Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinicopathological features of lung cancer in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a connective tissue disorder (CTD) associated with an increased risk of malignancy including lung cancer (LC). Methods Clinicopathologic characteristics of LC patients with RA and without systemic CTD were compared to identify the potential differences. A further intra-group comparison was conducted in LC patients with RA according to smoking status to explore the effect of smoking on the clinicopathologic characteristics of LC patients with RA. Results A total of 44 LC patients with RA and 176 LC patients without systemic CTD were included in this study. There were no statistically significant differences in the distribution of age, gender, smoking status, histology type, and tumor location between the two groups. However, a significantly larger proportion of patients with stage IV LC was noted in LC with RA group (59.1% vs. 39.2%, P=0.017). Besides, more LC patients with RA had an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance score (PS) ≥2 (8.0% vs. 20.5%, P=0.015). On multivariate analysis, tumor stage (OR: 1.41, 95% CI: 1.23-13.70, P=0.021) and presence of RA (OR: 1.35, 95% CI: 1.34-11.16, P=0.012) demonstrated independent associations with poorer ECOG PS. RA-interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD) was observed in 18 LC patients (40.9%) with RA. Among them, usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) was observed only in past or current smokers, whereas non-specific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP) was observed only in non-smokers. Conclusions There were no statistically significant differences in the distribution of age, gender, smoking status, histology type, and tumor location between LC patients with RA and those without systemic CTD. Compared with LC patients without CTD, LC patients with RA were more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage and have a poorer ECOG PS score, and were less likely to receive surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy.
Explicit State Tracking with Semi-Supervisionfor Neural Dialogue Generation

The task of dialogue generation aims to automatically provide responses given previous utterances. Tracking dialogue states is an important ingredient in dialogue generation for estimating users' intention. However, the expensive nature of state labeling and the weak interpretability make the dialogue state tracking a challenging problem for both task-oriented and non-task-oriented dialogue generation: For generating responses in task-oriented dialogues, state tracking is usually learned from manually annotated corpora, where the human annotation is expensive for training; for generating responses in non-task-oriented dialogues, most of existing work neglects the explicit state tracking due to the unlimited number of dialogue states. In this paper, we propose the semi-supervised explicit dialogue state tracker (SEDST) for neural dialogue generation. To this end, our approach has two core ingredients: CopyFlowNet and posterior regularization. Specifically, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture, named CopyFlowNet, to represent an explicit dialogue state with a probabilistic distribution over the vocabulary space. To optimize the training procedure, we apply a posterior regularization strategy to integrate indirect supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on both task-oriented and non-task-oriented dialogue corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Moreover, we find that our proposed semi-supervised dialogue state tracker achieves a comparable performance as state-of-the-art supervised learning baselines in state tracking procedure.
Interatrial block predicts atrial fibrillation in patients with carotid and coronary artery disease.

Background Interatrial block (IAB) has been previously shown to predict atrial fibrillation (AF) in cardiac populations. This study sought to evaluate the relationship between IAB and new-onset AF in a population of patients undergoing clinically indicated coronary angiography who received carotid ultrasonography. Methods A population of 355 subjects undergoing coronary angiography and carotid ultrasound were retrospectively studied. Common carotid artery (CCA) far-wall intima-media thickness (CIMT), and total carotid plaque area were measured. Coronary artery disease was measured by angiography and IAB by electrocardiograph (ECG). Results The mean population age was 64.4 years, 70.4% male, mean BMI 29.9 kg/m2. IAB was a predictor of new-onset AF (OR =2.40, 95% CI: 1.33-4.29; P=0.003). There was a significant difference in AF free survival time between patients with IAB and without IAB via Cox proportional hazard analysis [52.9 months (95% CI: 47.1-58.7 months) vs. 62.6 months (95% CI: 58.8-66.5 months); P=0.006]. Patients with IAB had a significantly greater CIMT (0.883±0.193 vs. 0.829±0.192 mm; P=0.013) and a higher prevalence of significant (>70%) right coronary artery lesions than patients without (45.8% vs. 34.4%; P=0.026). Significant predictors of IAB on multivariate analysis were BMI ≥30 kg/m2 (OR =3.14, 95% CI: 1.14-6.71, P=0.003), male sex (OR =1.78, 95% CI: 1.05-3.03, P=0.034), increased mean CIMT (per 0.1 mm increase) (OR =1.75, 95% CI: 1.00-3.07, P=0.050) and increased age (per 10-year increase) (OR =1.46, 95% CI: 1.14-1.88, P=0.003). Conclusions IAB is a predictor of new-onset AF in patients with carotid and coronary artery disease. Both carotid and coronary artery disease are associated with a higher prevalence of IAB.
Using twitch tracheal airway pressure, negative inhale forced pressure, and Medical Research Council score to guide weaning from mechanical ventilation.

Background Weaning from mechanical ventilation (MV) is an important and universal issue in critically ill patients, with no consensus that predicts weaning success. Twitch tracheal airway pressure (TwPtr) may be a more objective indicator of diaphragm function. The present study evaluated TwPtr relative to negative inspiratory force (NIF) or Medical Research Council (MRC) score, for predicting success of weaning from MV. Methods From December 2015 to March 2017, 62 patients were included who received invasive MV >48 hours and then underwent a test for spontaneous breathing. The NIF and MRC score were sequentially determined. The TwPtr measurement was performed via magnetic stimulation of the neck phrenic nerve. Results Weaning success was achieved by 54 patients (87.1%), including 30, 12, and 12 patients who experienced simple, difficult, and prolonged weaning, respectively. The areas under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) for NIF, MRC score, and TwPtr were 0.778, 0.560, and 0.792. When TwPtr was combined with NIF, the sensitivity and specificity of weaning success were 96.3% and 75.0%, and AUC was 0.807. In the weaning success group, after correction for age, the AUC of TwPtr was 0.878, which differentiated the simple weaning from non-simple group. Conclusions TwPtr was superior to either NIF or MRC score for differentiating patients in the simple weaning group from those patients who experienced difficult, prolonged, or failed weaning. TwPtr combined with NIF may be used to predict weaning success better than the MRC score alone.
A COLABORAÇÃO NA CADEIA DE SUPRIMENTOS, AS CAPABILIDADES E O DESEMPENHO OPERACIONAL: UMA ANÁLISE NO SETOR DE BENS DE CAPITAL

The objective of this study was to verify the importance of collaboration practices, characterized as resource sharing, information and common goals, operational capabilities and operational performance in the capital goods industry installed in Brazil. For this study, it was considered the direct supply chain in the collaborative relationship between the focus company or main company and their first tier suppliers. The research was divided in two phases, in the first phase, there were carried out ten depth interviews with managers of multinational companies and treated by analysis of content. Also in this phase, a stimulated survey was conducted in order to identify possible gaps unidentified on the spontaneous interview. In the second phase a structured questionnaire was used, based on authors of supply chain management, collaboration, operational capabilities and operational performance. The questionnaire was sent to 40 companies of this sector. The results showed that collaborative practices are not frequently used in companies of capital goods sector, especially when related to resource sharing. Also, it was possible to find that there were few differences between the answers when considering the function of the respondent, the size of the company and the motivating factor for the purchase of capital goods.
Multimodal Continuous Turn-Taking Prediction Using Multiscale RNNs

In human conversational interactions, turn-taking exchanges can be coordinated using cues from multiple modalities. To design spoken dialog systems that can conduct fluid interactions it is desirable to incorporate cues from separate modalities into turn-taking models. We propose that there is an appropriate temporal granularity at which modalities should be modeled. We design a multiscale RNN architecture to model modalities at separate timescales in a continuous manner. Our results show that modeling linguistic and acoustic features at separate temporal rates can be beneficial for turn-taking modeling. We also show that our approach can be used to incorporate gaze features into turn-taking models.
Reliance on Medicare Providers by Veterans after Becoming Age‐Eligible for Medicare is Associated with the Use of More Outpatient Services

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effect of Medicare use on the receipt of outpatient services from 2001 through 2015 for a cohort of Veterans Administration (VA) users who became age-eligible for Medicare in 1998-2000. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING VA administrative data linked with Medicare claims for veterans who participated in the 1999 Large Health Survey of Enrolled Veterans. STUDY DESIGN We coded each veteran as VA-reliant or Medicare-reliant based on the number of visits in each system and compared the health and social risk factors between VA-reliant and Medicare-reliant veterans. We used bivariate probit and instrumental variables models to estimate the association between a veteran's reliance on Medicare and the receipt of outpatient procedures in Medicare and the VA. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Veterans who chose to rely on the VA (n = 4,317) had substantially worse social and health risk factors than Medicare-reliant veterans (n = 2,567). Medicare reliance was associated with greater use of outpatient services for 24 of the 28 types of services considered. Instrumental variable estimates found significant effects of Medicare reliance on receipt of advanced imaging and cardiovascular testing. CONCLUSIONS Expanded access to fee-for-service care in the community may be expensive, while the VA will likely continue to care for the most vulnerable veterans.
Post-stroke infections and preventive antibiotics in stroke: Update of clinical evidence

This review provides an update of evidence on post-stroke infections and the use of preventive antibiotics in stroke. Infection is a common complication after stroke, affecting between 15% and 30% of the patients. The predictors for post-stroke infection can be divided into three categories: clinical factors, anatomical (stroke related) factors and immunological factors. The relation between the occurrence of a post-stroke infection and functional outcome remained subject of debate, but it seems likely that the occurrence of these infections has a causal relation with poor functional outcome and mortality. In the first meta-analysis on preventive antibiotic therapy, almost a decade ago, its beneficial effect on post-stroke infection rate was clear; however, the effect on functional outcome remained uncertain because included studies were small and heterogeneous. Afterwards, three large phase-3 RCTs were published and a Cochrane meta-analysis was performed. It has now become clear that, despite the finding that overall infections are reduced, preventive antibiotic therapy in the acute phase of stroke does neither improve functional outcome, nor decrease mortality rates. This does not yet mean that further research on preventive antibiotics in stroke is useless: the pathophysiology and etiology of post-stroke infections are unclear and the use of preventive antibiotics in specific subgroups of stroke patients could still be very effective. This is currently being studied. Besides, preventive antibiotic therapy might be cost-effective by increasing quality-adjusted life years. Thirdly, research for the upcoming years might put more emphasis on the effect of stroke on immunological alterations.
Planung der Produkte und Fertigungssysteme für die Märkte von morgen

nnovationskraft ist eine herausragende Fahigkeit des mittelstandisch gepragten Maschinen- und Anlagenbaus. Angesichts zunehmender Komplexitat der Marktleistungen und kurzer werdender Innovations- zyklen zahlt die Strategiekompetenz mehr denn je. Strategiekompetenz hilft, die Erfolgspotenziale von morgen fruhzeitig zu erkennen und rechtzeitig zu erschliesen. Die strategische Planung von Produkten und Fertigungssystemen kommt gerade in den mittelstandischen Unternehmen des Maschinen- und Anlagenbaus zu kurz. Eine Ursache liegt in der grosen Vielfalt an Methoden und dem fehlenden Wissen, welche Methoden fur das spezifische Unternehmen relevant sind und wie die strategische Planung in den Unternehmensfuhrungsprozess einzubetten ist. Im Rahmen des Verbundprojekts Strategische Produkt- und Prozessplanung (SPP) wurde in sechs reprasentativen Mitgliedsfirmen des VDMA das Instrumentarium der strategischen Planung erfolgreich eingefuhrt. Das vorliegende Buch vermittelt einen umfassenden Einblick in die strategische Planung in Unternehmen des Maschinen- und Anlagenbaus und gibt konkrete Hinweise fur die Gestaltung der Produkte und Fertigungssysteme von morgen. Die Fallbeispiele zeigen, wie Unternehmen das Instrumentarium der strategischen Planung erfolgreich einsetzen.
Hidradenitis suppurativa/acne inversa: a practical framework for treatment optimization – systematic review and recommendations from the HS ALLIANCE working group

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS)/acne inversa is a debilitating chronic disease that remains poorly understood and difficult to manage. Clinical practice is variable, and there is a need for international, evidence‐based and easily applicable consensus on HS management. We report here the findings of a systematic literature review, which were subsequently used as a basis for the development of international consensus recommendations for the management of patients with HS. A systematic literature review was performed for each of nine clinical questions in HS (defined by an expert steering committee), covering comorbidity assessment, therapy (medical, surgical and combinations) and response to treatment. Included articles underwent data extraction and were graded according to the Oxford Centre for Evidence‐based Medicine criteria. Evidence‐based recommendations were then drafted, refined and voted upon, using a modified Delphi process. Overall, 5310 articles were screened, 171 articles were analysed, and 65 were used to derive recommendations. These articles included six randomized controlled trials plus cohort studies and case series. The highest level of evidence concerned dosing recommendations for topical clindamycin in mild disease (with systemic tetracyclines for more frequent/widespread lesions) and biologic therapy (especially adalimumab) as second‐line agents (following conventional therapy failure). Good‐quality evidence was available for the hidradenitis suppurativa clinical response (HiSCR) as a dichotomous outcome measure in inflammatory areas under treatment. Lower‐level evidence supported recommendations for topical triclosan and oral zinc in mild‐to‐moderate HS, systemic clindamycin and rifampicin in moderate HS and intravenous ertapenem in selected patients with more severe disease. Intralesional or systemic steroids may also be considered. Local surgical excision is suggested for mild‐to‐moderate HS, with wide excision for more extensive disease. Despite a paucity of good‐quality data on management decisions in HS, this systematic review has enabled the development of robust and easily applicable clinical recommendations for international physicians based on graded evidence.
Tensor Embedding: A Supervised Framework for Human Behavioral Data Mining and Prediction

Today’s densely instrumented world offers tremendous opportunities for continuous acquisition and analysis of multimodal sensor data, providing temporal characterization of individual behaviors. Is it possible to efficiently couple such rich sensor data with predictive modeling techniques to provide contextual and insightful assessments of individual behavior? Such data is noisy, incomplete, and collected from multiple sources, each with a different temporal resolution and dimensionality. In addition, longitudinal studies tend to examine a number of aspects of human behavior, such as well being, performance, or personality, which poses a challenge for handcrafted features engineering. To address these challenges, we propose supervised tensor embedding (STE), an algorithm for the joint decomposition of input and target variables in high-dimensional multimodal data. Latent features obtained from STE can be fed into any regression model for the estimation of the target variable(s). Following the embedding of higher-order data, features from different sources can be coupled. Additionally, we demonstrate that feature selection on higher-order data can enhance performance. The efficiency of our method is tested on two real-world datasets consisting of 29 target variables. Compared to the state of the art, we find that (i) our method outperforms others in 21 prediction tasks, and (ii) there are a few aspects of human behavior that are unpredictable regardless of the method, which can be the limitation of multilinear methods or lack of proper independent variables.
The MeMAD Submission to the WMT18 Multimodal Translation Task

This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the WMT Multimodal Machine Translation Shared Task. We propose adapting the Transformer neural machine translation (NMT) architecture to a multi-modal setting. In this paper, we also describe the preliminary experiments with text-only translation systems leading us up to this choice. We have the top scoring system for both English-to-German and English-to-French, according to the automatic metrics for flickr18. Our experiments show that the effect of the visual features in our system is small. Our largest gains come from the quality of the underlying text-only NMT system. We find that appropriate use of additional data is effective.
Recent Findings on AMPA Receptor Recycling

α-Amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptors (AMPA-Rs) are tetrameric protein complexes that mediate most of the fast-excitatory transmission in response to the neurotransmitter glutamate in neurons. The abundance of AMPA-Rs at the surface of excitatory synapses establishes the strength of the response to glutamate. It is thus evident that neurons need to tightly regulate this feature, particularly in the context of all synaptic plasticity events, which are considered the biological correlates of higher cognitive functions such as learning and memory. AMPA-R levels at the synapse are regulated by insertion of newly synthesized receptors, lateral diffusion on the plasma membrane and endosomal cycling. The latter is likely the most important especially for synaptic plasticity. This process starts with the endocytosis of the receptor from the cell surface and is followed by either degradation, if the receptor is directed to the lysosomal compartment, or reinsertion at the cell surface through a specialized endosomal compartment called recycling endosomes. Although the basic steps of this process have been discovered, the details and participation of additional regulatory proteins are still being discovered. In this review article, we describe the most recent findings shedding light on this crucial mechanism of synaptic regulation.
Bumblebees Express Consistent, but Flexible, Speed-Accuracy Tactics Under Different Levels of Predation Threat

A speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) in behavioural decisions is known to occur in a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. Accurate decisions often take longer for a given condition, while fast decisions can be inaccurate in some tasks. Speed-accuracy tactics are known to vary consistently among individuals, and show a degree of flexibility during colour discrimination tasks in bees. Such individual flexibility in speed-accuracy tactics is likely to be advantageous for animals exposed to fluctuating environments, such as changes in predation threat. We therefore test whether individual speed-accuracy tactics are fixed or flexible under different levels of predation threat in a model invertebrate, the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. The flexibility of speed-accuracy tactics in a foraging context was tested in the laboratory using a “meadow” of artificial flowers harbouring “robotic” crab spider predators. We found that while the ranking of bees along the speed and accuracy continuums was consistent across two levels of predation threat, there was some flexibility in the tactics used by individual bees – most bees became less accurate at colour discrimination when exposed to predation threat when flower types were rewarding. The relationship between decision speed and accuracy was influenced by predator detectability and the risk associated with making incorrect choices during the colour discrimination task. Predator crypsis resulted in a breakdown in the relationship between speed and accuracy, especially when making an incorrect floral choice incurred a distasteful quinine punishment. No single speed-accuracy tactic was found to be optimal in terms of foraging efficiency under either predation threat situation. However, bees that made faster decisions achieved higher nectar collection rates in predator free situations, while accurate bees achieved higher foraging rates under predation threat. Our findings show that while individual bees remain relatively consistent in terms of whether they place greater emphasis on speed or accuracy under predation threat, they can respond flexibly to the additional time costs of detecting predators.
Temporal variability of bacterioplankton is habitat driven

Temporal dynamics of bacterioplankton are rarely investigated for multiple habitats and years within individual lakes, limiting our understanding of the variability of bacterioplankton community (BC) composition with respect to environmental factors. We assessed the BC composition of a littoral and two pelagic habitats (euphotic zone and hypolimnion) of Lake Tovel monthly from April 2014 to May 2017 by high‐throughput sequencing of the V3–V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene. The three habitats differed in temperature, light, oxygen and hydrology. In particular, the littoral was the most hydrologically unstable because it receives most of the lake inflow, the hypolimnion was the most stable because of its hydrologically sheltered position, and the pelagic euphotic habitat was intermediate. Consequently, we hypothesized different temporal patterns of BC composition for all three habitats according to their environmental differences. We applied PERMANOVA, nonmetric multidimensional scaling and source–sink analysis to characterize BC composition. Overall, BCs were different among habitats with the littoral showing the highest variability and the hypolimnion the highest stability. The BC of rainy 2014 was distinct from the BCs of other years irrespective of the habitats considered. Seasonal differences in BCs were limited to spring, probably linked to meltwater inflow and mixing. Thus, temporal effects related to year and season were linked to the hydrological gradient of habitats. We suggest that despite potential within‐lake dispersal of bacterioplankton by water flow and mixing, local environmental conditions played a major role in Lake Tovel, fostering distinct BCs in the three habitats.