data yang pernah dilaporkan. Pendekatan yang dijalankan dalam penyelidikan ini memberi garis panduan yang berguna dalam rawatan fenol menggunakan sistem turus padat.
Diagnostic Analyses of Retinal Dystrophy Genes: Current Status and Perspective

Abstract Over the past decade, novel high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionised both research and diagnostic testing for monogenic disorders. This applies particularly to genetically very heterogeneous disorders like retinal dystrophies (RDs). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) today is considered as reliable as Sanger sequencing, which had been the gold standard for decades. Today, comprehensive NGS-based diagnostic testing reveals the causative mutations in the majority of RD patients, with important implications for genetic counselling for recurrence risks and personalised medical management (from interdisciplinary surveillance to prophylactic measures and, albeit yet rare, [gene] therapy). While DNA sequencing is – in most cases – no longer the diagnostic bottleneck, one needs to be aware of interpretation pitfalls and dead ends. The advent of new (NGS) technologies will solve some of these issues. However, specialised medical geneticists who are familiar with the peculiarities of certain RD genes and closely interact with ophthalmologists will remain key to successful RD research and diagnostic testing for the benefit of the patients. This review sheds light on the current state of the field, its challenges and potential solutions.
GAFnet: Group Attention Fusion Network for PAN and MS Image High-Resolution Classification

Panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images have coordinated and paired spatial spectral information, which can complement each other and make up for their shortcomings for image interpretation. In this article, a novel classification method called the deep group spatial–spectral attention fusion network is proposed for PAN and MS images. First, the MS image is processed by unpooling to obtain the same resolution as that of the PAN image. Second, the group spatial attention and group spectral attention modules are proposed to extract image features. The PAN and the processed MS images are regarded as the input of the two modules, respectively. Third, the features from the previous step are fused by the attention fusion module, which aims to fully fuse multilevel features, take into account both the low-level features and the high-level features, and maintain the global abstract and local detailed information of the pixels. Finally, the fusion feature is fed into the classifier and the resulting map is obtained by pixel level. Extensive experiments and analysis on four datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable results.
Capturing Subjective Age, Subjective Life Expectancy, and Their Links With Older Adults’ Health: The Dutch Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam

Objectives: This study compares the associations of two subjective lifetime perspectives, subjective age (SA) and subjective life expectancy (SLE), with physical performance, self-rated health, and depressive symptoms. Methods: 64 91-year-old participants were selected from three waves of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (2008/09, 2011/12, 2015/16; n = 1822 participants, n = 3500 observations) that included graphical and numerical measures of SA and SLE. We used generalized estimating equations to examine their associations with health. Results: Associations of SA/SLE with health were weaker for physical performance than for self-rated health and depressive symptoms. The associations of SA and SLE with physical performance were of similar magnitude but with self-rated health depended on the type of measure. Depressive symptoms, instead, showed a stronger association with SA than with SLE. Graphical measures showed weaker associations than numerical measures. Discussion: The way in which subjective lifetime perspectives and health are conceptualized and measured influences the strength of their associations.
Association of the Quality Rating and Improvement System, Texas Rising Star, on Physical Activity and Screen Time Policies and Practices in Texas Child Care Centers

Purpose: Quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) are systems approaches to assist states in providing high quality early childhood education. Texas Rising Star (TRS), a voluntary QRIS, exceeds state licensing standards and meets some obesity prevention guidelines. This study examines differences in physical activity, screen time, and outdoor policies and practices by QRIS certification. Design: Cross-sectional. Setting: Online. Sample: After exclusion criteria, respondents were 431 Texas childcare centers. Measures: 2016 survey of policies and Go NAPSACC best practices. Analysis: Chi-square and t-tests indicated differences in 1) practices and 2) policies by QRIS status. Results: TRS-certified centers reported more policies for physical activity (M = 4.57 ± 3.07 vs. 3.61 ± 2.95, p = 0.009) and screen time (M = 1.91 ± 1.84 vs. 1.28 ± 1.56, p < 0.001) than non-certified centers. TRS-certified centers reported significantly higher frequencies for 7 of 14 physical activity practices, however no significant differences for screen time practices were found. Additionally, TRS-certified centers reported more outdoor practices, including more classrooms/storage (p < 0.001) and vegetable gardens (p = 0.025). Conclusion: TRS-certified centers reported more physical activity policies and practices, more screen time policies, and more outdoor practices. TRS certification was not associated with screen time practices. QRIS can be a practical way to insert obesity prevention in early care and education. Using items from a widely used survey enables comparisons, however future research is needed in larger-scale studies. Some COVID-19 implications are discussed.
VM-NSP

Negative sequential patterns (NSPs) capture more informative and actionable knowledge than classic positive sequential patterns (PSPs) due to the involvement of both occurring and nonoccurring behaviors and events, which can contribute to many relevant applications. However, NSP mining is nontrivial, as it involves fundamental challenges requiring distinct theoretical foundations and is not directly addressable by PSP mining. In the very limited research reported on NSP mining, a negative element constraint (NEC) is incorporated to only consider the NSPs composed of specific forms of elements (containing either positive or negative items), which results in many valuable NSPs being missed. Here, we loosen the NEC (called loose negative element constraint (LNEC)) to include partial negative elements containing both positive and negative items, which enables the discovery of more flexible patterns but incorporates significant new learning challenges, such as representing and mining complete NSPs. Accordingly, we formalize the LNEC-based NSP mining problem and propose a novel vertical NSP mining framework, VM-NSP, to efficiently mine the complete set of NSPs by a vertical representation (VR) of each sequence. An efficient bitmap-based vertical NSP mining algorithm, bM-NSP, introduces a bitmap hash table--based VR and a prefix-based negative sequential candidate generation strategy to optimize the discovery performance. VM-NSP and its implementation bM-NSP form the first VR-based approach for complete NSP mining with LNEC. Theoretical analyses and experiments confirm the performance superiority of bM-NSP on synthetic and real-life datasets w.r. t. diverse data factors, which substantially expands existing NSP mining methods toward flexible NSP discovery.
Toward Dynamic User Intention

User intention is an important factor to be considered for recommender systems, which always changes dynamically in different contexts. Recent studies (represented by sequential recommendation) begin to focus on predicting what users want beyond what users like, which are better at capturing user intention and have attracted a surge of interest. However, user intention modeling is non-trivial, because it is generally influenced by various factors, among which item relations and their temporal evolutionary effects are of great importance. For example, consumption of a cellphone will have varying impacts on the demands for its relational items: For complements, the demands are likely to be promoted in the short term; while for substitutes, the long-term effect may take advantage, because users do not need another cellphone immediately. Moreover, the temporal evolutions of different relational effects vary across different domains, which makes it challenging to adaptively take them into consideration. As a result, most existing studies only loosely incorporate item relations by encoding their semantics into embeddings, neglecting fine-grained time-aware effects. In this work, we propose Knowledge-aware Dynamic Attention (KDA) to take both relational effects and their temporal evolutions into consideration. Specifically, to model dynamic impacts of historical relational interactions on user intention, we aggregate the history sequence into relation-specific embeddings, where the attention weight consists of two parts. First, we measure the relational intensity between historical items and the target item to model the absolute degree of influence in terms of each relation. Second, to model how the relational effects drift with time, we innovatively introduce Fourier transform with learnable frequency-domain embeddings to estimate temporal decay functions of different relations adaptively. Subsequently, the self-attention mechanism is leveraged to derive the final representation of the whole history sequence, which reflects the dynamic user intention and will be applied to generate the recommendation list. Extensive experiments in three real-world datasets indicate the proposed KDA model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Top-K recommendation task. Moreover, the proposed Fourier-based method opens up a new avenue to adaptively integrate temporal dynamics into general neural models.