Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AHNS Series: Do you know your guidelines? Evidence‐based management of oral cavity cancers

Oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) is the most common nonmelanoma head and neck cancer in the world, with an estimated 405 000 new cases expected each year. Subsites of the oral cavity include the alveolar ridge, buccal mucosa, anterior tongue, tonsillar pillar, retromolar trigone, hard palate, gingiva, and floor of the mouth. In this issue of the AHNS “Do you know your guidelines? ” series, we review the evidence‐based approach to the management of oral cavity carcinomas based on the framework provided by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology.
Recognition of bacterial pathogens and mucosal immunity

Rapid detection and elimination of pathogens invasive to intestinal tissue is essential to avoid prolonged gut inflammation, or systemic sepsis. The discovery of transmembrane or intracytoplasmic pattern recognition receptors that detect the presence of conserved microbial macromolecular structures has significantly advanced the understanding of how metazoans respond to and eliminate bacteria that have entered the intestinal mucosa. In this review, we highlight recent advances in the field of host recognition of bacterial pathogens and subsequent mucosal innate immune response. Additionally, some bacteria are pathogenic because they have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to evade the host mucosal innate immune response. We discuss advances in identifying the mechanisms by which pathogens evade detection by dampening the immune response.
Under Pressure: Mechanical Stress Management in the Nucleus

Cells are constantly adjusting to the mechanical properties of their surroundings, operating a complex mechanochemical feedback, which hinges on mechanotransduction mechanisms. Whereas adhesion structures have been shown to play a central role in mechanotransduction, it now emerges that the nucleus may act as a mechanosensitive structure. Here, we review recent advances demonstrating that mechanical stress emanating from the cytoskeleton can activate pathways in the nucleus which eventually impact both its structure and the transcriptional machinery.
Quantitation of protein phosphorylation in pregnant rat uteri using stable isotope dimethyl labeling coupled with IMAC

Quantitative analysis of protein phosphorylation provides important insights into molecular signaling mechanisms and a better understanding of many cellular processes. In this study, we coupled stable isotope dimethyl labeling with immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) enrichment to quantify protein phosphorylation at MS‐determined phosphorylation sites. The proposed method was first characterized using α‐ and β‐casein as two model phosphoproteins, and further applied to the analysis of pregnant rat uteri with and without treatment with 8‐bromo‐cGMP. Dimethyl labeling has several significant advantages: global, fast (within 5 min) and complete (near 100%). Our results indicate that the labeling has no adverse effect on the IMAC enrichment for tryptic peptides having single and multiple phosphorylation sites. Moreover, the enhanced a1 signal and the complete reaction by dimethyl labeling provide unequivocal identification of both the N‐terminal amino acid and the number of the labeling site. Using these two criteria in data validation, which is particularly important for identifying phosphoproteins, we found that the confidence in interpreting dimethyl‐labeled peptides had greatly increased. In the analysis of late gestation rat uteri, the abundance ratio between treated and un‐treated phosphopeptide signals ranged from 0.51 to 1.69 with an average of around 1.01 ± 0.25. The obtained ratio of the phosphorylation levels at Ser 15 of HSP27 was further confirmed by the consistent results obtained from Western blot analyses. Based on the analysis of the results, it is interesting to note that the activated cGMP dependentt protein kinase G (PKG) seems to affect the phosphorylation of proteins associated with the inhibition of cell migration and proliferation, redistribution of actin‐associated proteins, and the increase of protein synthesis in late‐gestation uteri. These observations provide important evidence suggesting that activated PKG may play a critical role in the shift of pregnant uteri from proliferative to hypertrophic states.
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN IMAGE ENCRYPTION AND COMPRESSION USING PERMUTATIONS & PREDICTIONS

Due to rapid growth in image sizes, an alternate of numerically lossless coding named visually lossless coding is considered to reduce storage size and lower data transmission. In this paper, a lossy compression method on encrypted color image is introduced with undetectable quality loss and high compression ratio. The proposed method includes the Zhang lossy compression [1], Hierarchical Oriented Prediction (HOP) [2], uniform quantization, negative sign removal, concatenation of 7-bit data and Huffman compression. The encrypted image is divided into rigid and elastic parts. The Zhang elastic compression is applied on elastic part and HOP is applied on rigid part. This method is applied on different test cases and the results were evaluated. The experimental evidences suggest that, the proposed method has better coding performance than the existing encrypted image compressions, with 9.645 % reductions in bit rate and the eye perception is visually lossless.
Bacillus subtilis Early Colonization of Arabidopsis thaliana Roots Involves Multiple Chemotaxis Receptors

ABSTRACT Colonization of plant roots by Bacillus subtilis is mutually beneficial to plants and bacteria. Plants can secrete up to 30% of their fixed carbon via root exudates, thereby feeding the bacteria, and in return the associated B. subtilis bacteria provide the plant with many growth-promoting traits. Formation of a biofilm on the root by matrix-producing B. subtilis is a well-established requirement for long-term colonization. However, we observed that cells start forming a biofilm only several hours after motile cells first settle on the plant. We also found that intact chemotaxis machinery is required for early root colonization by B. subtilis and for plant protection. Arabidopsis thaliana root exudates attract B. subtilis in vitro, an activity mediated by the two characterized chemoreceptors, McpB and McpC, as well as by the orphan receptor TlpC. Nonetheless, bacteria lacking these chemoreceptors are still able to colonize the root, suggesting that other chemoreceptors might also play a role in this process. These observations suggest that A. thaliana actively recruits B. subtilis through root-secreted molecules, and our results stress the important roles of B. subtilis chemoreceptors for efficient colonization of plants in natural environments. These results demonstrate a remarkable strategy adapted by beneficial rhizobacteria to utilize carbon-rich root exudates, which may facilitate rhizobacterial colonization and a mutualistic association with the host. IMPORTANCE Bacillus subtilis is a plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium that establishes robust interactions with roots. Many studies have now demonstrated that biofilm formation is required for long-term colonization. However, we observed that motile B. subtilis mediates the first contact with the roots. These cells differentiate into biofilm-producing cells only several hours after the bacteria first contact the root. Our study reveals that intact chemotaxis machinery is required for the bacteria to reach the root. Many, if not all, of the B. subtilis 10 chemoreceptors are involved in the interaction with the plant. These observations stress the importance of root-bacterium interactions in the B. subtilis lifestyle. Bacillus subtilis is a plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium that establishes robust interactions with roots. Many studies have now demonstrated that biofilm formation is required for long-term colonization. However, we observed that motile B. subtilis mediates the first contact with the roots. These cells differentiate into biofilm-producing cells only several hours after the bacteria first contact the root. Our study reveals that intact chemotaxis machinery is required for the bacteria to reach the root. Many, if not all, of the B. subtilis 10 chemoreceptors are involved in the interaction with the plant. These observations stress the importance of root-bacterium interactions in the B. subtilis lifestyle.
Conventional and Bayesian Validation for Fuzzy Clustering Analysis

Clustering analysis has been used for identifying similar objects and discovering distribution of patterns in large data sets. While hard clustering assigns an object to only one cluster, fuzzy clustering assigns one object to multiple clusters at the same time based on their degrees of membership. An important issue in clustering analysis is the validation of fuzzy partitions. In this paper, we consider the Bayesian like validation along with four conventional validity measures for two clustering algorithms namely, fuzzy c-means and fuzzy c-shell based. An empirical study is conducted on five data sets to compare their performances. Results show that the Bayesian validation score outperforms the conventional ones. However, a multiple objective approach is needed.
The Worcester Venous Thromboembolism study: a population-based study of the clinical epidemiology of venous thromboembolism.

BACKGROUND While there have been marked advances in diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for venous thromboembolism, our understanding of its clinical epidemiology is based on studies conducted more than a decade ago. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this observational study was to describe the incidence and attack rates of venous thromboembolism in residents of the Worcester Statistical Metropolitan Area in 1999. We also describe demographic and clinical characteristics, management strategies, and associated hospital and 30-day outcomes. DESIGN AND MEASUREMENTS The medical records of all residents from Worcester, MA (2000 census=477,800), diagnosed with International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision (ICD-9) codes consistent with possible venous thromboembolism during 1999 were independently validated, classified, and reviewed by trained abstractors. RESULTS A total of 587 subjects were enrolled with validated venous thromboembolism. The incidence and attack rates of venous thromboembolism were 104 and 128 per 100,000 population, respectively. Three quarters of patients developed their venous thromboembolism in the outpatient setting - a substantial proportion of these patients had undergone recent surgery or had a recent prior hospitalization. Less than half of the patients received anticoagulant prophylaxis during high-risk periods before their venous thromboembolism. Thirty-day rates of venous thromboembolism recurrence, major bleeding, and mortality were 4.8%, 7.7%, and 6.6%, respectively. CONCLUSION These data provide insights into recent incidence and attack rates, changing patient profiles, management strategies, and subsequent outcomes in patients with venous thromboembolism. The underutilization of prophylaxis before venous thromboembolism, and relatively high 30-day recurrence rates, suggest a continued need for the improvement of venous thromboembolism prophylaxis and management in the community.
Broadly tunable solid microbottle resonator

Highly tunable solid microbottle resonator (MBR) is demonstrated with ß-factors up to 105. MBR-WGM spectrum was cleaned-up by evanescently coupling on different positions of an optical microtaper fiber. The mechanical tuning of 3.71 nm on the traced MBR-WGMs corresponds to ∼0.9 FSR resonance shift.
Segmentation of Images Using Kernel Fuzzy C Means Clustering

The segmentation of the image refers to extracting the needed region from the image. The main objective of the process is to cluster the image wi thout producing much noises in the image. To preprocess t he input images in order to remove the unwanted pixels in the image. The proposed FCM based segmentation method is clustering based segmentation methodology which is combined with the DCT transformation. To employ kernel functions and Fuzzy rule generation methodologies to cluster the input image. The performance of the segmentation method is measured. As The performance strategy the accuracy of the proposed method is calculated.
Mortality in cardiogenic shock complicating acute myocardial infarction due to left main coronary artery disease: does gender matter?

AIMS To assess prognosis in men and women with myocardial infarction (MI) complicated with cardiogenic shock (CS) due to critical stenosis of the unprotected left main coronary artery (ULMCA). METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 643 (females 28.6%, males 71.4%) consecutive patients with critical ULMCA stenosis and acute MI were included. Data were obtained from the Polish Registry of Acute Coronary Syndromes (PL-ACS). Study end-points were defined as in-hospital death, mortality at 30 days, 6 and 12 months. Of all patients 103 (16.0%) developed CS. Basic characteristics and treatment strategy were similar in both sexes. As many as 95% of patients in CS were treated invasively with PCI. In-hospital mortality among women in CS was lower than among men (43.3% vs. 64.4%, p = 0.049). Mortality at 30 days and 12 months in CS group as well as in patients without CS did not differ significantly between men and women. In multivariate analysis age and CS, but not a female gender, were independent factors of increased mortality whereas only a successful PCI significantly reduced mortality. CONCLUSION Cardiogenic shock and pulmonary edema were independent factors of mortality. There were no differences in mortality between men and women in subgroups with and without CS. Emergency PCI seems to be a useful and beneficial option in this subset of patients.
The Design and Analysis of Piezoresistive Shuriken-Structured Diaphragm Micro-Pressure Sensors

This paper presented a novel 0–3 kPa piezoresistive pressure sensor with high sensitivity and linearity. A shuriken-structured diaphragm (SSD) is designed for the first time to solve the conflict between the sensitivity and linearity for piezoresistive pressure sensors. A trade-off between the stress on the diaphragm edge and the deflection of the diaphragm was achieved by this SSD design according to the numerical simulation. The effects of the glass substrate and the passivation films on the sensing performance were also studied numerically and experimentally. The experimental results indicated the present pressure sensor had a sensitivity of 4.72 mV/kPa/V and a linearity of 0.18 %FSO (full scale output) in the pressure range of 0–3 kPa, which were 28.3% and 50% better than the previous works. [2016-0101]
The Enter-net and Salm-gene databases of foodborne bacterial pathogens that cause human infections in Europe and beyond: an international collaboration in surveillance and the development of intervention strategies

The free movement of people and foodstuffs between countries are effective ways of distributing disease internationally. There is a requirement for a mechanism whereby data and information on potential outbreaks of foodborne pathogens can be disseminated rapidly to those who need to know. The Enter-net dedicated surveillance network provides this mechanism, complemented by the Salm-gene molecular typing network. Data on epidemiological and microbiological features on current cases, as well as background levels of infections are immediately available within the Enter-net databases. The Salm-gene network with its database of harmonized salmonella PFGE patterns from the participating European countries provides immediate, and electronically exchangeable, DNA fingerprints of outbreak strains. This prompt electronic dissemination of information regarding unusual events with international implications ensures that public health interventions can be implemented and cases of foodborne disease prevented.
Staple food fortification with iron: a multifactorial decision.

Iron deficiency is not restricted to infants and pregnant women; it also affects school-age children, adolescents, elders, and even adult males in developing countries, including those of Latin America. Therefore, interventions with extensive coverage are suitable to prevent and to control this deficiency. Fortification of staple foods is an adequate strategy to provide additional iron to populations. However, unlike fortification with vitamin A, iodine, and B vitamins, food fortification with iron has not been very successful. Iron is a reactive compound, whose level in foods is limited because iron causes negative changes in the original properties of the food that is being fortified. This feature combined with the low absorption of iron compounds used for fortification – usually not higher than 10%2 – makes prevention of iron deficiency through food fortification of very few commodities a great challenge. This review will cover several factors that need to be taken into consideration to plan, understand, evaluate, and make a decision about fortification of staple foods with iron. Included is a discussion regarding bioavailability, technologic compatibility, and cost effectiveness. To conclude, the review mentions additional advantages of fortifying staple foods with iron and the indispensable need to combine this strategy with other interventions. All of these factors must be considered before launching a field efficacy trial, which should be the ultimate proof for a decision made wisely and with possibilities of success.
Distributed Computing for Large-scale Graphs

The last decade has seen an increased attention on large-scale data analysis, caused mainly by the availability of new sources of data and the development of programming model that allowed their analysis. Since many of these sources can be modeled as graphs, many large-scale graph processing frameworks have been developed, from vertex-centric models such as pregel to more complex programming models that allow asynchronous computation, can tackle dynamism in the data and permit the usage of different amount of resources. This thesis presents theoretical and practical results in the area of distributed large- scale graph analysis by giving an overview of the entire pipeline. Data must first be pre-processed to obtain a graph, which is then partitioned into subgraphs of similar size. To analyze this graph the user must choose a system and a programming model that matches her available resources, the type of data and the class of algorithm to execute. Aside from an overview of all these different steps, this research presents three novel approaches to those steps. The first main contribution is dfep, a novel distributed partitioning algorithm that divides the edge set into similar sized partition. dfep can obtain partitions with good quality in only a few iterations. The output of dfep can then be used by etsch, a graph processing framework that uses partitions of edges as the focus of its programming model. etsch’s programming model is shown to be flexible and can easily reuse sequential classical graph algorithms as part of its workflow. Implementations of etsch in hadoop, spark and akka allow for a comparison of those systems and the discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. The implementation of etsch in akka is by far the fastest and is able to process billion-edges graphs faster that competitors such as gps, blogel and giraph++, while using only a few computing nodes. A final contribution is an application study of graph-centric approaches to word sense induction and disambiguation: from a large set of documents a word graph is constructed and then processed by a graph clustering algorithm, to find documents that refer to the same entities. A novel graph clustering algorithm, named tovel, uses a diffusion-based approach inspired by the cycle of water.
Fast cloud image segmentation with superpixel analysis based convolutional networks

Due to the various noises, the cloud image segmentation becomes a big challenge for atmosphere prediction. CNN is capable of learning discriminative features from complex data, but this may be quite time-consuming in pixel-level segmentation problems. In this paper we propose superpixel analysis based CNN (SP-CNN) for high efficient cloud image segmentation. SP-CNN employs image over-segmentation of superpixels as basic entities to preserve local consistency. SP-CNN takes the image patches centered at representative pixels in every superpixel as input, and all superpixels are classified as cloud or non-cloud part by voting of the representative pixels. It greatly reduces the computational burden on CNN learning. In order to avoid the ambiguity from superpixel boundaries, SP-CNN selects the representative pixels uniformly from the eroded superpixels. Experimental analysis demonstrates that SP-CNN guarantees both the effectiveness and efficiency in cloud segmentation.
INS-based identification of quay-crane spreader yaw

A crucial problem in crane control is to identify exactly the position and orientation of the load in space. This paper describes a new non-contact method for determining the crane load location by means of an inertial navigation system (INS) and a Kalman filter. The Kalman filter estimates the spreader position, which is not observed by the INS. Experiments were conducted on a 1/15th geometric scale model of a quay-crane. The work has potential application in the development of integrated estimation and control systems for full-scale quay-cranes.
Trastuzumab and metastatic breast cancer: trastuzumab use in Australia--monitoring the effect of an expensive medicine access program.

PURPOSE Data from clinical trials are used for drug registration; however, many cancer medicines are ultimately used off-label. This study examines the extent to which the clinical practice use of trastuzumab for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer differs from its use under trial conditions. METHODS This study involved all women (N = 1,469) with metastatic breast cancer who received trastuzumab in Australia between December 2001 and March 2005. Given that Australia operates a universal health care system, administrative databases could be examined to determine the duration of therapy, rate of off-label use, compliance with cardiac monitoring, and the extent of drug wastage (volume and cost). RESULTS A total of 433 enrollees (29.5%) received trastuzumab as monotherapy and 1,036 enrollees (70.5%) received the drug in combination with chemotherapy. A total of 321 women (22%) received off-label trastuzumab. The median duration of trastuzumab therapy was longer than that on trial: 5.6 v 3.1 months for enrollees receiving monotherapy and 12.5 v 6.9 months for concomitant chemotherapy. Only 47 (3%) of enrollees received cardiac monitoring before and during trastuzumab therapy. We estimated 24% of trastuzumab dispensed was discarded, at a cost of $21.1 million Australian. Alternative administration schedules and the addition of another vial size potentially reduce wastage to 6% of volume dispensed. CONCLUSION Debates about the use of expensive cancer medicines should consider postmarketing assessments as well as trial experience. The longer duration of trastuzumab use in clinical practice and the high rates of off-label use provide incentive for new clinical trials. Strategies to improve cardiac monitoring and to minimize drug wastage are issues that require immediate attention.