Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Health and long-term care use trajectories of older disabled women.

PURPOSE I examined health and long-term care use trajectories of a sample of chronically disabled older women eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid by exploring their use data in order to understand and anticipate the increasing demand on the health and long-term care delivery systems as aging female baby boomers reach age 65 and older. DESIGN AND METHODS A sample of older disabled women in Ohio who completed preadmission review was divided into three groups on the basis of the setting in which they received their initial long-term care services. RESULTS I was able to establish a long-term care career for the sample members beginning with receiving long-term care in the community, followed by a transition stage in which care was received in the community and in a nursing home, and finally by a stage at which they entered and remained in a nursing home. As the sample members proceeded along their long-term care career and their health and disability status worsened, I found a clear shift in the kind of care needed from hospital and home care to nursing home care. There was also a shift in the major payer, from Medicare to Medicaid. IMPLICATIONS As the baby boomers age, a much larger number of women will be disabled and need health and long-term care services. For a considerable number of these women, Medicaid gradually becomes the major payer for care, an issue that needs close observation.
Phytate degradation during breadmaking: The influence of flour type and breadmaking procedures

Phytic acid has been considered to be an antinutrient due to its ability to bind minerals and proteins, either directly or indirectly, thus changing their solubility, functionality, absorption, and digestibility. In this study, the influence of the flour type (type 500, type 850, and whole meal flour) and three different breadmaking procedures (direct, indirect, and with sourdough addition) on phytic acid was investigated. The results showed that the flour type influenced the phytic acid content. The phytic acid contents of flour type 500, type 850, and whole meal flour was 0.4380, 0.5756, and 0.9460 g/100 g dm, respectively. The dough and bread prepared from flour with a higher phytic acid content also contained higher amount of phytic acid. During fermentation and baking, degradation of phytic acid occurred. Phytic acid was also influenced by pH. Samples of lower pH had a lower phytic acid content. Dough prepared from flour type 500 and type 850 with 10% addition of sourdough had especially low phytic acid contents, and the bread prepared from the respective dough contained no phytic acid at all.
Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses of incinerability index

A composite indicator for incinerability called incinerability index or i‐Index has been developed to quantify the incinerability of municipal solid waste (MSW) as a unique numerical figure on a scale of 0–100. Due to the absence of guidelines for the formulation of a composite indicator, the reliability of the quantified incinerability and the incinerability‐based rankings might be debatable. To ascertain the suitability of the methodology in developing the indicator for incinerability, uncertainty, and sensitivity analyses are essential. This article aims to carry out the uncertainty analysis of the various stages of the formulation of i‐Index, namely, relative weightage determination of input parameters, normalization of parameters and their aggregation. Sensitivity analysis is also done to determine the extent of influence an input has on the quantified incinerability. The robustness and the transparency of i‐Index can be assessed and improved by this approach.
Uplink Performance Improvement by Decoupling Uplink/Downlink Access in HetNets

In dense and heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), significant imbalance between uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmissions may happen in regard to signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio and traffic load. Under this circumstance, decoupled UL/DL access (DUDA) is proposed for HetNets for improving system performance. In this paper, we theoretically investigate UL performance improvement brought by a DUDA mode over a conventional coupled UL/DL access (CUDA) mode based on stochastic geometry theory. We employ fractional power control to determine location-dependent user transmit power. We consider two kinds of user equipment distributions, namely uniform and clustered distributions, which are modeled as Poisson point and Neyman–Scott cluster processes, respectively. Numerical results reveal that system performance in terms of spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the DUDA mode is better than or equal to that of the CUDA mode in HetNets. We identify the conditions under which the DUDA mode performs significantly better than the CUDA mode. Numerical results also show that the DUDA mode can improve load balance and fairness. In addition, we find that the DUDA mode is more beneficial for ultradense networks. Simulation results further validate the effectiveness and accuracy of our analytical model.
Continuous beam steering antenna with large 2D coverage for 5G applications

A gap waveguide continuous beam steering antenna is proposed in the 60-GHz band for 5G applications. The antenna is composed of two parts: i) a quasi-TEM feeding network, ii) a slotted radiating plate. The relative mechanical rotation between the two parts generates a phase gradient across the radiating part and the beam radiated in the upper hemisphere can be scanned continuously. The antenna is developed in hollow waveguide with a contactless technology to ease the mechanical movement between the antenna parts. The proposed antenna has been validated numerically and experimentally in the 60-GHz band. Very good agreement has been obtained between simulations and measurements. The antenna field of view reaches ±60°. and its bandwidth equals 13% for VSWR<2. The losses within the structure are 0.5dB. Finally a large 2D beam coverage can be obtained by combining frequency scanning and mechanical rotation of the two antenna parts; these results are also confirmed experimentally.
miR-146a-5p Mediates Intermittent Hypoxia-Induced Injury in H9c2 Cells by Targeting XIAP

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as key modulators in the pathophysiologic processes of cardiovascular diseases. However, its function in cardiac injury induced by obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) remains unknown. The aim of the current study was to identify the effect and potential molecular mechanism of miR-146a-5p in intermittent hypoxia(IH)- induced myocardial damage. We exposed H9c2 cells to IH condition; the expression levels of miR-146a-5p were detected by RT-qPCR. Cell viability, cell apoptosis, and the expressions of apoptosis-associated proteins were assessed via Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8), flow cytometry, and western blotting, respectively. Target genes of miR-146a-5p were confirmed by dual-luciferase reporter assay. IH remarkably lowered viability but enhanced cell apoptosis. Concomitantly, the miR-146a-5p expression level was increased in H9c2 cells after IH. Subsequent experiments showed that IH-induced injury was alleviated through miR-146a-5p silence. X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein (XIAP) was predicted by bioinformatics analysis and further confirmed as a direct target gene of miR-146a-5p. Surprisingly, the effect of miR-146a-5p inhibition under IH may be reversed by downregulating XIAP expression. In conclusion, our results demonstrated that miR-146a-5p could attenuate viability and promote the apoptosis of H9c2 by targeting XIAP, thus aggravating the H9c2 cell injury induced by IH, which could enhance our understanding of the mechanisms for OSA-associated cardiac injury.
Reflection and Reaction

Barrett’s oesophagus in the general population. Contrary to the implications of Jankowski and colleagues, the cohort does not need to be representative for results to be valid. In fact, patients who enrol in clinical trials are rarely representative of the population with the disease. With regards to generalisability (the real issue in representativeness), we acknowledged in our discussion the need for replication. We were fortunate that we could control for all known risk factors of oesophageal adenocarcinoma, including age, sex, race, education, adiposity, usual diet, and use of tobacco. Another, as yet unknown, factor (such as exercise, as hypothesised by Jankowski and co-workers) that would be highly protective for development of oesophageal adenocarcinoma and have a strong positive association with use of the drugs, both of which are needed to explain the substantially reduced incidence of cancer that we noted, is difficult to imagine. Use of proton-pump inhibitors could confound the findings; however, almost all participants (users and nonusers alike) were taking acid-reducing drugs, which are titrated to eliminate reflux symptoms. This finding, together with the fact that these drugs have not been shown to modify subsequent cancer risk, implies that they are unlikely to be a source of substantial bias.
Medication adherence for HIV positive women caring for children: in their own words

Few studies have directly focused on adherence to highly active antiretroviral medication (HAART) in HIV positive women caring for children. These women may have unique barriers and facilitators to taking medication, and a deeper understanding of their adherence patterns could enhance intervention strategies. A total of 36 HIV positive women who care for children less than 18 years of age were interviewed regarding their patterns and decision around taking HAART. The study group was comprised of 19 Latinas, 10 Euro-Americans, 5 African Americans and 2 Cape Verdeans. The mean length of time the women knew they were HIV positive was 11.15 years. Adherence patterns shifted over the course of the women's HIV history. The participants continually discussed medication adherence within the context of events and relationships that either upset or stabilized their adherence. The following themes emerged: (1) shifting adherence patterns; (2) reasons for adherence; (3) reasons for non-adherence; (4) the relationship between distress level and medication adherence; (5) interpersonal relationship as barrier or facilitator of medication adherence; and (6) children as facilitators in adherence. Providers need to be aware of the shifting nature of adherence and its relationship to psychosocial functioning.
Correlation of 3-Dimensionally Quantified Intraretinal and Subretinal Fluid With Visual Acuity in Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration.

IMPORTANCE Robust and sensitive imaging biomarkers for visual function are an unmet medical need in the management of neovascular age-related macular degeneration. OBJECTIVE To determine the correlation of 3-dimensionally quantified intraretinal cystoid fluid (IRC) and subretinal fluid (SRF) with best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) in treatment-naive neovascular age-related macular degeneration and during antiangiogenic therapy. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Retrospective cohort study between November 2009 and November 2011 at an institutional referral center and reading center of patients with treatment-naive subfoveal choroidal neovascularization receiving intravitreal ranibizumab or aflibercept over 12 months. All individual IRC and SRF lesions were manually delineated on each of the 128 B-scan sections of spectral-domain optical coherence tomographic volume scans at baseline and months 1, 6, and 12. Correlations were computed between the IRC and SRF parameters and the baseline BCVA, final BCVA, and BCVA change. A systematic parameter search was conducted to detect annotation-derived variables with best predictive value. An exponential model for BCVA change balancing for the ceiling effect was constructed. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Goodness of fit of correlations between the IRC and SRF parameters and the baseline BCVA, final BCVA, and BCVA change. RESULTS Thirty-eight patients were included (25 female, 13 male; mean [SD] age at enrollment, 78.49 [8.23] years; mean [SD] BCVA score at baseline, 54 [16] Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study letters [Snellen equivalent approximately 20/160], with a gain to 63 [19] letters [Snellen equivalent approximately 20/100] at month 12). A total of 19,456 scans underwent complete quantification of IRC and SRF. The best correlation with BCVA at baseline was achieved using a coverage-based, foveal area-weighted IRC parameter (R2 = 0.59; P < .001). The same baseline parameter also predicted BCVA at 12 months (R2 = 0.21; P = .003). The BCVA gain correlated with IRC decrease in the exponential model (R2 = 0.40; P < .001) and linear model (R2 = 0.25; P = .002). No robust associations were found between SRF and baseline BCVA (R2 = 0.06; P = .14) or BCVA change (R2 = 0.14; P = .02). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this proof-of-principle study, IRC-derived morphometric variables correlated well with treatment-naive BCVA and BCVA outcomes in antiangiogenic therapy. While IRC reduction was associated with BCVA gains, some IRC-mediated neurosensory damage remained permanent.
Dynamics of Oxidant-antioxidant System in Patients with Multidrugresistant Tuberculosis Receiving Anti-mycobacterial Therapy

The changes in oxidant-antioxidant system were evaluated in serum samples of 140 patients with pulmonary tuberculosis, comprising those with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and without MDR-TB and 30 healthy donors. The select parameters of Antioxidant System (AOS) including levels of thiol (–SH) groups, total antioxidant activity, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase as well as metabolites of oxidative degradation of lipids (LPO), i.e., trienoic conjugates and lipofuscin, were measured by spectrophotometry. At treatment initiation AOS and LPO values of TB patients were significantly lower or higher in comparison with healthy donors. After the two months of chemotherapy there was a significant increase of AOS and decrease in LPO values in TB patients. In patients with MDR-TB and relapsed pulmonary TB was noticed more pronounced authentic changes of pro-oxidant-antioxidant system in the blood of the comparison is not MDR TB and newly diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis as for the standard anti-tuberculosis therapy since two months after treatment. *Corresponding author: Dmytro О Butov, Kharkiv National Medical University, Kharkiv, Ukraine, E-mail: dddimad@yandex.ua Received October 16, 2013; Accepted December 17, 2013; Published December 19, 2013 Citation: Butov DО, Kuzhko MM, Kuznetsova IМ, Grinishina OО, Maksimenko OА, et al. (2013) Dynamics of Oxidant-antioxidant System in Patients with Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis Receiving Anti-mycobacterial Therapy. J Pulm Respir Med 3: 161. doi:10.4172/2161-105X. 1000161 Copyright: © 2013 Butov DО, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Parameterization of brachytherapy source phase space file for Monte Carlo-based clinical brachytherapy dose calculation

A common approach to implementing the Monte Carlo method for the calculation of brachytherapy radiation dose deposition is to use a phase space file containing information on particles emitted from a brachytherapy source. However, the loading of the phase space file during the dose calculation consumes a large amount of computer random access memory, imposing a higher requirement for computer hardware. In this study, we propose a method to parameterize the information (e.g., particle location, direction and energy) stored in the phase space file by using several probability distributions. This method was implemented for dose calculations of a commercial Ir-192 high dose rate source. Dose calculation accuracy of the parameterized source was compared to the results observed using the full phase space file in a simple water phantom and in a clinical breast cancer case. The results showed the parameterized source at a size of 200 kB was as accurate as the phase space file represented source of 1.1 GB. By using the parameterized source representation, a compact Monte Carlo job can be designed, which allows an easy setup for parallel computing in brachytherapy planning.
Dimensionality Reduction in Automatic Knowledge Acquisition: A Simple Greedy Search Approach

Knowledge acquisition is the process of collecting domain knowledge, documenting the knowledge, and transforming it into a computerized representation. Due to the difficulties involved in eliciting knowledge from human experts, knowledge acquisition was identified as a bottleneck in the development of knowledge-based system. Over the past decades, a number of automatic knowledge acquisition techniques have been developed. However, the performance of these techniques suffers from the so called curse of dimensionality, i.e., difficulties arise when many irrelevant (or redundant) parameters exist. This paper presents a heuristic approach based on statistics and greedy search for dimensionality reduction to facilitate automatic knowledge acquisition. The approach deals with classification problems. Specifically, Chi-square statistics are used to rank the importance of individual parameters. Then, a backward search procedure is employed to eliminate parameters (less important parameters first) that do not contribute to class separability. The algorithm is very efficient and was found to be effective when applied to a variety of problems with different characteristics.
Multistage topology optimization of induction heating apparatus in time domain electromagnetic field with magnetic nonlinearity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to solve efficiently the topology optimization (TO) in time domain problem with magnetic nonlinearity requiring a large-scale finite element mesh. As an actual application model, the proposed method is applied to induction heating apparatus. Design/methodology/approach To achieve TO with efficient computation time, a multistage topology is proposed. This method can derive the optimum structure by repeatedly reducing the design domain and regenerating the finite element mesh. Findings It was clarified that the structure derived from proposed method can be similar to the structure derived from the conventional method, and that the computation time can be made more efficient by parameter tuning of the frequency and volume constraint value. In addition, as a time domain induction heating apparatus problem of an actual application model, an optimum topology considering magnetic nonlinearity was derived from the proposed method. Originality/value Whereas the entire design domain must be filled with small triangles in the conventional TO method, the proposed method requires finer mesh division of only the stepwise-reduced design domain. Therefore, the mesh scale is reduced, and there is a possibility that the computation time for TO can be shortened.
A comparison of morpheme and word based document retrieval for Asian languages

Most document retrieval systems are word based. Words are very convenient retrieval units in English but not so in some Asian languages. The task of determining which morphemes constitute words in Vietnamese and Chinese is problematic, and has been assumed to be the reason that word based retrieval does not work so well. The paper examines a number of segmentation algorithms, and then reports on some experiments comparing morpheme and word based retrieval. It shows that morpheme based retrieval is hard to improve on.
Learning Interpretable Classification Rules Using Binarization

We propose to learn classification rules from continuous data with class labels using a twostep procedure: We first binarize data points, and second perform feature selection on the binarized data to obtain minimum necessary binary features that are required to classify given data. Each binary feature represents an interval on the original feature space, hence the user can directly interpret classification rules as intersections of intervals. Although such interpretability is indispensable in machine learning applications from biology to economics, we cannot often interpret classification rules obtained by recently emerging highly accurate machine learning methods such as deep learning. We experimentally demonstrate that our method can learn simpler classification rules than a decision tree classifier while keeping reasonable accuracy.
Isolation and properties of a soluble sialidase from the culture fluid of Chinese hamster ovary cells.

A soluble sialidase that can degrade recombinant glycoproteins expressed in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells has been isolated and purified to near homogeneity from the cell culture fluid of this host. Purification of approximately 34,000-fold was carried out using conventional purification techniques including sequential DEAE-Sepharose and S-Sepharose ion-exchange chromatography, followed by hydrophobic interaction chromatography with Phenyl-Toyopearl. Final purification was achieved by heparin-agarose and chromatofocusing chromatography. The minimum molecular weight of the sialidase on SDS-PAGE was approximately 43,000 Da. When the final preparation was examined under non-denaturing conditions, two major (pI = 6.8 and 7.0) and five minor electrophoretic forms with different isoelectric points were identified. The basis for the electrophoretic heterogeneity is not known, but it was not due to carbohydrate diversity since no carbohydrates were detected on the purified protein. The enzyme degraded a variety of sialyl-conjugate substrates, at a pH optimum of 5.9, including intact glycoproteins, oligosaccharides and gangliosides with a 4-fold preference for 2,3- versus 2,6-linked sialic acid residues. With ganglioside substrates, internally linked sialic acid residues were not cleaved by the enzyme. Delineation of this enzyme from the lysosomal and plasma membrane sialidases was made using inhibition studies with C-9 substituted 5-acetamido-2,6-anhydro-3,5-dideoxy-D-glycero-D-galacto-non-2- enonic acid derivatives. The enzyme was identified in several CHO cell lines by immunoblotting using antiserum raised against a synthetic peptide based on amino acid sequence of a fragment derived by trypsin digestion of the purified sialidase. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Big Data - State of the Art

This report is an investigation into the current state of the art with respect to "Big Data" frameworks and libraries. The primary purpose of this report is to investigate some of the available processing and analytical frameworks and/or libraries, identify some of their strengths and weaknesses through the application of a set of criteria. This criteria can then be used to compare other frameworks, systems, or libraries that are not present here to enable rapid and objective comparison.