Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monitored Anesthesia Care vs Intubation for Vertebrobasilar Stroke Endovascular Therapy

Importance No consensus regarding the ideal sedation treatment for stroke endovascular therapy has been reached, and practices remain largely based on local protocols and clinician preferences. Most studies have focused on anterior circulation strokes; therefore, little is known regarding the optimal anesthesia type for vertebrobasilar occlusion strokes. Objective To compare clinical and angiographic outcomes between monitored anesthesia care (MAC) and general anesthesia (GA) in patients presenting with vertebrobasilar occlusion strokes. Design, Setting, and Participants Retrospective, matched, case-control study of consecutive vertebrobasilar occlusion strokes treated with endovascular therapy at 2 academic institutions. The study took place between September 2005 and September 2015 at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Stroke Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and between September 2010 and September 2015 at the Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia. Patients requiring emergent intubation prior to endovascular therapy were excluded. The remaining patients were categorized into (1) MAC and (2) elective intubation for the procedure (elective GA). Patients who converted from MAC to GA during the procedure were included in the MAC group. The 2 groups were matched for age, baseline National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score, and glucose levels. Baseline characteristics and outcomes were compared. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome measure was the shift in the degree of disability among the 2 groups as measured by the modified Rankin scale at 90 days. Results A total of 215 patients underwent endovascular therapy for vertebrobasilar occlusion strokes during the study period. Thirty-nine patients were excluded owing to emergent pre–endovascular therapy intubation. Sixty-three patients had MAC (36%) and 113 patients had GA (64%). The conversion rate from MAC to GA was 13% (n = 8). After matching, 61 pairs of patients (n = 122) underwent primary analysis. The 2 groups were well balanced in terms of baseline characteristics. Median age was 69 years (interquartile range, 60-75 years) in the MAC group vs 67 years (interquartile range, 55.5-78.5 years) in the GA group (P = .83). Fifty-four percent of the patients in the MAC group were men vs 41% in the GA group (P = .44). When compared with the elective GA group, patients who underwent the procedure with MAC had similar rates of successful reperfusion, good clinical outcomes, hemorrhagic complications, and mortality. The modality of anesthesia was not associated with any significant changes in the modified Rankin scale score distribution (MAC: OR, 1.52; 95% CI, 0.80-2.90; P = .19). Conclusions and Relevance In endovascular therapy for acute posterior circulation stroke, MAC is feasible and appears to be as safe and effective as GA. Future clinical trials are warranted to confirm our findings.
Normobaric oxygen therapy inhibits HIF-1&agr; and VEGF expression in perihematoma and reduces neurological function defects

It is unknown whether normobaric oxygen (NBO) therapy exerts neuroprotective effects against human intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). In this study, the potential of NBO therapy for salvaging brain damage following ICH was investigated in a rodent model with oxygen delivered at different concentrations. A total of 164 male Sprague–Dawley rats were induced with ICH using a collagenase injection and divided randomly into one ICH control group (no treatment, n=86) and three NBO treatment groups (35, 50, or 90% oxygen, n=26/group). Twenty-six rats were used as sham controls. The Neurological Severity Score (NSS) was evaluated. Contents of brain water, hypoxia-inducible factor 1&agr; (HIF-1&agr;), and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) were measured in the perihematoma. A cellular apoptosis assay was performed. Compared with the sham control group, the ICH control group had higher NSS following ICH, which peaked at 24 h and began to decrease after 72 h. ICH rats also showed higher contents of brain water, HIF-1&agr;, and VEGF (peaked at 72 h) in the ipsilateral perihematoma tissue than in the contralateral brain tissue. Compared with the ICH control group, all NBO groups showed improved NSSs, decreased contents of brain water, HIF-1&agr; and VEGF, and fewer apoptotic cells in the perihematoma at 72 h after ICH, but statistical significance of these changes was achieved only with oxygen delivered at 90% (P<0.05, two-way analysis of variance). These results suggest that NBO therapy with oxygen delivered at 90% conferred best neuroprotection to ICH rats, potentially through amelioration of brain edema by suppressing HIF-1&agr; and VEGF expression in the perihematoma.
POLITECNICO TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE An Experimental Evaluation of the Computational Cost of a DPI Traffic Classifier

—A common belief in the scientiﬁc community is that trafﬁc classiﬁers based on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) are far more expensive in terms of computational complexity compared to statistical classiﬁers. In this paper we counter this notion by deﬁning accurate models for a Deep Packet Inspection classiﬁer and a statistical one based on Support Vector Machines, and by evaluating their actual processing costs through experimental analysis. The results suggest that, contrary to the common belief, a DPI classiﬁer and an SVM-based one can have comparable computational costs. Although much work is left to prove that our results apply in more general cases, this preliminary analysis is a ﬁrst indication of how DPI classiﬁers might not be as computationally complex, compared to other approaches, as we previously thought.
231 Circulation : Heart Failure Topic Review Cardiovascular Effects of 1 Year of Alagebrium and Endurance Exercise Training in Healthy Older Individuals

Lifelong exercise training maintains a youthful compliance of the left ventricle (LV), whereas a year of exercise training started later in life fails to reverse LV stiffening, possibly because of accumulation of irreversible advanced glycation end products. Alagebrium is a novel drug that breaks advanced glycation end product crosslinks and improves LV stiffness in aged animals. In this study, the authors prescribed alagebrium (200 mg daily) or placebo combined with aerobic exercise training or contact control in healthy, sedentary older individuals for 1 year. The authors evaluated overall cardiac function by the use of several modalities, including invasive pressure–volume measurements, exercise testing, and cardiac MRI before and after the training. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the effects of alagebrium and exercise training in healthy aged humans. After intervention, exercise training significantly increased exercise capacity, LV mass, and LV end-diastolic volume. Conversely, alagebrium had little effect on exercise capacity or LV geometry. However, alagebrium showed a modest improvement in LV stiffness compared with placebo. This favorable effect of alagebrium on LV stiffness was most prominent in individuals with combined alagebrium and exercise training.
Optical and Radio variability of the Northern VHE gamma-ray emitting BL Lac objects

We compare the variability properties of very high energy gamma-ray emitting BL Lac objects in the optical and radio bands. We use the variability information to distinguish multiple emission components in the jet, to be used as a guidance for spectral energy distribution modelling. Our sample includes 32 objects in the Northern sky that have data for at least 2 years in both bands. We use optical R-band data from the Tuorla blazar monitoring program and 15 GHz radio data from the Owens Valley Radio Observatory blazer monitoring program. We estimate the variability amplitudes using the intrinsic modulation index, and study the time-domain connection by cross-correlating the optical and radio light curves assuming power law power spectral density. Our sample objects are in general more variable in the optical than radio. We find correlated flares in about half of the objects, and correlated long-term trends in more than 40% of the objects. In these objects we estimate that at least 10%-50% of the optical emission originates in the same emission region as the radio, while the other half is due to faster variations not seen in the radio. This implies that simple single-zone spectral energy distribution models are not adequate for many of these objects.
Sensitivity and specificity of the Streptococcus pneumoniae urinary antigen test for unconcentrated urine from adult patients with pneumonia: A meta‐analysis

Studies on the sensitivity and specificity of the Binax Now Streptococcus pneumonia urinary antigen test (index test) show considerable variance of results. Those written in English provided sufficient original data to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the index test using unconcentrated urine to identify S. pneumoniae infection in adults with pneumonia. Reference tests were conducted with at least one culture and/or smear. We estimated sensitivity and two specificities. One was the specificity evaluated using only patients with pneumonia of identified other aetiologies (‘specificity (other)’). The other was the specificity evaluated based on both patients with pneumonia of unknown aetiology and those with pneumonia of other aetiologies (‘specificity (unknown and other)’) using a fixed model for meta‐analysis. We found 10 articles involving 2315 patients. The analysis of 10 studies involving 399 patients yielded a pooled sensitivity of 0.75 (95% confidence interval: 0.71–0.79) without heterogeneity or publication bias. The analysis of six studies involving 258 patients yielded a pooled specificity (other) of 0.95 (95% confidence interval: 0.92–0.98) without no heterogeneity or publication bias. We attempted to conduct a meta‐analysis with the 10 studies involving 1916 patients to estimate specificity (unknown and other), but it remained unclear due to moderate heterogeneity and possible publication bias. In our meta‐analysis, sensitivity of the index test was moderate and specificity (other) was high; however, the specificity (unknown and other) remained unclear.
The Ramah Navajo Child-to-Child Program

The international CHILD-to-child program, conceptualized by Dr. David Morley of the University of London, is based on the concept that children in developing nations act as caregivers, teachers, and health workers in their families and communities. The critical component in the program is the ability and willingness of children to become actively involved as care givers. CHILD-to-child is an action-oriented approach that draws upon a vast reservoir of similar programs that have been successful in over forty developing countries of the Third World. Similarities between the Ramah Navajo Community in New Mexico and many Third World nations served as a stimulus in the initiation and development of this project. The Ramah Navajo CHILD-to-child Health Education Project involved the development of a school health education curriculum that supported Native American children in a community-based effort to improve the quality of health care and the standard of living for their families. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education as a national demonstration project, a needs assessment was conducted and a seven-unit curriculum was developed.
Toward a physiological approach to breast cancer prevention.

Breast cancer is one of the most frequent malignancies in women, and its incidence is increasing. No reduction in the mortality rate has resulted from advances in early diagnosis and new therapeutic modalities; therefore, new approaches to the understanding of this disease are required. The observation that, in an experimental animal model, full-term pregnancy prior to exposure to a carcinogenic agent protects the mammary gland from malignant transformation led us to study the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. The protective effect observed after pregnancy did not depend upon gestational or lactational hyperplasia of the mammary gland, but upon structural changes induced in the mammary parenchyma by those processes. Those changes are permanent, since the protective effect is maintained after pregnancy and consists in the complete differentiation of terminal end buds to lobules. The protective effect exerted by pregnancy can be mimicked by treating young virgin rats with a single placental hormone, chorionic gonadotropin. Since the possibility of preventing breast cancer by treating young nulliparous females with hormones that mimic a fullterm pregnancy that results in complete differentiation of the gland is of practical interest to the human female population, we undertook the study of the human breast. The breast of postpubertal nulliparous women is composed of lobular structures reflecting different stages of development. Lobules type 1 (lob 1) are the most undifferentiated ones. Lobules type 2 evolve from the previous ones and have a more complex morphology, being composed of a higher number of ductular structures per lobule. They progress to lobules type 3 and 4, which are present in the pregnant and lactational periods of the mammary gland. In nulliparous women the structure most frequently found at all ages is the lob 1, whereas in parous women, lob 3 is the most frequent one. Lob 1 are considered to be the site of origin of ductal carcinoma in situ, which progresses to invasive carcinoma. Lob 2 originate lobular carcinoma and lob 3 originate adenomas, fibroadenomas, sclerosing adenosis, and apocrine cysts. These observations led us to test if the degree of lobular development influences the transformation of human breast epithelial cells exposed in vitro to chemical carcinogens. We found that primary cultures derived from breast tissues composed of lobules type 1 and 2 express phenotypes of cell transformation which were not observed in cells derived from lobules type 3. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
p53 Chromatin Epigenetic Domain Organization and p53 Transcription

ABSTRACT Epigenetic organization represents an important regulation mechanism of gene expression. In this work, we show that the mouse p53 gene is organized into two epigenetic domains. The first domain is fully unmethylated, associated with histone modifications in active genes, and organized in a nucleosome-free conformation that is deficient in H2a/H2b, whereas the second domain is fully methylated, associated with deacetylated histones, and organized in a nucleosomal structure. In mitotic cells, RNA polymerase is depleted in domain II, which is folded into a higher-order structure and is associated with H1 histone, whereas domain I conformation is preserved. Similar results were obtained for cells treated with inhibitors of associated regulatory factors. These results suggest that depletion of RNA polymerase II is the result of a physical barrier due to the folding of chromatin in domain II. The novel chromatin structure in the first domain during mitosis also suggests a mechanism for marking active genes in successive cell cycles.
La crisis financiera de los Estados unidos

El trabajo ofrece una vision comprehensiva de la presente crisis economica de los Estados Unidos, con enfasis en los determinantes y factores de riesgo que se encuentran en el sistema financiero de ese pais.Se concluye que: a) ha sido una crisis de desarrollo gradual, pero no prevista por la mayoria de los economistas, sorprendiendo pro su impacto recesivo y la diseminacion internacional observada desde mediados de 2008, b) es claro (ex post) que Estados Unidos debe introducir reformas institucionales en su sistema financiero y en sus mercados de capitales, pero sus autoridades no parecen tener claro cuales, c) se trata de una crisis del sistema financiero, no de las instituciones juridicas del capitalismo; d) en materia macroeconomica, aun bajo el maquillaje de "reglas flexibles", es claro el fracaso de la discrecionalidad en la politicas monetaria, asi como tambien el del implicito enfoque de la "autorregulacion" de los mercados de la llamada "doctrina Greenspan", e) Esta crisis ha evidenciado las notables falencias de la moderna macroeconomia dinamica basada en el paradigma de las expectativas racionales y de los mercados eficientes.
A study of recommendation considering cancellation — Case study of golf EC website

Recently Electronic Commerce (EC) have attracted much attention and widely popular. Whence recommendations which understand user's feelings and sort out the goods the user desires attract attention. On the other hand, cancellation behavior can be large risk at EC companies which handles use of service at facilities such as hotel rooms and golf courses as products. We try analyzing to decrease the canceling ratio caused by the inner factors which are come from customer's mind. We recommend item which understands customer's true needs by analyzing reservation and data of behavior log including actual cancellation. We also inspected the utility of the cancellation data and the constrain conditions for model building using a Bayesian network. We show that it is possible to contribute to accuracy improvement of a recommendation for the cancellation data.
Volunteering in cross-national perspective: initial comparisons

Despite a growing interest in volunteering at national and international levels, few studies have explored comparative aspects of voluntary activities. To remedy this situation, this paper looks at the cultural differences in defining volunteering in relation to paid work on the one hand, and compulsory work on the other. Against this background, the paper explores cross-national patterns in the frequency of volunteering, the social characteristics of volunteers, and the motivations that lie behind them. The paper finds a close relationship between the type of non-profit regime (liberal, social democratic, corporatist, and statist) and the role and importance of volunteering. In closing , the paper addresses policy issues and open research questions.
Molecular epidemiological studies show that hepatitis A virus is endemic among active homosexual men in Europe

Large outbreaks of hepatitis A have occurred in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom during the period 1997–2005 affecting homosexual men. A collaborative study was undertaken between these countries to determine if the strains involved in these hepatitis A outbreaks were related genetically. The N‐terminal region of VP1 and the VP1/P2A region of the strains were sequenced and compared. The majority of the strains found among homosexual men from the different European countries formed a closely related cluster, named MSM1, belonging to genotype IA. Different HAV strains circulated among other risk groups in these countries during the same period, indicating that specific strains were circulating among homosexual men exclusively. Similar strains found among homosexual men from 1997 to 2005 indicate that these HAV strains have been circulating among homosexual men for a long time. The homosexual communities are probably too small within the individual countries to maintain HAV in their population over time, whereas the homosexual communities across Europe are probably sufficiently large to sustain continued circulation of homologous HAV strains for years resulting in an endemic situation among homosexual men. J. Med. Virol. 79:356–365, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
SPRINT: side-chain prediction inference toolbox for multistate protein design

UNLABELLED SPRINT is a software package that performs computational multistate protein design using state-of-the-art inference on probabilistic graphical models. The input to SPRINT is a list of protein structures, the rotamers modeled for each structure and the pre-calculated rotamer energies. Probabilistic inference is performed using the belief propagation or A* algorithms, and dead-end elimination can be applied as pre-processing. The output can either be a list of amino acid sequences simultaneously compatible with these structures, or probabilistic amino acid profiles compatible with the structures. In addition, higher order (e.g. pairwise) amino acid probabilities can also be predicted. Finally, SPRINT also has a module for protein side-chain prediction and single-state design. AVAILABILITY The full C++ source code for SPRINT can be freely downloaded from http://www.protonet. cs.huji. ac.il/sprint.
A scalable parallel workstation cluster system

In this paper, we argue that because of recent advance of network & CPU technologies, workstation clusters are poised to become the primary parallel computing infrastructure for science and engineering computing. After analyzing and comparing the communication performance of three popular networks: 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Ethernet and 640 Mbps Myrinet on an experimental workstation cluster, we point out that two main factors hinder the wider application of workstation cluster: low efficiency of communication system (both hardware and software) and lack of friendly parallel program development environment with accessory tools. For these two problem, we implemented two workstation cluster systems for different performance/price rate requirements: one is 8 PowerPCs with shared media network, another is 8 Sun Sparcstations with switch network. By using Reduced Communication Protocol (RCP), we dramatically improved the performance of communication system; by expanding the language support of PVM and adding several useful tools, we build a visual integrated parallel program development environment IPCE. On our platform, we also analyzed several massive applications, such as GRI benchmark, earthquake simulator, weather forecasting and some NAS benchmarks, and we get very good results for these coarse-grain to middle-grain applications. The speedup ranges from 5.83 to 7.98 and parallel efficiency reaches to 72.88%-99.7%.
Implications of Marijuana Legalization for Adolescent Substance Use

Marijuana that is legally available for adults has multiple implications for adolescent substance use. One potential effect that legalization may have is an increase in adolescent use to due increased availability, greater social acceptance, and possibly lower prices. Legalization may also facilitate the introduction of new formulations of marijuana (edible, vaporized) and with potentially higher potencies. It is unknown what adolescent consumption patterns will be if marijuana is widely available and marketed in different forms, or what effects different patterns of adolescent use will have on cognition, the development of marijuana use disorders, school performance, and the development of psychotic illnesses. Also unclear is whether adolescent users will be experiencing higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) compared with previous generations of users due to higher potencies. Although previous studies of the effects of adolescent marijuana use provide some guidance for current policy and public health recommendations, many new studies will be needed that answer questions in the context of use within a legal adult environment. Claims that marijuana has medicinal benefits create additional challenges for adolescent prevention efforts, as they contrast with messages of its harmfulness. Prevention and treatment approaches will need to address perceptions of the safety of marijuana, claims of its medicinal use, and consider family-wide effects as older siblings and parents may increasingly openly consume and advocate for marijuana use. Guidance for primary care physicians will be needed regarded screening and counseling. Widespread legalization and acceptance of marijuana implies that as law enforcement approaches for marijuana control decline, public health, medical, and scientific efforts to understand and reduce negative consequences of adolescent marijuana use need to be substantially increased to levels commensurate with those efforts for tobacco and alcohol.