Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acceptability of Urine Screening for Neisseria gonorrheae and Chlamydia trachomatis in Adolescents at an Urban Emergency Department

Objective The objective of this study was to determine the acceptability of urine screening for Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Chlamydia trachomatis in adolescents in a pediatric emergency department. Study Design We used a prospective enrollment of adolescents aged 14–20 visiting an urban pediatric emergency department. Main Outcome Measures The main outcome measure was acceptance of urine STD screening rates. Results Of 1231 potential participants, 879 (71%) agreed to participate and 352 (29%) declined screening. Participants were similar to those refusing to participate in terms of gender. In multivariate analysis, age, race/ethnicity, and insurance status were associated with variation in sexually transmitted disease (STD) test acceptance, whereas the presence of a parent was not. Despite similar training, 1 of 3 recruiters had significantly lower acceptance rates than her peers. Overall, 10% of patients enrolled were found to have one or both infections. Conclusion Urine screening for STDs can be efficiently conducted in an emergency department setting. This screening appears to be acceptable to most patients.
Problems of Startup and Phase Jumps in PLL Systems

An adaptive phase-locked loop (PLL) structure is proposed which offers fast and smooth tracking of phase-angle jumps. Correlatively, it offers soft startup stage and avoids undesired frequency swings caused by phase jumps. The adaptive mechanism adjusts the gain of frequency estimation loop in order to mitigate large transients of frequency during sudden phase angle variations. This reduces the coupling of phase and frequency variables and allows tremendously faster and smoother estimation of both variables. The proposed adaptive mechanism can be applied to different PLL and adaptive notch-filter systems three of which including the enhanced PLL (EPLL), the synchronous reference frame PLL (SRF-PLL), and the second order generalized integrator frequency-locked loop (SOGI-FLL) are studied in this paper.
Phase III study of fluorouracil, leucovorin, and levamisole in high-risk stage II and III colon cancer: final report of Intergroup 0089.

PURPOSE In 1990, fluorouracil (FU) plus levamisole for 1 year became standard adjuvant treatment for patients with high-risk stages II and III colon cancer. Intergroup (INT) 0089 assessed the relative contributions of leucovorin and levamisole in such patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS From 1988 to 1992, 3,794 patients were randomly assigned. Experimental treatment consisted of one of three chemotherapy regimens: the low-dose leucovorin plus FU (Mayo Clinic; LDLV) regimen, the high-dose leucovorin plus FU (Roswell Park; HDLV) regimen, and the low-dose leucovorin plus levamisole plus FU (LDLV plus LEV) regimen, each administered for 30 to 32 weeks. The control arm was levamisole plus FU (LEV) for 1 year. RESULTS After a median follow-up of 10 years, of 3,561 eligible patients, 1,691 (47%) have died and 1,330 (37%) have experienced disease recurrence; 137 (10%) of those experiencing recurrence are still alive. A total of 481 patients (13%) died without evidence of recurrence, and 1,723 (48%) are alive and disease free. Although there were toxicity differences among the four arms, none was statistically superior in disease-free or overall survival. CONCLUSION The 6- to 8-month regimens of LDLV and HDLV without levamisole used in this trial, rather than the previous standard regimen of 12 months of LEV, have become widely used. INT-0089 has long-term follow-up of the largest clinical trial of patients with high-risk colon cancer, documenting not only the durability of the treatment effects, but also the natural history of patients with high-risk colon cancer, and analyses of treatment based on age, race, and comorbid conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and second primary cancers.
Thompson Sampling for Complex Bandit Problems

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of the basic arms' rewards, and the feedback observed may not necessarily be the reward per-arm. For instance, when the complex actions are subsets of the arms, we may only observe the maximum reward over the chosen subset. Thus, feedback across complex actions may be coupled due to the nature of the reward function. We prove a frequentist regret bound for Thompson sampling in a very general setting involving parameter, action and observation spaces and a likelihood function over them. The bound holds for discretely-supported priors over the parameter space and without additional structural properties such as closed-form posteriors, conjugate prior structure or independence across arms. The regret bound scales logarithmically with time but, more importantly, with an improved constant that non-trivially captures the coupling across complex actions due to the structure of the rewards. As applications, we derive improved regret bounds for classes of complex bandit problems involving selecting subsets of arms, including the first nontrivial regret bounds for nonlinear MAX reward feedback from subsets.
Roadmap of optical communications

Lightwave communications is a necessity for the information age. Optical links provide enormous bandwidth, and the optical fiber is the only medium that can meet the modern society's needs for transporting massive amounts of data over long distances. Applications range from global high-capacity networks, which constitute the backbone of the internet, to the massively parallel interconnects that provide data connectivity inside datacenters and supercomputers. Optical communications is a diverse and rapidly changing field, where experts in photonics, communications, electronics, and signal processing work side by side to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher capacity, lower cost, and lower energy consumption, while adapting the system design to novel services and technologies. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this rich research field, Journal of Optics has invited 16 researchers, each a world-leading expert in their respective subfields, to contribute a section to this invited review article, summarizing their views on state-of-the-art and future developments in optical communications.
A Bayesian Compressive Sensing Vehicular Location Method Based on Three-Dimensional Radio Frequency

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) safety applications, vehicular position is fundamental information to achieve collision avoidance and fleet management. Now, position information is comprehensively provided by global positioning system (GPS). However, in the dense urban, due to multipath effect and signal occlusion, GPS-based positioning method potentially fails to provide accurate position information. For this reason, an assistant approach has been presented in this paper by using three-dimensional radio frequency, such as time of arrival (TOA) and direction of arrival (DOA). With the goal of providing an efficient and reliable estimation of vehicular position in general traffic scenarios, we propose a hybrid TOA/DOA positioning method based on Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS), which benefits from the realization of vehicle-to-roadside wireless interaction with the dedicated short range communication. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved through extensive experiments in several scenarios where different signal configurations and the noise conditions are taken into account. Moreover, some comparative experiments are also performed to confirm the strength of our proposed approach.
RETINAL BLOOD FLOW CORRELATES TO AQUEOUS VASCULAR ENDOTHELIAL GROWTH FACTOR IN CENTRAL RETINAL VEIN OCCLUSION

Purpose: As laser speckle flowgraphy can measure blood flow distribution in the ocular fundus, the authors analyzed the relationship between retinal blood flow and aqueous vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) concentration in central retinal vein occlusion. Methods: This prospective observational study examined 45 eyes of 45 patients with central retinal vein occlusion before treatment. Blood flow in large vessels around and at the optic disk, aqueous VEGF concentration, and arteriovenous passage time were examined. Blood flow was evaluated as mean blur rate by laser speckle flowgraphy. Results: Fluorescein angiography found 20 ischemic and 25 nonischemic type eyes. Aqueous VEGF concentration in the ischemic type was significantly higher than that in the nonischemic type (P = 0.01). Arteriovenous passage time was significantly correlated to the logarithm of the aqueous VEGF concentration (P = 0.0001). Mean blur rate of the affected eye/mean blur rate of the unaffected eye of the ischemic type was significantly lower than the nonischemic type (P = 0.039). Additionally, mean blur rate was significantly correlated both to the logarithm of the aqueous VEGF concentration (P < 0.0001) and to the arteriovenous passage time (P = 0.0001). Conclusion: Laser speckle flowgraphy may be useful for predicting aqueous VEGF concentration and severity of central retinal vein occlusion.
Privacy architectures in social networks' state-of-the-art survey

The use of social networking has exploded, with millions of people using various web- and mobile-based services around the world. This increase in social networking use has led to user anxiety related to privacy and the unauthorised exposure of personal information. Large-scale sharing in virtual spaces means that researchers, designers and developers now need to re-consider the issues and challenges of maintaining privacy when using social networking services. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the current state-of-the-art privacy in social networks for both desktop and mobile uses and devices from various architectural vantage points. The survey will assist researchers and analysts in academia and industry to move towards mitigating many of the privacy issues in social networks.
Chemopreventive and antioxidant upshots of Indigofera tinctoria hydromethanolic extract in NPYR induced lung cancer in murine subjects

Indigofera tinctoria is one of the important plants of various traditional medicinal systems. We assessed the effect of hydromethanolic extract of Indigofera tinctoria on biochemical parameters, glutathionemetabolizing enzymes, lung specific markers and glycoproteins in N-nitrosopyrrolidine (NPYR) induced experimental lung toxicity in Swiss albino mice. Experimental subjects bearing lung cancer showed a significant increase in lipid peroxidation (LPO), superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity, total protein content (TPC) and total cholesterol content (TCC). Catalase (CAT) alleviated in NPYR intoxicated mice. Glutathione metabolizing enzymes decreased while lung specific markers-lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) and glycoprotein level increased in NPYR administered mice subjects. Confirmed by histological study, post treatment of low and high doses of I. tinctoria hydromethanolic (ITHML and ITHMH) extract normalizes the abnormal enzymatic and biochemical factors which signify antioxidant and anticancer activity of the plant.
A Study on Autonomic Functions in Chronic Opium Abusers

Over the centuries, opium has been the most frequent substance abused in the many parts of the world. In India opium dependence is widely prevalent in certain states of India, especially Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh (MP) etc. In rural areas of western Rajasthan crude opium is consumed with a social acceptance by adult male population. Later on they become addicted to it. There are many studies about the effects of opium on the various body systems but its chronic abuse effect on autonomic functions is still unclear, therefore this study is undertaken to explore the effect of chronic abuse of opium on autonomic functions in opium dependent patients of western Rajasthan and its comparison with normal non addicted controlled subjects. In this study total 100 male subjects were included, which were further divided in two groups. 50 subjects were from opium addicted population and 50 were healthy subjects. Female patients were omitted from analysis due to the low numbers of female opium addicts. Subjects who fulfilled DSMIV criteria were chosen as opium dependent patients (ODP). Various autonomic function test Valsalva Maneuver (VM), Deep Breathing Test (DBT), Lying To Standing Test (LST) were carried out for assessing parasympathetic reactivity and Hand Grip Test for sympathetic reactivity. Our study revealed significant changes in the autonomic functions in addicted population in comparison to normal controlled subjects. In valsalva maneuver, deep breathing test, lying to standing test result were highly significant (p < 0.001) and in hand grip test rise in SBP(p<0.05) and DBP(p<0.001) were significantly lower in addicted group as compared to the control. The risk of dysautonomia in opium addicted subjects was higher than in the non-addicted group. According to this study the longtime use of opium may results in autonomic dysfunction in opium dependent people but more evidence is still needed to completely prove the study. So recognition, treatment, and prevention of this change could be a new step in improving of health and condition of patients.
Planning and design phases of a commensal radar system in the FM broadcast band

We refer to radars that depend on transmitters of opportunity while having no impact on the systems that the transmitters are serving, as commensal radars. Other researchers refer to such systems as passive bistatic radar (PBR) [5], [26], [18]. The word passive refers only to the receivers; since, no radar system can be passive. Our system is multistatic, so the term PBR is not appropriate. Another term used in open literature is, passive coherent location [5], [23], [9]. This nomenclature is closer to our system, except that the system is not passive, so we believe that commensal is the best descriptor of this class of radar, while ours is specifically, a multistatic FM broadcast band commensal radar. An overview of a multistatic system is shown in Figure 1. For simplicity, we shall refer to commensal multistatic radar (CMR) when referring to our system here. We will explain in the following why our system must be multistatic, with few transmitter sites and many receivers, due to its intended deployment in developing nations.
Using Query Zoning and Correlation Within SMART: TREC 5

The Smart information rtrieval project emphasizes completely automatic approaches to the understanding and retrieval of large quantities of text. We continue our work in TREC 5, performaing runs in the routing, ad-hoc, and foreign language environments. The major focus this year is on zoning different parts of an initial retrieval ranking, and treating each type of query zone differently as processing continues. We also experiment with dynamic phrasing, seeing which words co-occur with originak query words in documents judged relevant. Exactly the same procedure is used for foreign language environments as for English; our tenet is that good information retrieval techniques are powerful than linguistic knowledge
YJTI at the NTCIR-13 STC Japanese Subtask

In this paper, we describe our participation in the NTCIR-13 STC Japanese Subtask, in which we develop systems with the retrieval-based method. To retrieve reply texts for a given comment text, our system generates vector representations of both the comment and candidate replies by a 3-layer LSTM-RNN and evaluate distances between the comment vector and the candidate reply vectors, selecting the top-k nearest reply vectors and returning the corresponding reply texts. We also take Theme and Genre into consideration to decide the final ranking. In preparation of the candidate reply texts, we utilize all the comments and replies in the training set of Yahoo! News comments data. Our two runs are based on two different LSTM-RNN models, one trained over Twitter conversation data and the other mainly trained over Yahoo! Chiebukuro QA data. Each dataset has no less than 60 million pairs of text, and we aim to show how effective these combinations of large-scale datasets and largescale neural models are for developing dialog systems. In addition, we had an assumption that the model of Twitter conversation data would outperform that of Yahoo! Chiebukuro QA data as the task domain seemed to be more similar to conversations in microblog services than social question answering, but the reported results revealed that it was not the case.
Reconfigurable fault-tolerant control of a vehicle with a steer-by-wire system

In this paper, a synthesis method of a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control system for a steer-by-wire vehicle is proposed. The proposed control law consists of a linear feedback control law and a control allocator based on online optimization. It is shown that the input-output property of the control allocator can be regarded as a sector bounded nonlinearity. Based on this fact, a design method of a controller that guarantees stability of the overall system is proposed. The effectiveness of the method is shown through numerical examples.
Swift Trust in a Virtual Temporary System: A Model Based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions

Trust- and reputation-based information security has been attracting global interest and attention in various disciplines. Despite the achievements of the past several decades, there is still a long way to go before the mechanism of trust and reputation is thoroughly mastered. Swift trust is playing an increasingly important role in virtual temporary systems but has not been analyzed in any depth, and the idea of applying swift trust to the study of temporary systems in virtual societies is still novel. Based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions, a swift trust model is proposed in which the mechanism of swift trust is realized by way of layered reasoning, which is superior to the typical trust reasoning. The model puts forward a trust-transfer mechanism and clustering mechanism to achieve a whole swift trust value. The reliability of swift trust in developing and maintaining temporary systems is discussed, together with the reliability of the swift trust values derived from the proposed approach. Experiments show good consistency with the results obtained by the model.
Changes in Quantity of Fibronectin from Human Skin Fibroblasts with Cellular Aging

Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, we investigated the amount of cell surface fibronectin and the amount released to the culture medium in human skin fibroblasts during successive cultivation. Cell surface fibronectin did not show a remarkable change in quantity through early and midpassage, but it decreased markedly in late passage. Released fibronectin per cell also did not show a remarkable change through early and midpassage. In late passage, however, it exhibited a marked increase.
Evolution of anaesthesia in transapical aortic valve implantation Running head: Anaesthesia and transcatheter valve

The Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI) had emerged more and more in the last twenty years. According to the scientifi c literature, this is an approved, suitable and alternative therapeutic choice to conventional surgery for aortic valve disease in high risk patients. The most of patients are octogenarians or nonagenarians, with multiple comorbidities (neurological,vascular,oncologic, haematological, etc). The evolution of TAVI techniques and its devices have improved the quality of results and reduced the periand post-procedural complications. Cardiac anaesthesia and analgesia in TAVI patients is very important and fundamental to a quickly and complete clinical restoring after the procedure. An optimal balance of drugs and peri-procedural management could reduce the neurological events (such as delirium), the days of hospitalization and the admission of intensive care unit. According to our experience in transapical approach, the low dose of propofol and desfl urane allowed to optimal cardiac anaesthesia and rapid mechanical ventilation weaning in complex patient undergone to transcatheter valve implantation with transapical approach. Moreover, our protocol reduced considerably the incidence of perioperative delirium. Case Report Evolution of anaesthesia in transapical aortic valve implantation Running head: Anaesthesia and transcatheter valve Marzia Cottini*, Lappa A, Donfrancesco S and Francesco Musumeci Department of Heart and Vessels, Cardiac Surgery Unit and Heart Transplantation Centre, “S. Camillo-Forlanini” Hospital, 00152 Rome, Italy *Address for Correspondence: Marzia Cottini, Department of Heart and Vessels, Cardiac Surgery Unit, “S. Camillo-Forlanini” Hospital, Circonvallazione Gianicolense 87, 00152, Rome, Italy, Tel: +39-347-3245331, Fax +39-06-58704511; Email: mailto:marzia.cottini@gmail.com Submitted: 03 August 2017 Approved: 18 September 2017 Published: 20 September 2017 Copyright: 2017 Cottini M, et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Lactic acidosis in critical illness

PurposeThis article reviews the current body of knowledge regarding lactic acidosis in critically ill patients. The classification of disordered lactate metabolism and its pathogenesis are examined. The utility of lactate as a metabolic monitor of shock is examined and current therapeutic strategies in the treatment of patients suffering from lactic acidosis are extensively reviewed. The paper is designed to integrate basic concepts with a current approach to lactate in critical illness that the clinician can use at the bedside. Data SourcesComprehensive review of the available, basic science, medical, surgical, and critical care literature. ConclusionsThe severity of lactic acidosis in critically ill patients correlates with overall oxygen debt and survival. Lactate determinations may be useful as an ongoing monitor of perfusion as resuscitation proceeds. Therapy of critically ill patients with lactic acidosis is designed to maximize oxygen delivery in order to reduce tissue hypoxia by increasing cardiac index, while maintaining hemoglobin concentration. Buffering agents have not been shown to materially affect outcome from lactic acidosis caused by shock. The benefits of other specific therapies designed to reduce the severity of lactic acidosis remain unproven. (Crit Care Med 1992; 20:80)
PHOTOSENSITIZATION WITH A CHLORIN‐THIOBARBITURATE CONJUGATE

Abstract— The photobiologic properties of a chlorin‐thiobarbiturate conjugate were examined. In addition to the characteristic 670 nm chlorin absorbance, the conjugate exhibited new absorbance bands at 517 and 743 nm, but these were not a part of the fluorescence emission spectra, nor was fluorescence observed at wavelengths >670 nm. The action spectrum indicated that the long‐wavelength absorbance of the conjugate was not involved in phototoxicity in cell culture, and that only irradiation at wavelengths associated with the chlorin moiety yielded a cytotoxic effect. In vivo cytotoxicity elicited by 745 nm irradiation is attributed to thermal effects.