Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical Characteristics and Management of Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis in Patients With Antiphospholipid Syndrome: A Single-Center Retrospective Study

Antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) with cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) is a relatively rare phenomenon, and this observational study aimed to investigate the clinical characteristics of APS patients complicated with CVST. We retrospectively investigated the clinical characteristics of CVST events in APS and compared differential characteristics and associated factors between APS patients with and without CVST. Twenty-one CVST patients with APS were enrolled including 14 females (9.4%) and 7 males (5.8%). The median age and disease duration at onset of CVST was 33 years (IQR 28-48) old and 1.3 months (IQR 0.7-4), respectively. Among APS patients with CVST, 12 (57.1%) cases presented with neurologic symptoms of CVST as the initial manifestation. Onset of CVST was mainly chronic (52.4%). Headache (90.5%) was the most common neurological symptom. The common locations of CVST were transverse sinus (76.2%) and superior sagittal sinus (57.1%), with more frequently (76.2%) dual or multiple sinuses involved. All patients with CVST were treated with anticoagulant, and 5 (23.8%) patients received endovascular therapy. Sixteen (84.2%) patients had good outcomes and 3 (15.8%) patients died at last follow-up. There were no significant differences (P > 0.05) between two groups in the analysis of related APS indicators. There were no significant differences (P > 0.05) between two groups in the analysis of related APS indicators. Although APS complicated with CVST is rare and predominately chronic developed. The evaluation of CVST should be performed for APS patients with intracranial hypertension syndrome. The routine screening of antiphospholipid antibodies (aPLs) is highly recommended in unexplained CVST patients. Most CVST patients with APS will have a good prognosis after treatment, and endovascular therapy is an alternative treatment.
Assessing the need for a wearable sign language recognition device for deaf individuals: Results from a national questionnaire

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine how sign language users perceive the sign language recognition (SLR) field, with a focus on gaining perspectives from members of the Canadian Deaf community. A questionnaire consisting of a series of rating and open-ended questions was used to gather perspectives and insights related to a hypothetical SLR device. The survey was distributed to members of the Deaf community, family and friends of Deaf individuals, and service providers, all of whom had some proficiency in American Sign Language (ASL). The average ratings provided by Deaf participants were distributed normally with a right-modal skew in the direction of the positive ratings. Six fundamental concerns about SLR technologies were identified from participants’ responses, with the most frequently cited pertaining to the technology’s feasibility. In descending order, participants ranked translation accuracy, speed, and comfort as the three most important design characteristics for potential SLR devices. Respondents identified many potential situations in which SLR devices could be used. For a SLR device to be user-centric and culturally appropriate, it is essential that future work in the field integrates perspectives from members of the Deaf community.
Curious Objects: How Visual Complexity Guides Attention and Engagement

Some things look more complex than others. For example, a crenulate and richly organized leaf may seem more complex than a plain stone. What is the nature of this experience-and why do we have it in the first place? Here, we explore how object complexity serves as an efficiently extracted visual signal that the object merits further exploration. We algorithmically generated a library of geometric shapes and determined their complexity by computing the cumulative surprisal of their internal skeletons-essentially quantifying the "amount of information" within each shape-and then used this approach to ask new questions about the perception of complexity. Experiments 1-3 asked what kind of mental process extracts visual complexity: a slow, deliberate, reflective process (as when we decide that an object is expensive or popular) or a fast, effortless, and automatic process (as when we see that an object is big or blue)? We placed simple and complex objects in visual search arrays and discovered that complex objects were easier to find among simple distractors than simple objects are among complex distractors-a classic search asymmetry indicating that complexity is prioritized in visual processing. Next, we explored the function of complexity: Why do we represent object complexity in the first place? Experiments 4-5 asked subjects to study serially presented objects in a self-paced manner (for a later memory test); subjects dwelled longer on complex objects than simple objects-even when object shape was completely task-irrelevant-suggesting a connection between visual complexity and exploratory engagement. Finally, Experiment 6 connected these implicit measures of complexity to explicit judgments. Collectively, these findings suggest that visual complexity is extracted efficiently and automatically, and even arouses a kind of "perceptual curiosity" about objects that encourages subsequent attentional engagement.
Perinatal exposure to silver nanoparticles reprograms immunometabolism and promotes pancreatic beta-cell death and kidney damage in mice

Abstract Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are extensively utilized in food, cosmetics, and healthcare products. Though the effects of AgNPs exposure on adults are well documented, the long-term effects of gestational/perinatal exposure upon the health of offspring have not been addressed. Herein, we show that only perinatal exposure to AgNPs through the mother could lead to chronic inflammation in offspring which persists till adulthood. Further, AgNPs exposure altered offspring’s immune responses against environmental stresses. AgNPs exposed offspring showed an altered response in splenocyte proliferation assay when challenged to lipopolysaccharide, concanavalin-A, AgNPs, or silver ions. Perinatal AgNPs exposure affected metabolic parameters (resistin, glucagon-like peptide-1, leptin, insulin) and upregulated JNK/P38/ERK signaling in the pancreas. We observed pancreatic damage, reduced insulin level, and increased blood glucose levels. Further, we observed renal damage, particularly to tubular and glomerular regions as indicated by histopathology and electron microscopy. Our study thus shows that only perinatal exposure to AgNPs could induce persistent inflammation, alter immune responses against foreign antigens and metabolism which may contribute to pancreatic and renal damage later in life.
Tests for tuberculosis infection: landscape analysis

Background Only the tuberculin skin test (TST) and two interferon-γ release assays (IGRAs), QuantiFERON-TB Gold In-Tube and T-SPOT.TB, are currently endorsed by the World Health Organization as tests for tuberculosis (TB) infection. While IGRAs are more specific than the TST, they require sophisticated laboratory infrastructure and are costly to perform. However, both types of tests have limited performance to predict development of active TB. Tests with improved predictive performance and operational characteristics are needed. Methods We reviewed the current landscape of tests for TB infection identified through a web-based survey targeting diagnostic manufacturers globally. Results We identified 20 tests for TB infection: 15 in vitro tests and five skin tests. 13 of the in vitro tests are whole-blood IGRAs and 14 use early secreted antigenic target 6 (ESAT-6) and culture filtrate protein 10 (CFP-10), with or without additional antigens. 10 of the tests are based on assays other than an ELISA, such as a fluorescent lateral flow assay that requires less manual operation and shorter assay time and hence is more suitable for decentralisation compared with the existing IGRAs. Four of the five skin tests use ESAT-6 and CFP-10 proteins, while the remaining test uses a new antigen that is specific to Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex. Conclusions New tests have the potential to improve accuracy, operational characteristics and end-user access to tests for TB infection. However, published data in various populations and settings are limited for most new tests. Evaluation of these new tests in a standardised design would facilitate their endorsement and programmatic scale-up. New and emerging tests for tuberculosis infection have the potential to improve accuracy, operational characteristics and end-user access. Evaluation of these tests in a standardised design would facilitate their endorsement and programmatic scale-up. https://bit.ly/327RBky
HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER IN COMBUSTION PROCESSES TWO-STAGE PROCESSING OF A MATERIAL WITH PREDOMINANT COMBUSTIBLE MATTER

The authors have presented an improved technology for processing of organic substances, which is based on an analysis of various methods described in the literature and results of experimental investigations of thermal conversion and plasma-assisted pyrolysis, conducted at the A. V. Luikov Heat and Mass Transfer Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The proposed technology includes two stages the fi rst of which is pyrolysis with a temperature of 400 to 550oC. The combustible matter of the material decomposes with the resulting formation of volatile hydrocarbons and solid coke-ash residue with a high content of carbon and a developed surface. Thus, after the pyrolytic stage step, the hydrocarbon part of the substance goes into a gas phase, and the coke-ash residue is dispersed. The second stage is high-temperature (1100–1400oC) processing of the products of the fi rst stage by the mechanism of partial oxidation. Additional oxygen is fed to convert carbon into CO. As a result, all the hydrocarbons are converted into a syngas which consists of CO and H2. This gas has a high calorifi c value and can be utilized as a fuel in an electric generator. The inorganic matter can be vitrifi ed and is suitable for safe burial.
Weak Feature Extraction and Strong Noise Suppression for SSVEP-EEG Based on Chaotic Detection Technology

Brain computer interface (BCI) is a novel communication method that does not rely on the normal neural pathway between the brain and muscle of human. It can transform mental activities into relevant commands to control external equipment and establish direct communication pathway. Among different paradigms, steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is widely used due to its certain periodicity and stability of control. However, electroencephalogram (EEG) of SSVEP is extremely weak and companied with multi-scale and strong noise. Existing algorithms for classification are based on the principle of template matching and spatial filtering, which cannot obtain satisfied performance of feature extraction under the multi-scale noise. Especially for the subjects produce weak response for external stimuli in EEG representation, i.e., BCI-Illiteracy subject, traditional algorithms are difficult to recognize the internal patterns of brain. To address this issue, a novel method based on Chaos theory is proposed to extract feature of SSVEP. The rule of this method is applying the peculiarity of nonlinear dynamics system to detect feature of SSVEP by judging the state changes of chaotic systems after adding weak EEG. To evaluate the validity of proposed method, this research recruit 32 subjects to participate the experiment. All subjects are divided into two groups according to the preliminary classification accuracy (mean acc >70% or < 70%) by canonical correlation analysis and we define the accuracy above 70% as group A (normal subjects), below 70% as group B (BCI-Illiteracy). Then, the classification accuracy and information transmission rate of two groups are verified using Chaotic theory. Experimental results show that all classification methods using in our study achieve good performance for normal subjects while chaos obtain excellent performance and significant improvements than traditional methods for BCI-Illiteracy.
Epistasis produces an excess of invariant sites in neutral molecular evolution

Substitution rate variability among sites is a common feature of protein evolution. This variability is frequently modeled by a gamma (Γ) distribution (1), which is proposed to be an emergent property of epistasis by de la Paz et al. (2). However, the conclusion of de la Paz et al. (2) is based on the analysis of highly divergent sequences, as many as 24 substitutions per site. We examined if this conclusion holds for more biologically realistic sequence divergences (0.1 to 5 substitutions per site) (3). Instead, we found that creation of a class of invariant sites is an emergent property of epistasis, and the sequence divergence level dictates whether an equalor a variable-rate model will best fit the data. In de la Paz et al. (2), neutral molecular evolution was simulated for protein families with a fitness function defined by a model inferred via direct coupling analysis (e.g., Fig. 1A). We counted the number of sites that experienced zero, one, two, three, and more substitutions directly from the generation by generation simulated sequences (e.g., Fig. 1B), which avoids confounding effects of estimation errors. This site frequency spectrum (SFS) will follow a Poisson distribution when the data are compatible with a single (S) evolutionary rate across sites (4). SFS will follow a negative binomial distribution if the evolutionary rates among sites are Γ distributed (1). We tested model fits to SFS at different levels of sequence divergence, allowing for a category of invariant sites (I+) with S and Γmodels (5). For each dataset, the best-fit model from four candidates (S, I + S, Γ, and I + Γ models) was selected using corrected Akaike information criterion (AICc) because these models are not all nested (6, 7). The S model fits best for a vast majority of datasets at sequence divergences less than 0.5 substitutions per site (Fig. 1C). That is, epistasis did not create significant evolutionary rate variability among sites at low sequence divergences. For divergences larger than 0.5 substitutions per site, models allowing for an invariant class of sites (I + S and I + Γ) provide the best fits (Fig. 1C). Similar patterns are observed for the other nine protein domain families analyzed by de la Paz et al. (2) (Fig. 2). The Γ model alone was not the dominant model except for one case (Fig. 2). Therefore, at sufficient evolutionary distances, epistasis generates many invariant sites and substitution rate variability, likely because incompatible substitutions at coupled sites are under greater negative selection than substitutions at loosely coupled and uncoupled sites. At relatively low divergences, fewer coupled sites are mutated, likely resulting in less differential negative selection among sites. So, even a single-rate model may fit the data well. Overall, our results suggest that epistasis provides a mechanistic explanation for the abundance of invariant sites beyond what is explained by an equal (S)or a variable (Γ)-rate model. Consequently, models incorporating a separate class of invariant sites best describe evolutionary rates of proteins.
Proteomic response of the marine ammonia-oxidising archaeon, Nitrosopumilus maritimus to iron limitation reveals strategies to compensate for nutrient scarcity.

Dissolved iron (Fe) is vanishingly low in the oceans, with ecological success conferred to microorganisms that can restructure their biochemistry to maintain high growth rates during Fe scarcity. Chemolithoautotrophic ammonia-oxidising archaea (AOA) are highly abundant in the oceans, constituting ~30% of cells below the photic zone. Here we examine the proteomic response of the AOA isolate Nitrosopumilus maritimus to growth-limiting Fe concentrations. Under Fe limitation, we observed a significant reduction in the intensity of Fe-dense ferredoxins associated with respiratory complex I whilst complex III and IV proteins with more central roles in the electron transport chain remain unchanged. We concomitantly observed an increase in the intensity of Fe-free functional alternatives such as flavodoxin and plastocyanin, thioredoxin and alkyl hydroperoxide which are known to mediate electron transport and reactive oxygen species detoxification, respectively. Under Fe limitation, we found a marked increase in the intensity of the ABC phosphonate transport system (Phn), highlighting an intriguing link between Fe and P cycling in N. maritimus. We hypothesise that an elevated uptake of exogenous phosphonates under Fe limitation may either supplement N. maritimus' endogenous methylphosphonate biosynthesis pathway - which requires Fe - or enhance the production of phosphonate-containing exopolysaccharides known to efficiently bind environmental Fe. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Optimization of sampling designs for pedigrees and association studies

In many studies, related individuals are phenotyped in order to infer how their genotype contributes to their phenotype, through the estimation of parameters such as breeding values or locus effects. When it is not possible to phenotype all the individuals, it is important to properly sample the population to improve the precision of the statistical analysis. This article studies how to optimize such sampling designs for pedigrees and association studies. Two sampling methods are developed, stratified sampling and D optimality. It is found that it is important to take account of mutation when sampling pedigrees with many generations: as the size of mutation effects increases, optimized designs sample more individuals in late generations. Optimized designs for association studies tend to improve the joint estimation of breeding values and locus effects, all the more as sample size is low and the genetic architecture of the trait is simple. When the trait is determined by few loci, they are reminiscent of classical experimental designs for regression models and tend to select homozygous individuals. When the trait is determined by many loci, locus effects may be difficult to estimate, even if an optimized design is used.
A Computational Fluid Structure Interaction Study for Carotids with Different Atherosclerotic Plaques.

Atherosclerosis is a systemic disease that leads to accumulation of deposits, known as atherosclerotic plaques, within the walls of the carotids. In particular, three types of plaque can be distinguished: soft, fibrous and calcific. Most of the computational studies who investigated the interplay between the plaque and the blood flow on patient-specific geometries, used non standard medical images to directly delineate and segment the plaque and its components. However these techniques are not so widely available in the clinical practice. In this context the aim of our work was twofold: i) to propose a new geometric tool that allowed to reconstruct a plausible plaque in the carotids from standard images and ii) to perform 3D FSI simulations where we compared some fluid-dynamic and structural quantities among 15 patients characterized by different typologies of plaque. Our results highlighted that both the morphology and the mechanical properties of different plaque components play a crucial role in determining the vulnerability of the plaque.
Getting to the heart of the matter: diagnostic tools and therapeutic approach to cardiac involvement in Behçet syndrome A Tunisian case series.

The aim was to investigate the frequency and spectrum of cardiac involvement (CI) in patients with Behçet syndrome (BS) in the Tunisian context, and to assess the clinical and imaging features, treatment, and outcomes. We retrospectively retrieved the medical records of patients with CI among 220 BS patients admitted to the hospital internal medicine department between February 2006 and April 2019, who fulfilled the International Study Group diagnostic criteria for BS. Ten patients (8 men, 2 women) were eligible for the study. Mean age was 37.3 years. Three patients had 2 isolated episodes of cardiac BS. The different types of CI were coronary artery disease (5/10), intracardiac thrombus (4/10), pericarditis (1/10), myocarditis (1/10), and myocardial fibrosis (1/10). Five patients had associated vascular involvement (50%). Medical treatment was based on corticosteroids and colchicine in all patients (100%), anticoagulants in 8 (80%), and cyclophosphamide followed by azathioprine in 9 (90%). The clinical course was favorable in 9 patients; 1 patient died. CI remains an important feature of BS because of its association with increased risk of mortality and morbidity. Therefore, early screening and detection with imaging methods are paramount. Also, better cooperation between rheumatologists and cardiologists could improve outcomes.
Plant essential oils potency as natural antibiotic in Indonesian medicinal herb of “jamu”

The main purposes of this study are to compile antibacterial activity data of essential oils from Indonesian’s plants in order which can be used as a natural antibiotic in “jamu” to increase potential Indonesian medicinal herb. By using Agar Diffusing method, Bioautography and Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrum, respectively, antibacterial activity and chemical compounds of 12 plants essential oils were studied in the Natural Product Chemistry Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Mathematics, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga since 2007 until 2015. The results of this studies showed that all of the essential oils have a medium to a strong antibacterial activity which are in the range of 30 – 2,500 μg and 80-5,000 μg. Further on, the essential oils analyzed by GCMS showed that each essential oils have different dominant compounds. These data can be used as basic doses in the usage of essential oils as natural antibiotics.
Genetic vulnerability of exposures to antenatal maternal treatments in 1– to 2-month-old infants

The growth and maturation of the nervous system are vulnerable during pregnancy. The impact of antenatal exposures to maternal treatments, in the context of genetic vulnerability of the fetus, on sensorimotor functioning in early infancy remains unexplored. Statistical features of head movements obtained from resting-state sleep fMRI scans are examined in 1- to 2-month-old infants, both those at high risk (HR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to a biological sibling with ASD and at low risk (LR) (N = 56). In utero exposures include maternal prescription medications (psychotropic Rx: N = 3HR; N = 5LR vs. non-psychotropic Rx: N = 11HR; N = 9LR vs. none: N = 11HR; N = 16LR), psychiatric diagnoses (two or more Dx2: N = 5HR; N = 1LR; one Dx1: N = 4HR; N = 5LR; no Dx: N = 12HR; N = 19LR), infections requiring antibiotics (infection: N = 5HR; N = 8LR; no infection: N = 20HR; N = 22LR), or high fever (fever: N = 2HR; N = 2LR; no fever: N = 23HR; N = 27LR). Movements with significantly higher variability are detected in infants exposed to psychotropics (e.g., opioid analgesics) and those whose mothers had fever, and this effect is significantly worse for infants at HR for ASD. Movements are significantly less variable in HR infants with non-psychotropic exposures (e.g., antibiotics). Heightened number of psychiatric or mental health conditions is associated with noisier movements in both risk groups. Genetic vulnerability due to in utero exposure to maternal treatments is an important future approach to be advanced in the field of early mind and brain development.