Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of lymph node status in patients with urothelial carcinoma—still in search of the perfect imaging modality: a systematic review

While accurate lymph node status evaluation in urothelial carcinoma patients is essential for the correct disease staging and, hence, establishing the most beneficial treatment strategy, the diagnostic performance of routine imaging in regards to this issue is not satisfactory. For the purpose of this article, we systematically reviewed the contemporary literature on the sensitivity and specificity of particular imaging modalities which have been studied for detecting lymph node metastases in patients diagnosed with urothelial carcinoma. The evidence reviewed shows that computed tomography (CT), although recognized as the imaging modality of choice, is associated with marked limitations, resulting in its low sensitivity for lymph node involvement detection in urothelial carcinoma patients, with no study reporting a value higher than 46% using standard cut-off values. Markedly higher sensitivity rates may be achieved with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), especially when using ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide as the contrast agent, however, no uniform protocol has been systematically studied up to date. The vast majority of recent evidence concerns positron emission tomography (PET), which is being reported to improve the diagnostic performance of CT alone, as has been demonstrated in multiple articles, which investigated the accuracy of PET/CT at primary or post-treatment staging of urothelial carcinoma patients. However, there has been substantial heterogeneity in terms of methodology and results between those studies, making it premature to draw any definitive conclusions. The results of this review lead to a conclusion, that while CT, despite being not fully satisfactory, still remains the gold-standard method of imaging for staging purposes in urothelial carcinoma, other imaging modalities are under investigation, with promising results.
Severe whipworm (Trichuris spp.) infection in the hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas)

A 3-year-old male hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas) at the Seoul Zoo, Korea, died without any previous symptoms. Necropsy revealed severe whipworm infection in the large intestine. The animal weighed 2.6 kg and had a blood clot at the anus. Numerous whipworms were found attached to the intestinal wall, with their anterior ends embedded in the mucosa. Fecal microscopy revealed typical barrel-shaped, brown eggs of Trichuris spp. , with hyaline polar plugs at each end. Histopathological examination revealed the thin anterior part of Trichuris spp. embedded in the mucosal layer and the thick posterior part at the mucosal surface or hanging freely in the intestinal lumen. This case emphasizes the importance of parasitic infection management in zoo animals.
Combinatorial processing of bacterial and host-derived innate immune stimuli at the single-cell level

During the course of a bacterial infection, cells are exposed simultaneously to a range of bacterial and host factors, which converge on the central transcription factor nuclear factor (NF)-κB. How do single cells integrate and process these converging stimuli? Here we tackle the question of how cells process combinatorial signals by making quantitative single-cell measurements of the NF-κB response to combinations of bacterial lipopolysaccharide and the stress cytokine tumor necrosis factor. We found that cells encode the presence of both stimuli via the dynamics of NF-κB nuclear translocation in individual cells, suggesting the integration of NF-κB activity for these stimuli occurs at the molecular and pathway level. However, the gene expression and cytokine secretion response to combinatorial stimuli were more complex, suggesting that other factors in addition to NF-κB contribute to signal integration at downstream layers of the response. Taken together, our results support the theory that during innate immune threat assessment, a pathogen recognized as both foreign and harmful will recruit an enhanced immune response. Our work highlights the remarkable capacity of individual cells to process multiple input signals and suggests that a deeper understanding of signal integration mechanisms will facilitate efforts to control dysregulated immune responses.
Virtual Screening, Biological Evaluation, and 3D-QSAR Studies of New HIV-1 Entry Inhibitors That Function via the CD4 Primary Receptor

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is responsible for the majority of HIV infections worldwide, and we still lack a cure for this infection. Blocking the interaction of HIV-1 and its primary receptor CD4 is one strategy for identifying new anti-HIV-1 entry inhibitors. Here we report the discovery of a novel ligand that can inhibit HIV-1 entry and infection via CD4. Biological and computational analyses of this inhibitor and its analogs, using bioactivity evaluation, Rule of Five (RO5), comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA)/comparative molecular similarity index analysis (CoMSIA) models, and three-dimensional quantitative structure-activity relationship (3D-QSAR), singled out compound 3 as a promising lead molecule for the further development of therapeutics targeting HIV-1 entry. Our study demonstrates an effective approach for employing structure-based, rational drug design techniques to identify novel antiviral compounds with interesting biological activities.
Outcomes for symptomatic non-obstructed individuals and individuals with mild (GOLD stage 1) COPD in a population based cohort

Background We aimed to study the adverse outcomes of symptomatic and asymptomatic non-obstructed individuals and those with mild COPD longitudinally in participants from three Latin-American cities. Methods Two population-based surveys of adults with spirometry were conducted for these same individuals with a 5- to 9-year interval. We evaluated the impact of respiratory symptoms (cough, phlegm, wheezing or dyspnea) in non-obstructed individuals, and among those classified as Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) stage 1, COPD on exacerbation frequency, mortality and FEV1 decline, compared with asymptomatic individuals without airflow obstruction or restriction. Results Non-obstructed symptomatic individuals had a marginal increased risk of mortality (HR 1.3; 95% CI 0.9–1.94), increased FEV1 decline (−4.5 mL/year; 95% CI −8.6, −0.4) and increased risk of 2+ exacerbations in the previous year (OR 2.6; 95% CI 1.2–6.5). Individuals with GOLD stage 1 had a marginal increase in mortality (HR 1.5; 95% CI 0.93–2.3) but a non-significant impact on FEV1 decline or exacerbations compared with non-obstructed individuals. Conclusions The presence of respiratory symptoms in non-obstructed individuals was a predictor of mortality, lung-function decline and exacerbations, whereas the impact of GOLD stage 1 was mild and inconsistent. Respiratory symptoms were associated with asthma, current smoking, and the report of heart disease. Spirometric case-finding and treatment should target individuals with moderate-to-severe airflow obstruction and those with restriction, the groups with consistent increased mortality.
Performance Analysis for City, Highway, and Rural Area in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Network

In the Vehicular ad hoc networks, safety applications are capable of sending and processing messages in real time is the most notable difference between safety and non-safety application. This message is also known as packet where information is transmitted at regular interval. To tell the neighbors about the vehicle profile the packet are generated and broadcasted consecutively. The information about the vehicle such as speed, acceleration, coordination, and the next coordination, etc. is contained in packets. The Vehicular ad hoc networks are vigorously changing the packet needs to be sent regularly. Because of safety-related issues, this is needed which can only be solved by the real-time information. However, due to increasing the packet and some environmental factors, if the channel becomes overloaded, there will be an increase in the packet collision probability and communication get a breakdown by destroying packet or information. Hence, the probability of successfully received the packets and the environmental condition is an important parameter for a Vehicular ad hoc networks based system. Because the Vehicular ad-hoc network propagation is strongly affected due to varying nature of the environment. The radio propagation path loss models use mean additional attenuation sophisticated fading model and do not consider the obstacle caused due to obstacles of vehicles in Line of Sight of transmitting and receiving vehicles/devices. This affects the attenuation signal at receiving vehicles. Therefore, we present an obstacle based radio propagation model that considers the effect caused by the presence of obstructing vehicles in Line of Sight. The experiment is conducted to evaluate the model under different environmental conditions (City, Highway, and Rural) by varying vehicle density to study the effect of throughput operation and packet collision considering environmental factor for multi-channel DSRC based Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication in IEEE 802.11p considering distributed slotted Medium Access Control protocol. The performance of the model was evaluated in terms of throughput, collision, and packet delivery ratio. City environment achieves a 15.04% average packet delivery ratio performance improvement over the other two environment considering varied vehicles. The overall result shows that the proposed obstacle based throughput model is efficient considering varied density.
The Design and Implementation of a Real Time Visual Search System on JD E-commerce Platform

We present the design and implementation of a visual search system for real time image retrieval on JD.com, the world's third largest and China's largest e-commerce site. We demonstrate that our system can support real time visual search with hundreds of billions of product images at sub-second timescales and handle frequent image updates through distributed hierarchical architecture and efficient indexing methods. We hope that sharing our practice with our real production system will inspire the middleware community's interest and appreciation for building practical large scale systems for emerging applications, such as e-commerce visual search.
nNOS-Expressing Neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area and Substantia Nigra Pars Compacta

Abstract GABA neurons in the VTA and SNc play key roles in reward and aversion through their local inhibitory control of dopamine neuron activity and through long-range projections to several target regions including the nucleus accumbens. It is not clear whether some of these GABA neurons are dedicated local interneurons or if they all collateralize and send projections externally as well as making local synaptic connections. Testing between these possibilities has been challenging in the absence of interneuron-specific molecular markers. We hypothesized that one potential candidate might be neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS), a common interneuronal marker in other brain regions. To test this, we used a combination of immunolabelling (including antibodies for nNOS that we validated in tissue from nNOS-deficient mice) and cell type-specific virus-based anterograde tracing in mice. We found that nNOS-expressing neurons, in the parabrachial pigmented (PBP) part of the VTA and the SNc were GABAergic and did not make detectable projections, suggesting they may be interneurons. In contrast, nNOS-expressing neurons in the rostral linear nucleus (RLi) were mostly glutamatergic and projected to a number of regions, including the lateral hypothalamus (LH), the ventral pallidum (VP), and the median raphe (MnR) nucleus. Taken together, these findings indicate that nNOS is expressed by neurochemically- and anatomically-distinct neuronal sub-groups in a sub-region-specific manner in the VTA and SNc.
STE20/PAKA Protein Kinase Gene Releases an Autoinhibitory Domain through Pre-mRNA Alternative Splicing in the Dermatophyte Trichophyton rubrum

Signaling pathways are highly diverse in filamentous fungi, allowing the cells to receive and process ambient information. Interaction of components from different pathways results in signaling networks. The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is dependent on phosphorylation that is accomplished by kinase proteins. Thus, the STE/PAK protein kinase family plays essential roles in MAPK signal transduction, regulating several cellular functions. The STE/PAK protein displays an autoinhibitory (Cdc42/Rac interactive binding—CRIB) domain on its N-terminal portion, which interacts with the C-terminal catalytic kinase domain. Based on current knowledge, for the STE/PAK kinase to be activated, molecular signals (e.g., interaction with the activated form of Rac1 and Cdc42 proteins) or proteolytic cleavage by caspase 3 is necessary. Both mechanisms release the kinase domain from the CRIB interaction. Here, we hypothesize a novel molecular mechanism for the activation of STE20/PAKA kinase in Trichophyton rubrum based on an alternative pre-mRNA splicing process. Our data suggest that, because of the retention of intron 1 of this gene, it is theoretically possible that the translation of STE20/PAKA kinase will be free of its autoinhibitory CRIB domain. These findings indicate a rapid response system to environmental changes. Furthermore, STE20/PAKA may be a potential T. rubrum virulence factor and an interesting target for new drugs against dermatophytes.
ATRX promotes maintenance of herpes simplex virus heterochromatin during chromatin stress

The mechanisms by which mammalian cells recognize and epigenetically restrict viral DNA are not well defined. We used herpes simplex virus with bioorthogonally labeled genomes to detect host factors recruited to viral DNA shortly after its nuclear entry and found that the cellular IFI16, PML, and ATRX proteins colocalized with viral DNA by 15 min post infection. HSV-1 infection of ATRX-depleted fibroblasts resulted in elevated viral mRNA and accelerated viral DNA accumulation. Despite the early association of ATRX with vDNA, we found that initial viral heterochromatin formation is ATRX-independent. However, viral heterochromatin stability required ATRX from 4 to 8 hr post infection. Inhibition of transcription blocked viral chromatin loss in ATRX-knockout cells; thus, ATRX is uniquely required for heterochromatin maintenance during chromatin stress. These results argue that the initial formation and the subsequent maintenance of viral heterochromatin are separable mechanisms, a concept that likely extrapolates to host cell chromatin and viral latency.
Intra-thyroidal parathyroid microadenoma

A 73-year-old woman was diagnosed with primary hyperparathyroidism (Calcium 2.85mmol/l, NR 2.2 – 2.6; PTH 11.9pmol/l NR 1.6–7.2). At another institution she underwent a bilateral neck exploration and the surgeon failed to identify a parathyroid tumour and terminated the operation. After referral to our hospital, an ultrasound scan identified an 8mm diameter lesion within the right thyroid lobe. Fine needle aspiration of the lesion revealed a PTH in excess of 50 000pmol/l from the supernantant. The neck was re-explored and a right hemithyroidectomy was undertaken. At the end of the procedure the intra-operative PTH assay fell by 74%. Histological examination revealed a 6mm parathyroid adenoma (Figure 1). The patient is normocalcaemic at one-year follow-up.
Healthcare market segmentation and data mining: A systematic review

Abstract Providing insight into healthcare consumers’ behaviors and attitudes is critical information in an environment where healthcare delivery is moving rapidly towards patient-centered care that is premised upon individuals becoming more active participants in managing their health. A systematic review of the literature concerning healthcare market segmentation and data mining identified several areas for future health marketing research. Common themes included: (a) reliance on survey data, (b) clustering methods, (c) limited classification modeling after clustering, and (d) detailed analysis of clusters by demographic data. Opportunities exist to expand health-marketing research to leverage patient level data with advanced data mining methods.
Design and Performance Analysis of Vehicle MIMO System for NR-based enhanced V2X

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has recently developed enhanced vehicle-to-everything (eV2X) communication. The requirements of the eV2X service are significantly higher than those of existing V2X, with the required data transmission rates ranging from tens of Mbps to up to 1000 Mbps. In addition, communication should be performed with an extremely low error probability within a time delay of several to several tens of ms. In this study, a low-density parity-check code and 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which are new radio technologies, are applied to meet the low-latency, high-reliability, and high-data-rate requirements of eV2X. In addition, we propose a vehicle multiple-input multiple-output system. The proposed system increases reliability through transmit diversity and lowers latency through a short transmission time interval. Simulation results show that the proposed system exhibits high reliability, high data rate, and low latency.
Clinical Validation of the cobas HPV Test on the cobas 6800 System for the Purpose of Cervical Screening

This study demonstrates that the clinical sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility of the novel cobas human papillomavirus (HPV) test on the cobas 6800 system for high-risk HPV types fulfills the criteria for use in population-based cervical screening. The criteria were formulated by an international consortium, using the cobas 4800 HPV test as a validated reference assay. ABSTRACT This study demonstrates that the clinical sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility of the novel cobas human papillomavirus (HPV) test on the cobas 6800 system for high-risk HPV types fulfills the criteria for use in population-based cervical screening. The criteria were formulated by an international consortium, using the cobas 4800 HPV test as a validated reference assay. The cobas HPV test detected over 98% of histologically confirmed cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2+ (CIN2+) lesions in women age 30 years or older, with a specificity of 98.9% compared with the reference cobas 4800 test. Both the intra- and interlaboratory agreement for the cobas HPV test were 98%. The clinical performance of the cobas HPV test is comparable to those of longitudinally validated HPV assays and fulfills the criteria for its use in primary cervical screening.
High Order Neural Networks for Video Classification

Capturing spatiotemporal correlations is an essential topic in video classification. In this paper, we present high order operations as a generic family of building blocks for capturing high order correlations from high dimensional input video space. We prove that several successful architectures for visual classification tasks are in the family of high order neural networks, theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrates their underlying mechanism is high order. We also proposal a new LEarnable hiGh Order (LEGO) block, whose goal is to capture spatiotemporal correlation in a feedforward manner. Specifically, LEGO blocks implicitly learn the relation expressions for spatiotemporal features and use the learned relations to weight input features. This building block can be plugged into many neural network architectures, achieving evident improvement without introducing much overhead. On the task of video classification, even using RGB only without fine-tuning with other video datasets, our high order models can achieve results on par with or better than the existing state-of-the-art methods on both Something-Something (V1 and V2) and Charades datasets.
Prenatal Programming of Neuroendocrine System Development by Lipopolysaccharide: Long-Term Effects

Various stress factors during critical periods of fetal development modulate the epigenetic mechanisms controlling specific genes, which can affect the structure and function of physiological systems. Maternal immune stress by bacterial infection simulated by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in an experiment is considered to be a powerful programming factor of fetal development. Studies of the molecular mechanisms controlling the formation and functioning of physiological systems are in the pilot stage. LPSs are the most potent natural inflammation factors. LPS-induced increases in fetal levels of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines can affect brain development and have long-term effects on behavior and neuroendocrine functions. The degradation of serotonergic neurons induced by LPS in the fetus is attributed to the increased levels of interleukin (IL)-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNFα) as well as to anxiety and depression in children. Dopamine deficiency causes dysthymia, learning disability, and Parkinson’s disease. According to our data, an LPS-induced increase in the levels of IL-6, leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), and monocyte chemotactic protein (MCP-1) in maternal and fetal rats during early pregnancy disturbs the development and functioning of gonadotropin-releasing hormone production and reproductive systems. It is important to note the high responsiveness of epigenetic developmental mechanisms to many regulatory factors, which offers opportunities to correct the defects.
A new phenolic compound from Phedimus middendorffianus with antiproliferative activity

Abstract A new phenolic compound (1) and together with 12 known compounds–eight flavonoids (2 ∼ 9), two phenolic compounds (10 and 11) and two benzoic acid (12 and 13)–were isolated from Phedimus middendorffianus (Maxim.). The structures of all compound were determined on the basis of spectroscopic (MS and NMR) analyses. Compounds 4, 5, 7 and 11 ∼ 13 were showed anti-proliferative activities against MCF-7 than PC-3 cell line. Also compound 12 and 13 showed the significant cytotoxic activities against two cancer cell lines, PC-3 and MCF-7. Graphical abstract
AppWrapper: Patching Security Functions with Dynamic Policy on Your Insecure Android Apps

Android provides a security system with permission control, but there are a number of vulnerabilities that have excessive permission rights and a large number of per-permission related APIs. To address these vulnerabilities, permission control studies have been conducted on APIs that are at risk of compromising user privacy. However, it is impossible to add a new security function to an insecure application, and there is a disadvantage that an overhead occurs in the progress of the app because the user is required to permit permission in real time and the users' convenience is decreased. In this paper, we propose an AppWrapper toolkit. The toolkit can add security functions to the user/administrator's desired locations (method level in activities) of an insecure app using the appwrapping technique. And, using dynamic policy management, it is easy to apply secure policies without adding security functions again. In addition, by providing a real-time app log function that considers the convenience of users, it is possible to confirm the location where the security function is required according to the progress flow of the insecure app, and to create a policy file by setting the policy. Experiments on commercial apps have shown 100% success rate, except for apps with built-in security and Android apps. On the average, it took 1.86 seconds to add the security function through the proposed framework, and the file size increased by about 2.11%, indicating that the security function can be added in a short time with the increase of the minimum file size.