Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A content-adaptive unstructured grid based integral equation method with the TV regularization for SPECT reconstruction

Existing reconstruction methods for single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are most based on discrete models, leading to low accuracy in reconstruction. Reconstruction methods based on integral equation models (IEMs) with a higher order piecewise polynomial discretization on the pixel grid for SEPCT imaging were recently proposed to overcome the accuracy deficiency of the discrete models. Discretization of IEMs based on the pixel grid leads to a system of a large dimension, which may require higher computational costs to solve. We develop a SPECT reconstruction method which employs an IEM of the SPECT data acquisition process and discretizes it on a content-adaptive unstructured grid (CAUG) with the total variation (TV) regularization aiming at reducing computational costs of the integral equation method. Specifically, we design a CAUG of the image domain for the discretization of the IEM, and propose a TV regularization defined on the CAUG for the resulting ill-posed problem. We then apply a preconditioned fixed-point proximity algorithm to solve the resulting non-smooth optimization problem, and provide convergence analysis of the algorithm. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the competing methods in terms of suppressing noise, preserving edges and reducing computational costs.
Life Cycle Assessment of Iberian Traditional Pig Production System in Spain

Traditional Iberian pig production is characterized by outdoor systems that produce animals fed with natural resources. The aim of this study was to assess the environmental impacts of such systems through Life Cycle Assessment. Environmental impacts were analysed per kilogram of live weight at farm gate. Iberian pig production in montanera had the lowest impacts for climate change (CC), acidification (AC), eutrophication (EU) and cumulative energy demand (CED), being 3.4 kg CO2 eq, 0.091 molc H+ eq, 0.046 kg PO43− eq, and 20.7 MJ, respectively, due to the strict use of natural resources (acorns and grass) during the fattening period. As Iberian farms had a greater dependence on compound feed in cebo campo, environmental impacts on CC, AC, EU and CED were 22, 17, 95 and 28% higher, respectively, than with montanera. For land occupation (LO), however, cebo campo had a lower impact (31.6 m2·year) than montanera (43.0 m2·year) system. Traditional Iberian pig production systems have environmental impacts higher than conventional systems studied in literature but are similar to other traditional systems. Based on the present assessment, it is necessary to account for the contribution of emissions resulting from the consumption of natural resources to avoid the underestimation of environmental impacts.
The impact of osteoporosis in patients with ankylosing spondylitis and its relationship to physical activity

Background: Osteoporosis (OP) is a major fracture risk in ankylosing spondylitis (AS), and there are few qualitative reports on bone mass in AS. Objective: The aim of this study was to correlate the bone mineral density (BMD) with disease activity and physical activity (PA) in AS. Materials and Methods: Sixty-two participants who met the criteria for diagnosis of AS (28 males and 34 females) were recruited from Al-Yarmouk Teaching Hospital Baghdad, Iraq. The study was conducted at baseline and after 6 months of exercises. European health-related quality of life was used to reflect physical function. The erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein were used to evaluate AS disease as markers for disease activity. The study measured BMD at two events, before and after performing the relevant exercise. Results: Results found that 9.6% of patients reported fractures. Low bone mass in the AS patients were 17 (27%) in number. Osteopenic patients were 9 (14%) in number, while osteoporotic patients were 8 (13%) in number. An association (P = 0.05) between BMD and PA was noticed in AS participants. There was a weak (P < 0.055) significant association of higher European health-related quality of life scores with lower spinal and hip BMD. No association of AS disease activity with BMD was found, although bone loss in AS is common in persistent active disease; regular PA seems to be a positive factor for improving bone quantity and prevent fracture. Programmed exercise promotes healthy bone. The severity of AS in Iraq is less than the other countries. Conclusion: PA in AS patients has a positive effect on bone status. This implies that AS disease-related loss in BMD is preventable by the relevant exercise program. This information is important, as it can be utilized while designing preventive and treatment plans for AS patients.
Comparing Quality: The Quality Assurance and Enhancement Report for England and Northern Ireland and the Ontario Quality Assurance Framework

This is a comparative study of two reports on the assurance of quality in higher education that appeared contemporaneously in 2008. One was the result of a joint working group of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the Higher Education Academy, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The other was the result of a task force of the Council of Ontario Universities and the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies. Both groups had the endorsement of government. Both groups began with extensive surveys of institutional opinion about existing quality assurance and enhancement regimes. Using NVivo software, documentary analysis, and archival records the paper identifies and compares several recurring themes, such as: the boundary line between academic support services and student services, the assurance of quality as separate from the enhancement of quality, balancing homogeneity and isomorphism, the institution versus the basic academic unit as the focus of assurance, self-regulation versus system regulation, the assurance of quality versus the enhancement of quality, the role and role of league ranking, performance indicators, and benchmarking, aggregation, and scope of jurisdiction. The paper pays particular attention to the balance between institutional autonomy and system-wide standards in promoting quality and innovation. Some particular findings are that the Ontario perspective focuses on assuring quality in contrast to the British approach’s orientation to enhancing quality. The British orientation is towards formative assessment while the Ontario approach is more normative. Neither report discusses the demonstration of quality. Both approaches, then and now, rely on external audits, but the meaning of “audit” is different between the two.
Computationally Analyzing Social Media Text for Topics: A Primer for Advertising Researchers

Abstract Advertising researchers and practitioners are increasingly using social media analytics (SMA), but focused overviews that explain how to use various SMA techniques are scarce. We focus on how researchers and practitioners can computationally analyze topics of conversation in social media posts, compare each to a human-coded topic analysis of a brand’s Twitter feed, and provide recommendations on how to assess and choose which computational methods to use. The computational methodologies that we survey in this article are text preprocessed summarization, phrase mining, topic modeling, supervised machine learning for text classification, and semantic topic tagging.
Modular lipid nanoparticle platform technology for siRNA and lipophilic prodrug delivery

Successfully employing therapeutic nucleic acids, such as small interfering RNA (siRNA), requires chemical modifications or the use of nanocarrier technology to prevent their degradation in the circulation and to facilitate intracellular delivery. Lipid nanoparticles (LNP) are among the most advanced nanocarriers culminating in the first siRNA therapeutic’s clinical translation and approval. At the same time, their applicability as modular platform technology due to the interchangeable building blocks and siRNA payload hallmarks one of LNPs’ major advantages. In addition, drug derivatization approaches to synthesize lipophilic small molecule prodrugs enable stable incorporation in LNPs. This provides ample opportunities to develop combination therapies by co-encapsulating multiple therapeutic agents in a single formulation. Here, we describe how the modular LNP platform can be applied for combined gene silencing and chemotherapy to induce additive anti-cancer effects. We show that various lipophilic taxane prodrug derivatives and siRNA against the androgen receptor, a prostate cancer driver, can be efficiently and stably co-encapsulated in LNPs. In addition, we demonstrate that prodrug incorporation does not affect LNPs’ gene silencing ability and that the combination therapy induces additive therapeutic effects in vitro. Using a double-radiolabeling approach, we quantitively determined the LNPs’ and prodrugs’ pharmacokinetic properties and biodistribution following systemic administration in tumor-bearing mice. Our results indicate that co-encapsulation of siRNA and lipophilic prodrugs into LNPs is an attractive and straightforward approach for combination therapy development. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
RUCAPANC: An open-label, phase 2 trial of the PARP inhibitor rucaparib in patients (pts) with pancreatic cancer (PC) and a known deleterious germline or somatic BRCA mutation.

4110Background: Pts with PC have a poor prognosis and limited treatment options. Around 9% of pts with PC have a germline or somatic BRCA mutation. Recent studies showed that rucaparib effectively treats pts with platinum-sensitive, relapsed, high-grade ovarian carcinoma and a BRCA mutation. RUCAPANC investigated the efficacy and safety of rucaparib in pts with PC and a known deleterious BRCA mutation. Methods: RUCAPANC (NCT02042378) enrolled pts with PC with measurable, relapsed disease who received 1–2 prior chemotherapy regimens in the locally advanced/metastatic setting. Pts received oral rucaparib (600 mg twice daily) until disease progression. The primary endpoint was objective response rate (ORR) by RECIST v1.1. Safety was also evaluated. Results: Nineteen pts were treated; 3 pts are ongoing. Median age was 57 years (range 41–75), 58% were male, 68% received ≥ 2 prior chemotherapy regimens (including adjuvant treatment), 79% were ECOG Performance Status of 1, and 79% had a BRCA2mutation by local te.
Experiences of community care givers on nutritional assessment of children under 5 years in eThekwini District

Introduction Malnutrition continues to be a major public health problem, especially in children under 5 years of age. Nutritional status is one of the indicators of overall well-being and human resources development of a nation. Aim of the study The aim of the study was to explore and describe experiences of Community Care Givers regarding the assessment of malnutrition in children under 5 years of age in eThekwini District Health Sub-district North area six. Methodology A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive study was used to conduct the study. Semi-structured individual face to face interviews were conducted with 13 participants. The study was guided by Pender’s Model of Health Promotion. Results The findings of the study revealed that participants were dissatisfied with mid upper arm circumference training. They reported lack of support and supervision in their performance such that mid upper arm circumference was non-prioritized. They were dissatisfied with remuneration and they worked under unsafe conditions. Conclusion In order to combat malnutrition in children under 5 years in the community, Community Care Givers need to be vigorously educated on the rationale of malnutrition assessment of children under 5 years in the communities so that they can have insight into what they are doing. Community Care Givers have multiple roles and may need to prioritize their work; this is not easy and requires specific guidance and training from skilled health professionals.
Prevalence of Co Infection of Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C among HIV Seropositive Cases in a Tertiary Care Centre

The Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lentivirus that causes the Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows lifethreatening opportunistic infections and to thrive. Hepatitis B is an infectious illness of the liver caused by the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) that affects apes, including humans. The acute illness causes liver inflammation, vomiting, jaundice and rarely, death. Chronic hepatitis B may eventually cause cirrhosis and liver cancer—a disease with poor response to all but a few current therapies. Hepatitis C is an infectious disease affecting primarily the liver, caused by the Hepatitis C virus (HCV). The infection is often asymptomatic, but chronic infection can lead to scarring of the liver and ultimately to cirrhosis, liver failure, liver cancer, or lifethreatening esophageal and gastric varices. It is estimated that HIV and viral hepatitis International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 12 (2017) pp. 260-265 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Numerical modelling challenges for clinical electroporation ablation technique of liver tumors

Electroporation ablation is a promising non surgical and minimally invasive technique of tumor ablation, for which no monitoring is currently available. In this paper, we present the recent advances and challenges on the numerical modeling of clinical electroporation ablation of liver tumors. In particular, we show that a nonlinear static electrical model of tissue combined with clinical imaging can give crucial information of the electric field distribution in the clinical configuration. We conclude the paper by presenting some important questions that have to be addressed for an effective impact of computational modeling in clinical practice of electroporation ablation.
Vitamin D2 vs. vitamin D3: They are not one and the same

Conflicting evidence has led to uncertainty as to whether vitamin D2 and vitamin D3 are equally efficacious in improving vitamin D status, despite historically being considered equipotent. A systematic review and meta-analysis completed in 2012 indicated that D3 was more effective at raising vitamin D levels {using total 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] as a marker of status} but the meta-analysis identified high levels of heterogeneity between studies and a lack of statistically powered sample sizes to provide a conclusive answer. Thus, to meet the need for robust data, our research team conducted the largest (to date) randomised, controlled trial comparing the two forms of vitamin D. The D2–D3 Study was conducted in 335 healthy South Asian (n = 90) and White European women (n = 245). The study was designed to compare the respective efficacy of vitamin D2 with vitamin D3 at raising total 25(OH)D when added to a juice or a biscuit, at a relatively low dose of 15 μg/day for 12 weeks. Overall, the results showed that those who consumed vitamin D3 showed an average increase in vitamin D status of 74%–75%, whereas an average increase of 33%–34% in vitamin D status was found in those who consumed vitamin D2. Therefore, this study emphatically shows that vitamin D3 is more than twice as effective as vitamin D2 at raising total 25(OH)D concentrations, when given in a low dose that is both physiologically relevant and in line with public health guidance.
Analytic Travelling Wave Solutions and Numerical Analysis of Fisher’s Equation via Explicit-Implicit FDM

We study the nonlinear parabolic Fisher’s equations for travelling wave solutions. The analyses focus on to describe the analytic solution in the spatial pattern of travelling wave solutions; especially the solutions are characterized in invariant with respect to translation in space. There are two phases in the work: in the first stage, we analyze dimensional reaction-diffusion equation with logistic type growth while in the second phase the non-dimensional equation known as Fishers’ equation is studied numerically. To investigate the results numerically, we select the explicit-implicit finite difference method (FDM) and the approximate solutions are compared with the exact solution in different time steps.
Can Embeddings Adequately Represent Medical Terminology? New Large-Scale Medical Term Similarity Datasets Have the Answer!

A large number of embeddings trained on medical data have emerged, but it remains unclear how well they represent medical terminology, in particular whether the close relationship of semantically similar medical terms is encoded in these embeddings. To date, only small datasets for testing medical term similarity are available, not allowing to draw conclusions about the generalisability of embeddings to the enormous amount of medical terms used by doctors. We present multiple automatically created large-scale medical term similarity datasets and confirm their high quality in an annotation study with doctors. We evaluate state-of-the-art word and contextual embeddings on our new datasets, comparing multiple vector similarity metrics and word vector aggregation techniques. Our results show that current embeddings are limited in their ability to adequately encode medical terms. The novel datasets thus form a challenging new benchmark for the development of medical embeddings able to accurately represent the whole medical terminology.
Carotid artery intimal media thickness and ankle brachial index as predictors for atherosclerosis in pre-diabetic patients -

Background: Atherosclerosis still remains as the major cause of death and premature disability in developed societies. Insulin resistance is a central pathogenesis feature of prediabetes, the incidence of which is rising substantially. The principal cause of end organ damage in prediabetes is premature cardiovascular atherosclerosis. Objectives: To assess the atherosclerosis in prediabetes. Materials and Methods: Patients who were nondiabetic of age group between 18 and 50 years were screened for fasting blood sugar, post-prandial blood sugar, hemoglobin A1c, after obtaining informed consent and were divided to study group and control group according to inclusion criteria. Results: In this study, abnormal carotid intimal media thickness (CIMT) was observed in 7 (17.1%), out of 41 pre-diabetic patients. This difference in CIMT findings between two groups was statistically significant. Prediabetics are at 8 times higher risk of developing abnormal CIMT than nondiabetics. Abnormal CIMT was associated with greater body mass index, waist-hip ratio, low high-density lipoprotein, high triglycerides, and abnormal ABI. Conclusion: Prediabetes was associated with higher risk of developing subclinical atherosclerosis when compared to non-diabetic patients. Lifestyle modification should be adopted to prevent the conversion of prediabetes into Type 2 diabetes mellitus and thus prevention of its complication.
Acute and 6-Month Outcomes in Recipients of Lung Transplantation Following Lower Extremity Strength Training: Pilot Study

Purpose: Individuals who receive lung transplantation (LTx) have prolonged lower extremity weakness that limits exercise capacity and function. The purposes of this pilot study were to measure whether acute, intense, gym-based rehabilitation significantly increased walking distance and lower extremity strength after LTx and to identify whether gains were retained at 6-month follow-up. Methods: Nine men (mean age =57 years) completed 4 weeks of daily (5×/wk), gym-based acute care rehabilitation after LTx. Rehabilitation included stretching, aerobic conditioning, education, and either low- or high-volume strength training. Outcomes were assessed at baseline, 4 weeks, and 6 months post-LTx and included 1-repetition maximum (1-RM) tests, isokinetic torque, isometric torque, and 6-minute walk distance. Results: Patients attended an average of 17 acute rehabilitation sessions. Following acute rehabilitation, walking distance was increased and patients achieved greater 1-RM for leg press and for knee extension. Regardless of the volume of strength training, knee extension isometric torque and isokinetic torque were significantly increased (P < .05). At 6 months, subjects achieved further gains in leg press 1-RM and grip strength (P < .05), while walking and other strength measures were maintained. Conclusions: Intense rehabilitation produced acute lower extremity strength improvements that were retained after 6-months. Further study is needed in a larger sample.
A Progressive Hedging Approach to Solve Harvest Scheduling Problem under Climate Change

Due to the long time horizon typically characterizing forest planning, uncertainty plays an important role when developing forest management plans. Especially important is the uncertainty related to recently human-induced global warming since it has a clear impact on forest capacity to contribute to biogenic and anthropogenic ecosystem services. If the forest manager ignores uncertainty, the resulting forest management plan may be sub-optimal, in the best case. This paper presents a methodology to incorporate uncertainty due to climate change into forest management planning. Specifically, this paper addresses the problem of harvest planning, i.e., defining which stands are to be cut in each planning period in order to maximize expected net revenues, considering several climate change scenarios. This study develops a solution approach for a planning problem for a eucalyptus forest with 1000 stands located in central Portugal where expected future conditions are anticipated by considering a set of climate scenarios. The model including all the constraints that link all the scenarios and spatial adjacency constraints leads to a very large problem that can only be solved by decomposing it into scenarios. For this purpose, we solve the problem using Progressive Hedging (PH) algorithm, which decomposes the problem into scenario sub-problems easier to solve. To analyze the performance of PH versus the use of the extensive form (EF), we solve several instances of the original problem using both approaches. Results show that PH outperforms the EF in both solving time and final optimality gap. In addition, the use of PH allows to solve the most difficult problems while the commercial solvers are not able to solve the EF. The approach presented allows the planner to develop more robust management plans that incorporate the uncertainty due to climate change in their plans.
La Vallée de l’Étrange de Mori Masahiro

Dans son essai precurseur publie en 1970, Masahiro Mori observe que l’affinite pour les robots augmente en fonction de leur ressemblance a l’humain, jusqu’a un certain point. Cependant, entre le premier pic d’affinite et le second d’indifferenciation humaine se trouve la vallee de l’etrange. Mori conseille aux createurs d’eviter cette vallee et de viser le premier pic. Confrere dans la recherche en robotique, le traducteur de Mori reflechit sur l’importance de l’essai et sur son influence durable en robotique et animation 3D au Japon et aux Etats-Unis. La vallee de l’etrange est vue positivement comme diagnostic afin d’ameliorer les theories d’interaction humaine, dont les androides sont equipes. La recherche sur la vallee de l’etrange a explose dans divers domaines depuis sa presentation en 2005 lors d’un atelier. Cet interet devrait s’intensifier puisque les chercheurs construisent des robots, des avatars et autres interfaces pour la technologie informatique de plus en plus ressemblant a l’humain.