Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-sampling for human papillomavirus (HPV) testing: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction Human papillomavirus (HPV) self-sampling test kits may increase screening for and early detection of cervical cancer and reduce its burden globally. To inform WHO self-care guidelines, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of HPV self-sampling among adult women on cervical (pre-)cancer screening uptake, screening frequency, social harms/adverse events and linkage to clinical assessment/treatment. Methods The included studies compared women using cervical cancer screening services with HPV self-sampling with women using standard of care, measured at least one outcome, and were published in a peer-reviewed journal. We searched PubMed, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CNIAHL), Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature (LILACS) and Embase through October 2018. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane tool for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and the Evidence Project tool for non-randomised studies. Meta-analysis was conducted using random-effects models to generate pooled estimates of relative risk (RR). Results 33 studies in 34 articles with 369 017 total participants met the inclusion criteria: 29 RCTs and 4 observational studies. All studies examined HPV self-sampling; comparison groups were standard of care (eg, Pap smear, visual inspection with acetic acid, clinician-collected HPV testing). 93% of participants were from high-income countries. All 33 studies measured cervical cancer screening uptake. Meta-analysis found greater screening uptake among HPV self-sampling participants compared with control (RR: 2.13, 95% CI 1.89 to 2.40). Effect size varied by HPV test kit dissemination method, whether mailed directly to home (RR: 2.27, 95% CI 1.89 to 2.71), offered door-to-door (RR: 2.37, 95% CI 1.12 to 5.03) or requested on demand (RR: 1.28, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.82). Meta-analysis showed no statistically significant difference in linkage to clinical assessment/treatment between arms (RR: 1.12, 95% CI 0.80 to 1.57). No studies measured screening frequency or social harms/adverse events. Conclusion A growing evidence base, mainly from high-income countries and with significant heterogeneity, suggests HPV self-sampling can increase cervical cancer screening uptake compared with standard of care, with a marginal effect on linkage to clinical assessment/treatment. Systematic review registration number PROSPERO CRD42018114871.
Life expectancy and disparities in survival among HIV-infected people receiving antiretroviral therapy: an observational cohort study in Kathmandu, Nepal

Introduction The advent of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has dramatically slowed down the progression of HIV. This study assesses the disparities in survival, life expectancy and determinants of survival among HIV-infected people receiving ART. Methods Using data from one of Nepal’s largest population-based retrospective cohort studies (in Kathmandu, Nepal), we followed a total of 3191 HIV-infected people aged 15 years and older who received ART over the period of 2004–2015. We created abridged life tables with age-specific survival rates and life expectancy, stratified by sex, ethnicity, CD4 cell counts and the WHO-classified clinical stage at initiation of ART. Results HIV-infected people who initiated ART with a CD4 cell count of >200 cells/cm3 at 15 years had 27.4 (22.3 to 32.6) years of additional life. People at WHO-classified clinical stage I and 15 years of age who initiated ART had 23.1 (16.6 to 29.7) years of additional life. Life expectancy increased alongside the CD4 cell count and decreased as clinical stages progressed upward. The study cohort contributed 8484.8 person years, with an overall survival rate of 3.3 per 100 person years (95% CI 3.0 to 3.7). Conclusions There are disparities in survival among HIV-infected people in Nepal. The survival payback of ART is proven; however, late diagnosis or the health system as a whole will affect the control and treatment of the illness. This study offers evidence of the benefits of enrolling early in care in general and ART in particular.
Post‐tetanic potentiation at the neuromuscular junction of the frog

1. Post‐tetanic potentiation (PTP) was studied at the neuromuscular junction of the frog. The magnitude and time course of PTP was dependent on the number of stimuli in the tetanus, rather than on the frequency or duration of the tetanus. At low temperature the maximum amplitude of PTP was unchanged, but the time course was prolonged.
Co-expression Network Analysis Elucidated a Core Module in Association With Prognosis of Non-functioning Non-invasive Human Pituitary Adenoma

Non-functioning pituitary adenomas (NFPAs) are tumors with clinically challenging features since they have insidious progression. A complex network of gene interactions is thought to have roles in tumor formation and progression. Therefore, revealing the genetic network behind NFPA tumorigenesis is not only essential to attain further knowledge of tumor biology, but also plays a fundamental role in the development of efficacious treatment strategies. Differential co-expression network analysis is an outstanding approach for elucidation of groups of genes which show distinct co-expression patterns among phenotypes. In this study, we carried out a differential co-expression network analysis of NFPA-associated transcriptome dataset (n = 40) considering invasive (n = 22) and non-invasive (n = 18) phenotypes. Furthermore, we identified differentially co-expressed and co-regulated mRNA modules, which might be considered as potential systems biomarkers for NFPA prognosis and invasiveness. As a result, we have identified a novel 13-gene module, including CEACAM6, CYP4B1, EIF2S2, HID1, IFFO1, MYO18A, PDCD2, SGIP1, SWSAP1, and four unknown genes (A_24_P127621, A_24_P255786, A_24_P683553, and A_24_P916979), which was able to categorize the patients into two groups as invasive and non-invasive NFPA with distinct prognosis. The prognostic core module genes were associated with progression and prognosis of brain and glandular based cancers as well. Furthermore, these module genes were also expressed in blood, salivary gland, and spinal cord tissues. These results may provide the evidence on featured gene module which might play a prominent role in NFPA prognosis and sub-typing as effective biomarkers and therapeutic targets in the future.
Movement disorders in encephalitis induced by Rhodococcus aurantiacus infection relieved by the administration of L‐dopa and anti‐T‐cell antibodies

Mice injected with Rhodococcus aurantiacus by the intravenous (i.v.) route show neurological disorders, hemiparesis, vertical headshake and turn‐round gait after day 7 postinfection (p.i.). Neurological symptoms caused by i.v. inoculation of R. aurantiacus were relieved by treatment with levodopa (l‐dopa). R. aurantiacus was isolated from the brain and was found to be completely eliminated at day 7 p.i. Focal encephalitis was mainly observed in the brain stem, and T cells could be isolated from the brain after day 7 p.i. Administration of both an anti‐CD4 monoclonal antibody (mAb) and an anti‐CD8 mAb suppressed neurological symptoms. These results suggest that R. aurantiacus induces movement disorders in mice, and that the symptoms are mediated by T cells infiltrating the brain, rather than directly by the bacterium.
Monoclonal Antibodies Targeting Ion Channels and Their Therapeutic Potential

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) represent a rapidly growing pharmaceutical class of protein drugs that becomes an important part of the precision therapy. mAbs are characterized by their high specificity and affinity for the target antigen, which is mostly present on the cell surface. Ion channels are a large family of transmembrane proteins that control ion transport across the cell membrane. They are involved in almost all biological processes in both health and disease and are widely considered as prospective targets. However, no antibody-based drug targeting ion channel has been developed so far that has progressed to clinical use. Thus, we provide a comprehensive review of the elaborated mAbs against ion channels, describe their mechanisms of action, and discuss their therapeutic potential.
Experimental Survey of Spiral Dynamics in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction

We present a systematic study of spiral waves in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky re- action in a spatial open reactor, where the concentrations of sulfuric acid, sodium bromate, and malonic acid are varied. Within this parameter space, three kinds of instabilities arise: two of them, which we identify as the retracting wavefront and convective instabilities, lead to the destruction of the spiral pattern, and mark the boundaries of the spiral existence domain in parameter space. Inside this domain, there exists a region where simply rotating spirals undergo the meandering instability. Quantitative measurements of the asymptotic characteristics of sim- ple spirals provide scaling relations between the observables: the pitch varies as the square root of the period. They both diverge with simple exponents at the retracting wavefront instability. This organization, reminiscent of a second order phase transition, allows us to consider the spi- ral a critical pattern. Comparison with several models and numerical simulations indicates the validity or discrepancies of applying these theoretical approaches to our experimental results. R esum e. |N ous pr esentons une etude syst ematique des ondes spirales dans la r eaction de Belousov-Zhabotinsky en r eacteur ouvert, en fonctions des concentrations d'acide sulfurique, de bromate de sodium et d'acide malonique. Dans cet espace de param etres, trois types d'insta- bilit es surviennent : deux d'entre elles, que nous appelons instabilit e de r etraction de front et instabilit e convective, nissent par d etruire les structures spirales, et marquent les limites de leur domaine d'existence. Il existe, dans ce domaine, une r egion o u les spirales en rotation simple bifurquent vers l'instabilit e de sinuage. Des mesures quantitatives des caract eristiques asymp- totiques des spirales simples fournissent des lois d' echelles entre les observables : le pas varie comme le carr ed e la p eriode ; tous deux divergent avec des exposants simples a l'instabilit ed e r etraction. Cette organisation, rappelant celle des transitions de phases du second ordre, nous autorise a consid erer la spirale comme une structure critique. La comparaison de nos r esultats exp erimentaux avec di erents mod eles et simulations num eriques montre accords et d esaccords des approches th eoriques.
Current State and Future Prospects of EEG and fNIRS in Robot-Assisted Gait Rehabilitation: A Brief Review

Gait and balance impairments are frequently considered as the most significant concerns among individuals suffering from neurological diseases. Robot-assisted gait training (RAGT) has shown to be a promising neurorehabilitation intervention to improve gait recovery in patients following stroke or brain injury by potentially initiating neuroplastic changes. However, the neurophysiological processes underlying gait recovery through RAGT remain poorly understood. As non-invasive, portable neuroimaging techniques, electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) provide new insights regarding the neurophysiological processes occurring during RAGT by measuring different perspectives of brain activity. Due to spatial information about changes in cortical activation patterns and the rapid temporal resolution of bioelectrical changes, more features correlated with brain activation and connectivity can be identified when using fused EEG-fNIRS, thus leading to a detailed understanding of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying motor behavior and impairments due to neurological diseases. Therefore, multi-modal integrations of EEG-fNIRS appear promising for the characterization of neurovascular coupling in brain network dynamics induced by RAGT. In this brief review, we surveyed neuroimaging studies focusing specifically on robotic gait rehabilitation. While previous studies have examined either EEG or fNIRS with respect to RAGT, a multi-modal integration of both approaches is lacking. Based on comparable studies using fused EEG-fNIRS integrations either for guiding non-invasive brain stimulation or as part of brain-machine interface paradigms, the potential of this methodologically combined approach in RAGT is discussed. Future research directions and perspectives for targeted, individualized gait recovery that optimize the outcome and efficiency of RAGT in neurorehabilitation were further derived.
Analysis, modeling and control of an interleaved isolated boost series resonant converter for microinverter applications

The analysis, modeling and control of an interleaved boost series resonant converter (IBSRC) is presented in this paper. The converter consists of an interleaved boost stage, a high-frequency transformer (HF-XFMR) and a voltage doubler rectifier. The HF-XFMR's leakage inductance and the voltage doubler bridge rectifier's capacitors form a resonant tank that allows zero-voltage switching (ZVS) of the main semiconductor devices and zero-current switching (ZCS) of the rectifier's diodes. This capability enables the IBSRC to operate at high switching frequencies leading to a compact design while keeping efficiency high. This makes the IBSRC suitable for the dc-dc converter stage of a dual-stage microinverter. The IBSRC dynamics are extensively investigated using the extended describing functions (EDF) methodology, whereas the converter small-signal model is derived to design the closed-loop control strategy. Experimental results on a 350-W prototype are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model and the performance of the controller during input and output variations.
A reiterated leader sequence is present in polyomavirus late transcripts produced by a transformed rat cell line

In cells transformed by polyomavirus, the viral genome is integrated into the host DNA, and in the absence of excision, viral gene expression is limited to the early region. We report here that the ability of a unique transformed rat cell line, designated SS1A, to produce readily detectable levels of late mRNAs is due to rearrangements of the integrated viral sequences. The structure of the SS1A insertion, resulting from amplification and deletion events, allows for the formation of a primary late transcript that can subsequently be spliced to generate a reiterated leader attached to the body of the late mRNA coding sequences. The presence of transcripts containing such a leader was confirmed by sequencing the 5' end of cDNA copies of late mRNAs isolated from a library constructed with SS1A mRNA. These results suggest that a reiterated leader sequence is necessary to stabilize late mRNA.
Sensor Fusion with Square-Root Cubature Information Filtering

This paper derives a square-root information-type filtering algorithm for nonlinear multi-sensor fusion problems using the cubature Kalman filter theory. The resulting filter is called the square-root cubature Information filter (SCIF). The SCIF propagates the square-root information matrices derived from numerically stable matrix operations and is therefore numerically robust. The SCIF is applied to a highly maneuvering target tracking problem in a distributed sensor network with feedback. The SCIF’s performance is finally compared with the regular cubature information filter and the traditional extended information filter. The results, presented herein, indicate that the SCIF is the most reliable of all three filters and yields a more accurate estimate than the extended information filter.
Association between body-mass index and risk of death in more than 1 million Asians.

BACKGROUND Most studies that have evaluated the association between the body-mass index (BMI) and the risks of death from any cause and from specific causes have been conducted in populations of European origin. METHODS We performed pooled analyses to evaluate the association between BMI and the risk of death among more than 1.1 million persons recruited in 19 cohorts in Asia. The analyses included approximately 120,700 deaths that occurred during a mean follow-up period of 9.2 years. Cox regression models were used to adjust for confounding factors. RESULTS In the cohorts of East Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, the lowest risk of death was seen among persons with a BMI (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) in the range of 22.6 to 27.5. The risk was elevated among persons with BMI levels either higher or lower than that range--by a factor of up to 1.5 among those with a BMI of more than 35.0 and by a factor of 2.8 among those with a BMI of 15.0 or less. A similar U-shaped association was seen between BMI and the risks of death from cancer, from cardiovascular diseases, and from other causes. In the cohorts comprising Indians and Bangladeshis, the risks of death from any cause and from causes other than cancer or cardiovascular disease were increased among persons with a BMI of 20.0 or less, as compared with those with a BMI of 22.6 to 25.0, whereas there was no excess risk of either death from any cause or cause-specific death associated with a high BMI. CONCLUSIONS Underweight was associated with a substantially increased risk of death in all Asian populations. The excess risk of death associated with a high BMI, however, was seen among East Asians but not among Indians and Bangladeshis.
Feeding Pasteurized Waste Milk to Preweaned Dairy Calves Changes Fecal and Upper Respiratory Tract Microbiota

In the present study bacterial communities from both, the gastrointestinal and respiratory tract of pre-weaned dairy calves fed two different milk-feeding programs were characterized using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Twenty female Holstein calves (38.8 ± 1.40 kg of BW) were fed pasteurized waste milk (pWM) containing residues of various antimicrobials. Twenty additional calves (38.1 ± 1.19 kg of BW) were fed milk replacer (MR) with similar nutrient composition (27.5% crude protein, 32.1% fat) compared to waste milk (28.6% crude protein, 30.0% fat) from day 1 to weaning at day 49 of study. Fecal samples and nasal swabs were collected on day 42 only from calves that were not treated with therapeutic antibiotics throughout the study, which were 8 MR and 10 pWM calves. To assess the impact of the two feeding regimes on the fecal and nasal microbiota, α and β-diversity measures were calculated, and the relative abundance of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at different taxonomic levels was determined for each sample. In general, Chao1, PD Whole Tree, and Shannon diversity indices were similar for the fecal and nasal bacterial communities of calves regardless of the feeding regime. However, principal coordinate analysis based on unweighted Unifrac distances indicated differences in the structure of bacterial communities of calves fed milk replacer compared with those from calves fed pasteurized waste milk. The relative abundance of the Streptococcaceae family and the genus Histophilus was greater (P < 0.05) in the nasal microbiota of calves fed milk replacer than in those fed pasteurized waste milk. However, the genus Prevotella tended (P = 0.06) to be more relatively abundant in the respiratory tract of calves fed pasteurized waste milk than in those fed milk replacer. Differences in relative abundances of bacterial taxa in gut microbiota were only observed at the phylum level, suggesting that antimicrobial residues present in waste milk have a non-specific influence at a lower taxonomical level.
Bridge Jobs and Partial Retirement

The "job-stopping" process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer "bridge" employment, partial retirement, and reverse retirement. Fewer than two-fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs, over half partially retire at some point in their working lives, and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring. In addition, postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job, and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender, permanent income, and career-job pension status.
Spanish Word Embeddings Learned on Word Association Norms

Word embeddings are vector representations of words in an n -dimensional space used for many natural language processing tasks. A large training corpus is needed for learning good quality word embed-dings. In this work, we present a method based on the node2vec algorithm for learning embeddings based on paths in a graph. We used a collection of Word Association Norms in Spanish to build a graph of word connections. The nodes of the network correspond to the words in the corpus, whereas the edges correspond to a pair of words given in a free association test. We evaluated our word vectors in human annotated benchmarks, achieving better results than those trained on a billion-word corpus such as, word2vec, fasttext, and glove.
Traceability Links Recovery in BPMN Models

Traceability Links Recovery has been a topic of interest for many years. However, Traceability Links Recovery in models in general, and BPMN models in particular, has not received enough attention yet. Through my work, I aim to ﬁll this research gap by studying Trace-ability Links Recovery between requirements and BPMN models. So far, under the tutelage of directors Carlos Cetina and ´ Oscar Pastor, I adapted Traceability Links Recovery code techniques to work over BPMN models. The produced approach was applied to two diﬀerent case studies, an academic one and an industrial one. The outcomes of the research outperformed the state of the art baseline. Under the light of these novel ﬁndings, opportunities for new research unfold.
Changes in Self-Rated Health Right After Immigration: A Panel Study of Economic, Social, Cultural, and Emotional Explanations of Self-Rated Health Among Immigrants in the Netherlands

Immigrants are often found to rate their health better than the native population does. It is, however, suggested that this healthy immigrant effect declines with an enduring length of stay. With Dutch panel data, we investigate which patterns in self-rated health can be found among immigrants shortly after their migration. We test to what extent economic, social, cultural and emotional explanations affect the changes that immigrants report in self-rated health. Based on a four-wave panel, our results support the immigrants' health decline hypothesis, since the self-rated health decreases in the first years after immigration to the Netherlands. The major change occurs between immigrants rating their health no longer as “very good,” but as “good. ” Shortly after immigration, self-rated health is associated with being employed and a higher income. Hazardous work and physically heavy work decrease self-rated health. Notwithstanding these effects, social, cultural, and emotional explanations turn out to be stronger. A lack of Dutch friends, perceptions of discrimination, perceived cultural distance, and feelings of homesickness strongly affect self-rated health. Furthermore, in understanding changes in self-rated health, the effects of making contact with Dutch people and changes in the perception of discrimination are definitive. However, contact with Dutch people did not decrease and discrimination did not increase over time, making them ineligible as an explanation for overall health decrease. Only the small effect that first-borns have may count as a reason for decreased self-rated health, since many of the recent immigrants we followed started families in the first years after immigration. Our findings leave room for the coined “acculturation to an unhealthier lifestyle thesis,” and we see promise in a stronger focus on the role of unmet expectations in the first years after immigration.