Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A REVIEW ON MICROSPONGE DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM

The drug delivery technology landscape has become highly competitive and rapidly evolving. More and more developments in delivery systems are being integrated to optimize the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of the therapy. Peptides, proteins and DNA-based therapeutics cannot be effectively delivered by conventional means. A Microsponges delivery system is a highly cross-linked, porous, polymeric microsphere, polymeric system consisting of porous microspheres that can entrap and release them into the skin over a long period of time. This delivery system provides extended release with reduced irritation, better tolerance, improved thermal, physical and chemical stability. The main goal of any drug delivery system is to achieve desired concentration of the drug in blood or tissue, which is therapeutically effective and non-toxic for a prolonged period In the present study various methods for preparation of microsponges drug delivery system are studied. Various advantages are also given which shows the importance of this method for the delivery of drugs over the other drug delivery system. More and more developments in delivery systems are being integrated to optimize the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of the therapy. Microsponge technology offers entrapment of ingredients and is believed to contribute towards reduced side effects, improved stability, increased elegance, and enhanced formulation flexibility. In addition, numerous studies have confirmed that microsponge systems are non-irritating, nonmutagenic, non-allergenic, and non-toxic. Microsponges delivery technology is being used currently in cosmetics, over-the-counter (OTC) skin care, sunscreens and prescription products. One of the best feature of microsponge is it is self-sterilizing. This review is focused on method of preparation, characterization and application of microsponge. Keywords: Microsponge, Control relaease, Target release, topical formulation, oral administration
Program Slicing Technique: A Novel Approach to Improve Programming Skills in Novice Learners

Learning programming contains several activities, e.g., syntax and semantics of language, program design, comprehension and debugging. Conventional classroom teaching begins with declarative knowledge concepts followed by program writing skills. As a result students attempt to memorise typical program codes instead of writing a fresh code applying the programming concepts. We have applied Program Slicing Technique as a instructional methodology to improve the basic programming skills of the novices. Slicing technique has been widely used in software testing, debugging and software assessment. Results of our study show that slicing technique has helped in improving program understanding and clarification of misconceptions encountered while coding a program. This approach also helps self-learners to gain better programming skills.
Encuesta de reconocimiento de la enfermedad cardiovascular en la mujer por la mujer

En la Argentina, las enfermedades cardiovasculares representan el principal problema de salud de las mujeres. Desde el ano 2007 mueren mas mujeres que hombres en nuestro pais por causa cardiovascular y de acuerdo con las ultimas estadisticas vitales publicadas, muere una mujer cada 11 minutos. Evaluar si las mujeres perciben que pueden sufrir enfermedades cardiovasculares asi como valorar el grado de conocimiento que tienen sobre estas patologias fueron los objetivos de una encuesta telefonica realizada en una muestra representativa de mujeres de Buenos Aires. Los resultados obtenidos en 600 encuestadas mostraron que la gran mayoria de las mujeres tienen un grado de conocimiento adecuado acerca de los factores de riesgo cardiovascular, de los sintomas de enfermedad coronaria y accidente cerebrovascular y de las conductas que previenen o reducen la probabilidad de enfermarse. Sin embargo, gran parte de las mujeres, y en especial las jovenes, perciben mucho mas al cancer de mama como un problema de salud que a las enfermedades cardiovasculares. Los resultados obtenidos tambien muestran que la informacion que tienen las mujeres sobre las enfermedades cardiovasculares rara vez proviene de sus medicos y mayoritariamente se origina en los medios de comunicacion masiva. El hecho de que las mujeres incrementen su percepcion sobre el riesgo de padecer enfermedades cardiovasculares podria traducirse en una mayor adopcion de conductas preventivas y, ante la eventualidad de presentar un evento cardiovascular agudo, en una pronta consulta y mayor y mejor acceso al tratamiento.
The end of overeating: Taking control of the insatiable American appetite

In The end of overeating: taking control of the insatiable American appetite, David A. Kessler presents an engaging perspective of the obesity epidemic. About two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight. The number of overweight and obese children is also growing at an alarming rate. These trends have adverse consequences on health because obesity increases the risk of chronic diseases, notably diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obstructive sleep apnea, and cancer. Obesity is also a major cause of disability and may shorten lifespan. As commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Kessler led the fight against tobacco companies to place their products under federal regulation. He also pushed through legislation for nutritional labeling of food. The idea for his book came to Kessler while watching a patient on The Oprah Winfrey Show describe how her struggles with food and weight affected her life. During his tenure as dean of the Yale School of Medicine, and later the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, Kessler embarked on a mission to unravel the factors underlying the rising incidence of obesity. He analyzed his own eating habits, watched others eating at restaurants and other locations, reviewed publications, and interviewed basic scientists and clinicians as well as food industry executives and workers. Kessler’s theory can be summed up as follows: Modern foods, particularly American foods, are designed not to satisfy, but rather to stimulate the reward pathways in the brain, conditioning us to crave more food.
A 2n Constraint Formulation for the Capacitated Minimal Spanning Tree Problem

In this paper we present a new formulation for the Capacitated Minimal Spanning Tree CMST problem. One advantage of the new formulation is that it is more compact in the number of constraints than a well-known formulation. Additionally, we show that the linear programming relaxation of both formulations produces optimal solutions with the same cost. We present a brief discussion concerning valid inequalities for the CMST which are directly derived from the new formulation. We show that some of the new inequalities are not dominated by some sets of facet-inducing inequalities for the CMST. We derive some Lagrangian relaxation-based methods from the new formulation and present computational evidence showing that reasonable improvements on the original linear programming bounds can be obtained if these methods are strengthened by the use of cutting planes. The reported computational results indicate that one of the methods presented in this paper dominates, in most of the cases, the previous best methods reported in the literature. The most significant improvements are obtained in the instances with the root in the corner.
Role of Chromium in Human Health and in Diabetes

Despite widespread use by patients with diabetes and anecdotal reports in the past regarding its efficacy, until recently, data in humans concerning chromium’s effects on insulin action in vivo or on cellular aspects of insulin action were scarce. Consequently, significant controversy still exists regarding the effect of chromium supplementation on parameters assessing human health. Furthermore, elucidating the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which chromium supplements affect carbohydrate metabolism in vivo is necessary before specific recommendations can be made regarding its routine use in the management of diabetes. This review focuses on providing current information about this trace mineral’s specific mechanisms of action and clinical trials in patients with diabetes. Chromium, one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust and seawater, exists in our environment in several oxidation states, principally as metallic (Cr), trivalent (+3), and hexavalent (+6) chromium. The latter is largely synthesized by the oxidation of the more common and naturally occurring trivalent chromium and is highly toxic. Trivalent chromium, found in most foods and nutrient supplements, is an essential nutrient with very low toxicity. The interest in chromium as a nutritional enhancement to glucose metabolism can be traced back to the 1950s, when it was suggested that brewer’s yeast contained a glucose tolerance factor (GTF) that prevented diabetes in experimental animals (1). This factor was eventually suggested to be a biologically active form of trivalent chromium that could substantially lower plasma glucose levels in diabetic mice (2). Interest regarding chromium administration in patients with diabetes was kindled by the observation in the 1970s that it truly was an essential nutrient required for normal carbohydrate metabolism. A patient receiving total parenteral nutrition (TPN) developed severe signs of diabetes, including weight loss and hyperglycemia that was refractory to increasing insulin dosing (3). Based on previous animal studies …
Cost-effectiveness analysis of recurrence score-guided treatment using a 21-gene assay in early breast cancer.

PURPOSE Most guidelines for hormone receptor (HR)-positive early breast cancer recommend addition of adjuvant chemotherapy for most women, leading to overtreatment, which causes considerable morbidity and cost. There has been recent incorporation of gene expression analysis in aiding decision making. We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of recurrence score (RS)-guided treatment using 21-gene assay as compared with treatment guided by the Adjuvant! Online program (AOL). PATIENTS AND METHODS A Markov model was developed to compare the cost-effectiveness of treatment guided either by 21-gene assay or by AOL in a 50-year-old woman with lymph node-negative HR-positive breast cancer over a lifetime horizon. We assumed that women classified to be at high risk all received chemotherapy followed by tamoxifen and those classified to be at low risk received tamoxifen only. The model took a health care payer's perspective with results reported in 2008 Canadian dollars ($). Event rates, costs, and utilities were derived from the literature. Both costs and benefits were discounted at 5%. Outcome measures were life years gained, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), lifetime costs, and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs). RESULTS For a 50-year-old woman, RS-guided treatment was associated with an incremental lifetime cost of $4,102 and a gain in 0.065 QALY, with an ICER of $63,064 per QALY compared with AOL-guided treatment. ICER increased with increasing cost of 21-gene assay and increasing age of patients. Results were most sensitive to probabilities relating to risk categorization and recurrence rate. CONCLUSIONS The 21-gene assay appears cost-effective from a Canadian health care perspective.
Decomposition of Utility Functions on Subsets of Product Sets

The standard decomposition theorem for additive and multiplicative utility functions Pollak [Pollak, R. O. 1967. Additive von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. Econometrica35 485-494. ], Keeney [Keeney, R. L. 1974. Multiplicative utility functions. Opns. Res.22 22-34. ] assumes that the outcome set is a whole product set. In this paper this assumption is relaxed, and the question of whether or not a natural revision of this theorem necessarily holds is investigated. This paper proves that two additional conditions are needed for the decomposition theorem to hold in the context where the outcome set is a subset of a Cartesian product. It is argued that these two new conditions are satisfied by a large family of subsets corresponding to significant real-world problems. Further research avenues are suggested including a generalization of this new decomposition result to nonexpected utility theories.
360° video stabilization

We present a hybrid 3D-2D algorithm for stabilizing 360° video using a deformable rotation motion model. Our algorithm uses 3D analysis to estimate the rotation between key frames that are appropriately spaced such that the right amount of motion has occurred to make that operation reliable. For the remaining frames, it uses 2D optimization to maximize the visual smoothness of feature point trajectories. A new low-dimensional flexible deformed rotation motion model enables handling small translational jitter, parallax, lens deformation, and rolling shutter wobble. Our 3D-2D architecture achieves better robustness, speed, and smoothing ability than either pure 2D or 3D methods can provide. Stabilizing a video with our method takes less time than playing it at normal speed. The results are sufficiently smooth to be played back at high speed-up factors; for this purpose we present a simple 360° hyperlapse algorithm that remaps the video frame time stamps to balance the apparent camera velocity.
Nueva evidencia epidemiológica y molecular a favor de la transmisión interhumana para el linaje Sout del hantavirus Andes

: After the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) outbreak occurred in Southern Argentina (Patagonia) in 1996, a new mechanism of hantavirus spread was described for Andes virus (AND): person-to-person transmission. Since then, this mode of transmission has been limited to the endemic area of AND Sout lineage. We report here an HPS case, patient A, with residence in Buenos Aires Province, whose unique epidemiological risk factor was to have shared a trip to Southern Argentina with an already ill person, later confirmed as an HPS case (patient I). A third case (patient B), with residence in Buenos Aires Province, developed HPS after several contact events with patient A, with no additional risk factors. Hantavirus infection was confirmed in all three patients by serological diagnosis and viral genetic characterization. The viral lineage characterized was AND Sout, being the same strain in the three cases. The clinical picture of patient A showed profound compromise, with gastrointestinal symptoms, with no clinical evidence of pulmonary involvement. In this work we present new evidence supporting person-to-person transmission for AND Sout lineage, where there was an only contact with the index case, occasional, prolonged and non-repeated, established out of the endemic area for AND Sout lineage.
Effective Document Labeling with Very Few Seed Words: A Topic Model Approach

Developing text classifiers often requires a large number of labeled documents as training examples. However, manually labeling documents is costly and time-consuming. Recently, a few methods have been proposed to label documents by using a small set of relevant keywords for each category, known as dataless text classification. In this paper, we propose a Seed-Guided Topic Model (named STM) for the dataless text classification task. Given a collection of unlabeled documents, and for each category a small set of seed words that are relevant to the semantic meaning of the category, the STM predicts the category labels of the documents through topic influence. STM models two kinds of topics: category-topics and general-topics. Each category-topic is associated with one specific category, representing its semantic meaning. The general-topics capture the global semantic information underlying the whole document collection. STM assumes that each document is associated with a single category-topic and a mixture of general-topics. A novelty of the model is that STM learns the topics by exploiting the explicit word co-occurrence patterns between the seed words and regular words (i.e., non-seed words) in the document collection. A document is then labeled, or classified, based on its posterior category-topic assignment. Experiments on two widely used datasets show that STM consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art dataless text classifiers. In some tasks, STM can also achieve comparable or even better classification accuracy than the state-of-the-art supervised learning solutions. Our experimental results further show that STM is insensitive to the tuning parameters. Stable performance with little variation can be achieved in a broad range of parameter settings, making it a desired choice for real applications.
The Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem

Federal aviation regulations require that all aircraft undergo maintenance after flying a certain number of hours. To ensure high aircraft utilization, maintenance is done at night, and these regulations translate into requiring aircraft to overnight at a maintenance station every three to four days (depending on the fleet type), and to visit a balance-check station periodically. After the schedule is fleeted, the aircraft are routed to satisfy these maintenance requirements. We give fast and simple polynomial-time algorithms for finding a routing of aircraft in a graph whose routings during the day are fixed, that satisfies both the three-day maintenance as well as the balance-check visit requirements under two different models: a static infinite-horizon model and a dynamic finite-horizon model. We discuss an implementation where we embed the static infinite-horizon model into a three-stage procedure for finding a maintenance routing of aircraft.
Continued use of trastuzumab beyond disease progression in the national comprehensive cancer network: should we practice ahead of the evidence?

BACKGROUND The role of continued trastuzumab after progression in women with human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER)-2+ metastatic breast cancer is controversial. Controlled clinical trials that establish a benefit from continued trastuzumab have been difficult to complete. METHODS In the National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN) Breast Cancer Outcomes Database, we identified women treated with trastuzumab for metastatic or relapsed HER-2+ breast cancer at eight NCCN centers who subsequently progressed. Patients were eligible for this analysis if they initiated treatment at an NCCN institution between July 1997 and December 2004, received trastuzumab-containing treatment, and progressed while on therapy. We calculated the proportion of patients who received trastuzumab after progression, and in a multivariate analysis assessed the association of patient and provider characteristics with continued trastuzumab therapy. RESULTS Our final cohort consisted of 218 women who experienced disease progression while on trastuzumab-containing therapy. Of these, 168 (77%) continued trastuzumab. Of these, 36 patients (17%) received therapy as part of a clinical trial. The only factors significantly associated with continuation of trastuzumab beyond progression were the presence of bone metastases and more recent year of development of progressive disease. CONCLUSIONS Prior to the availability of any high-quality evidence supporting this practice, over three quarters of patients treated with trastuzumab for HER-2+ metastatic breast cancer at eight NCCN centers continued therapy beyond progression. Further work is needed to understand how physicians adopt new treatments when there is ambiguity surrounding their benefit.
Inventory Competition Under Dynamic Consumer Choice

We analyze a model of inventory competition among n firms that provide competing, substitutable goods. Each firm chooses initial inventory levels for their good in a single period (newsboy-like) inventory model. Customers choose dynamically based on current availability, so the inventory levels at one firm affect the demand of all competingfirms. This creates a strategic interaction amongthe firms' inventory decisions. Our work extends earlier work on variations of this problem by Karjalainen (1992), Lippman and McCardle (1997) and Parlar (1988). Specifically, we model demand in a more realistic way as a stochastic sequence of heterogeneous consumers who choose dynamically from amongthe available goods (or choose not to purchase) based on a utility maximization criterion. We also use a sample path analysis, so minimal assumptions are imposed on this demand process. We characterize the Nash equilibrium of the resulting stocking game and prove it is unique in the symmetric case. We show there is a bias toward overstocking caused by competition; specifically, reducing the quantity stocked at any equilibrium of the game increases total system profits, and at any joint-optimal set of stocking levels, each firm has an individual incentive to increase its own stock. For the symmetric case, we show that as the number of competing firms increases, the overstockingbecomes so severe that total system (and individual firm) profits approach zero. Finally, we propose a stochastic gradient algorithm for computing equilibria and provide several numerical examples.
Linear Facility Location in Three Dimensions - Models and Solution Methods

We consider the problem of locating a line or a line segment in three-dimensional space, such that the sum of distances from the facility represented by the line (segment) to a given set of points is minimized. An example is planning the drilling of a mine shaft, with access to ore deposits through horizontal tunnels connecting the deposits and the shaft. Various models of the problem are developed and analyzed, and efficient solution methods are given.
Inventory Models with Fixed Costs, Forecast Updates, and Two Delivery Modes

This paper is concerned with a periodic review inventory system with fast and slow delivery modes, fixed ordering cost, and regular demand forecast updates. At the beginning of each period, on-hand inventory and demand information are updated. At the same time, decisions on how much to order using fast and slow delivery modes are made. Fast and slow orders are delivered at the end of the current period and at the end of the next period, respectively. A forecast-update-dependent ( s,S)-type policy is shown to be optimal. Also shown are some monotonicity properties of the policy parameters with respect to the costs and information updates.
UberManufacturing: A Goal-Driven Collaborative Industrial Manufacturing Marketplace

In this paper, we present the application of an automatic service composition system in the context of collaborative industrial manufacturing. We discuss how our system could support a production-as-a-service paradigm and present the architecture we created to realize this potential. The basis of our approach are embedded semantic descriptions of a production cell's available resources (machines and human workers). Using these descriptions and given a specification of the product to be manufactured, our system is able to derive a collaborative plan that composes its available resources to achieve that manufacturing goal. This ability to flexibly reconfigure industrial equipment in a goal-driven way is becoming increasingly important in the industrial domain, where mass customization leads to ever smaller lot sizes and potentially even to a lot-size-one world. It can revolutionize the way we think about manufacturing: instead of highly optimized integrated high-volume production lines, this would allow individual manufacturing cells to offer their capabilities as a service and compete with other cells in a paradigm that we refer to as UberManufacturing.