Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
miR-223 Deficiency Increases Eosinophil Progenitor Proliferation

Recently, microRNAs have been shown to be involved in hematopoietic cell development, but their role in eosinophilopoiesis has not yet been described. In this article, we show that miR-223 is upregulated during eosinophil differentiation in an ex vivo bone marrow–derived eosinophil culture system. Targeted ablation of miR-223 leads to an increased proliferation of eosinophil progenitors. We found upregulation of a miR-223 target gene, IGF1R, in the eosinophil progenitor cultures derived from miR-223−/− mice compared with miR-223+/+ littermate controls. The increased proliferation of miR-223−/− eosinophil progenitors was reversed by treatment with an IGF1R inhibitor (picropodophyllin). Whole-genome microarray analysis of differentially regulated genes between miR-223+/+ and miR-223−/− eosinophil progenitor cultures identified a specific enrichment in genes that regulate hematologic cell development. Indeed, miR-223−/− eosinophil progenitors had a delay in differentiation. Our results demonstrate that microRNAs regulate the development of eosinophils by influencing eosinophil progenitor growth and differentiation and identify a contributory role for miR-223 in this process.
A dual-modality photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging system for noninvasive sentinel lymph node detection: preliminary clinical results

Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) has emerged as an accurate, less invasive alternative to axillary lymph node dissection, and it has rapidly become the standard of care for patients with clinically node-negative breast cancer. The sentinel lymph node (SLN) hypothesis states that the pathological status of the axilla can be accurately predicted by determining the status of the first (i.e., sentinel) lymph nodes that drain from the primary tumor. Physicians use radio-labeled sulfur colloid and/or methylene blue dye to identify the SLN, which is most likely to contain metastatic cancer cells. However, the surgical procedure causes morbidity and associated expenses. To overcome these limitations, we developed a dual-modality photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging system to noninvasively detect SLNs based on the accumulation of methylene blue dye. Ultimately, we aim to guide percutaneous needle biopsies and provide a minimally invasive method for axillary staging of breast cancer. The system consists of a tunable dye laser pumped by a Nd:YAG laser, a commercial ultrasound imaging system (Philips iU22), and a multichannel data acquisition system which displays co-registered photoacoustic and ultrasound images in real-time. Our clinical results demonstrate that real-time photoacoustic imaging can provide sensitive and specific detection of methylene blue dye in vivo. While preliminary studies have shown that in vivo detection of SLNs by using co-registered photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging is feasible, further investigation is needed to demonstrate robust SLN detection.
New Two-Dimensional Solid State Pixel Detectors With Dedicated Front-End Integrated Circuits for X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Imaging

New two-dimensional (2D) position sensitive solid state pixel detectors with dedicated multi-channel mixed-signal front-end readout integrated circuits (ICs) have been developed for x-ray and gamma ray imaging. These pixel detectors were designed to be versatile and accommodate many types of position-sensitive solid-state sensors. These 2D pixel detectors are designed to address the needs of a wide range of photon counting applications with high energy resolution imaging, high spatial resolution and for fast photon counting with simultaneous multiple energy binning capability. The first family of these pixel detectors is intended for spectroscopy applications with sensors such as Si, Ge, GaAs, HgI2, PbI2, Se, CdTe and CdZnTe in a variety of configurations to detect and image x-rays and gamma-rays of energies up to 1.3 MeV. The second family is developed for fast photon counting with simultaneous energy binning. They can be used with similar solid state sensors. The third family is for high spatial resolution imaging with resolution down to 50 times 50 micron.
Comparison of the concurrent and predictive validity of three measures of readiness to change marijuana use in a clinical sample of adolescents.

OBJECTIVE The measurement of readiness to change has become common practice in alcohol and drug treatment of both adults and adolescents. Nevertheless, there is relatively little research on the validity of measures of readiness to change among treated adolescents. The purpose of this study was to compare three measures of readiness to change marijuana use commonly used in clinical research and practice with adolescents: the Readiness Ruler, the Stages of Change Readiness and Treatment Eagerness Scale (SOCRATES; Factors 1 and 2, Recognition and Taking Steps, respectively), and a staging algorithm. METHOD The participants were 174 adolescents presenting for intensive outpatient alcohol and drug treatment who reported current marijuana use at the initial assessment. Evidence for concurrent validity was assessed by computing simple correlations among readiness measures, and correlations of each readiness measure with marijuana involvement (percentage of days abstinent in the last 30 days, problem severity score, and marijuana abuse and dependence symptom count [based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, criteria]) at both the initial/baseline assessment and at a 6-month follow-up assessment. Evidence for predictive validity was based on the results of multilevel regression models of the readiness measures in predicting frequency of marijuana use, symptoms, and problems at 6 months from the initial readiness assessment and then in predicting marijuana use, symptoms, and problems at 12 months from the readiness assessment at 6 months. RESULTS The results showed evidence for good concurrent and predictive validity for the ruler, the staging algorithm, and Taking Steps but poor evidence for the validity of Recognition. The ruler emerged as the measure with the most clinical utility when brevity and ease of administration are taken into account. CONCLUSIONS Research and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
Herpes/HIV/hepatitis viruses: biological similarities despite taxonomic differences

Recent improvements in our understanding of the natural history and pathogenesis of disease caused by members of the Herpesviridae, Retroviridae, Hepadnaviridae, and Flaviviridae, suggest striking biological parallels. The establishment of latency has long been a hallmark of herpesviruses, allowing them to persist for the life of the individual. Tactics employed by separate members of the Herpesviridae nevertheless vary according to the biological characteristics of the cells in which they wish to persist. Thus, terminally differentiated dorsal root ganglion cells will not divide so HSV and VZV can persist at that site without the need to copy daughter viruses to daughter cells. In contrast, EBV must replicate in tandem with its B-cell host to avoid being diluted with every cell division: a feat accomplished through EBNA-1 which maintains the episomal form of EBV DNA. Irrespective of the mechanism, the persistence of herpesviruses in a latent form profoundly affects what can be achieved by the immune system or with anti-herpes chemotherapy. Studies after syngeneic bone marrow transplantation in mice demonstrate long-lived reservoirs of persisting murine CMV DNA in multiple organs which cannot be eradicated by adoptive transfer of cytotoxic T-cells. Thus, these potent immune effector cells can control active virus replication but cannot eradicate the last vestiges of potential infection. Likewise, potent drugs such as acyclovir effectively control HSV or VZV replication but have no influence on the long-term persistence of latent viruses. Thus, patients given suppressive acyclovir experience profound control of genital herpes but their virus may reactivate again as soon as the drug is withdrawn, even if they have taken it consistently as part of a clinical trial for six years. A trend for reduced reactivation frequency was noted in this study which might result from improved immune responses better able to keep HSV suppressed into latency. However, non-immunological mechanisms are also possible: for example, empowering individuals with genital herpes to have control over their disease might break a vicious cycle of stress/reactivation/stress otherwise capable of maintaining a high frequency of clinical recurrence. In an analogous manner, the prevention of replication of HIV through administration of a potent cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs reveals a long-lived set of cells with
Actual number of tumor budding as a new tool for the individualization of treatment of T1 colorectal carcinomas

Background and Aim: Treatment of T1 colorectal carcinomas, either local excision including endoscopic polypectomy or radical surgery, has always been problematic in everyday practice. Although previous studies have revealed that tumor budding at the invasive margin can be a marker for the malignant potential of T1 colorectal carcinomas, the evaluation of tumor budding has not been standardized as yet. In the present study, we attempted to apply the actual number of tumor budding units for the individualization of treatment in T1 colorectal carcinomas.
Acquiring Knowledge from Categories Using Semantic Associations

There are several RDF (Resource Description Framework) knowledge bases that store community-generated categories of entities and conceptual or factual information about entities. These two types of information may have strong associations; for example, entities categorized in People from Korea (categorial information) have a high probability of being a person (conceptual information) and being born in Korea (factual information). This kind of associations can be used for extracting new conceptual or factual information about entities. In this paper, we propose a prediction system that predicts new conceptual or factual information from categories of entities. First, the proposed system uses a novel association rule mining (ARM) approach that effectively mines rules encoding associations between categories of entities and conceptual or factual information about entities contained in existing RDF knowledge bases. Our extensive experiments show that our novel ARM approach outperforms the state-of-the-art ARM approach in terms of the prediction quality and coverage of these kind of associations. Second, the proposed system ranks and groups the mined rules based on their predictability by our novel semantic confidence measure calculated with a semantic resource such as WordNet. The experiments show that our novel confidence measure outperforms the standard confidence measure frequently used in the traditional ARM field in terms of discriminating the predictability of mined rules. Last, the proposed prediction system selects only rules of predictability from ranked and grouped rules, and then uses them to predict accurate new information from categories of entities. The experiments show that the results of the proposed prediction system are fairly comparable to that of the state-of-the-art prediction system in terms of the accuracy of prediction while overwhelming the coverage of prediction.
Discriminating duplex and hairpin oligonucleotides using chemical shifts: application to the anticodon stem-loop of Escherichia coli tRNA(Phe).

A sensitive NMR spectroscopic method for detection of duplex forms of self-complementary nucleic acid sequences has been implemented. The G.U wobble base pair formed between a (15)N-labeled strand and an unlabeled probe strand is used to identify the duplex. The guanine imino resonance, with its characteristic chemical shift, is detected using a 2D (15)N-(1)H heteronuclear multiple quantum coherence (HMQC) spectrum and provides a sensitive and unambiguous route to hairpin-duplex discrimination. The method has been used to identify the duplex and hairpin forms of an RNA oligonucleotide at concentrations of approximately 20 microM. This method has also been used to rule out possible duplex formation of an RNA oligonucleotide corresponding to the unmodified anticodon stem-loop of Escherichia coli tRNA(Phe) and suggests that this hairpin has a 3 nt loop.
Color correction with blind image restoration based on multiple images using a low-rank model

Abstract. We present a method that can handle the color correction of multiple photographs with blind image restoration simultaneously and automatically. We prove that the local colors of a set of images of the same scene exhibit the low-rank property locally both before and after a color-correction operation. This property allows us to correct all kinds of errors in an image under a low-rank matrix model without particular priors or assumptions. The possible errors may be caused by changes of viewpoint, large illumination variations, gross pixel corruptions, partial occlusions, etc. Furthermore, a new iterative soft-segmentation method is proposed for local color transfer using color influence maps. Due to the fact that the correct color information and the spatial information of images can be recovered using the low-rank model, more precise color correction and many other image-restoration tasks—including image denoising, image deblurring, and gray-scale image colorizing—can be performed simultaneously. Experiments have verified that our method can achieve consistent and promising results on uncontrolled real photographs acquired from the Internet and that it outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Reported Drosophila Courtship Song Rhythms Remain Data Analysis Artifacts

From 1980 to 1992, a series of influential papers reported on the discovery, genetics, and evolution of a periodic cycling of the interval between Drosophila male courtship song pulses. The molecular mechanisms underlying this periodicity were never described. To reinitiate investigation of this phenomenon, we performed automated segmentation of songs, but failed to detect the proposed periodicity (1, 2). Kyriacou et al. (3) report that we failed to detect song rhythms because i) our flies did not sing enough and ii) our segmenter did not identify song pulses accurately. They manually annotated a subset of our recordings and reported that two strains displayed rhythms with genotype-specific periodicity, in agreement with their original reports. We cannot replicate this finding and show that the manually-annotated data, as well as the automatically segmented data, provide no evidence for either the existence of song rhythms or song periodicity differences between genotypes. Furthermore, we have re-examined our methods and analysis and find that our methods did not prevent detection of putative song periodicity. We therefore conclude that previous positive reports of song rhythms most likely resulted from inappropriate statistical analyses.
TV-Related Mother-Child Interaction and Children's Perceptions of TV Characters

,How does a parent's or other adult's involvement in a child's TV viewing influence that child's responses to television? Much of the evidence on this question comes from experimental research. It has been shown that adult commentary can inhibit or intensify children's imitative responses to a visual medium;' that mothers' comments can counteract children's tendencies to follow t k dictates of a TV commercial;* and that adult commentary can enhance children's comprehension of a TV program,J as well as their retention of information and values presented on TV.4 Furthermore, studies in which mothers were merely encouraged to sit with their children (with no specific instructions as to what to say to them) while they were watching television have indicated that children learn more from the medium under such circumstances.5 Survey findings are less clear in their implications for this relationship. Although several studies have shown that various features of family environment may condition children's or adolescents' re-
Genomics-Assisted Plant Breeding in the 21st Century: Technological Advances and Progress

One of the key global challenges of the 21st century is the production of enough food for the increasing world population. As per some recent reports the global population will continue to grow with some 9 billion people by the middle of the current century and the world will need 70 to 100% more food by that time (Godfray et al., 2010 and references therein). Agricultural productivity needs to be increased while addressing the issues of scarcity of arable land and water, impact of changing climate and preservation of natural resources. Improvement of crop yields on available agricultural land requires concerted efforts using modern scientific and technological advances in multiple disciplines (Hubert et al., 2010). Two such disciplines that have revolutionized crop improvement in the recent decades are molecular breeding and plant genomics. While the availability and application of molecular markers have accelerated the pace and precision of plant genetics and breeding, the introduction of a multitude of “omics” tools has provided unprecedented ability to dissect the molecular and genetic basis of traits as well as the characterization of whole genomes.
Content based image retrieval based on Cell Color Coherence Vector (Cell-CCV)

There are a large number of methods in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems that are based on color. The Global Color Histogram (GCH) is the most widely used method, the success of which flows from its computational simplicity. The problem with this method, however, is the absence of spatial information on the distribution of the color. To incorporate spatial information, Local Color Histograms (LCHs) are proposed, where, images are decomposed into several blocks. To reduce the space overhead of LCHs, Cell/Color histograms (CCHs) are proposed. In CCH, a cell histogram is calculated for each of the colors present in images. In this paper, we propose a new color based approach called Cell Color Coherence Vector (Cell-CCV). The proposed method is a fusion of two efficient color techniques: Cell Color Histogram (CCH) and Color Coherence Vector (CCV). Indeed, it uses a color coherence vector for each of the colors present in the images. CCV classifies pixels into coherent or incoherent regions. This gives good distinctions that cannot be made with color histograms used in CCH. Therefore, Cell-CCV takes advantage of both methods. The proposed method was tested using Wang dataset (Corel 1K). Results show that the newly developed method (Cell-CCV) performs significantly better than CCV and CCH for image retrieval in terms of weighted precision and average precision of 1000 queries.
Low Complexity Fast LMMSE-Based Channel Estimation for OFDM Systems in Frequency Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels

Channel estimation (CE) is a challenging problem and one of the key technologies in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) proposed for OFDM systems has excellent Mean Square Error (MSE) performance. However, the conventional method requires the statistical knowledge of the channel information in advance and the complicated inverse operation of large dimension matrices. In this case, an enhanced fast LMMSE channel estimation using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation and the most significant taps (MST) algorithm for OFDM systems is proposed. This method has the advantage of low computational complexity and no requirement on the detailed channel information. In addition, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other LMMSE methods in terms of bit error rate (BER) without the loss of MSE performance.
Brain Microdialysis

There is an increasing need for more accurate and detailed information concerning the complex biochemical reactions in the normal and abnormal brain. The ideal method must provide instantaneous and reliable concentration measurements of a wide variety of interstitial substances in discrete brain areas. Furthermore, normal tissue structure and metabolism should be left completely unchanged following a particular experimental procedure. None of the available techniques fulfills these requirements. The methods in use are the cortical cup, which was introduced in 1953 (MacIntosh and Oborin, 1953); the push-pull cannula, introduced in 196 1 (Gaddum, 196 1); and microelectrodes. Brain microdialysis is the latest development in this methodology but was introduced as early as 1966 (Bito et al., 1966). The method has been continuously refined, first by Delgado et al. (1972, 1984) and later, in particular, by Ungerstedt and Pycock (1974) and Ungerstedt et al. (1982). This review deals with many technical and practical aspects of brain microdialysis and gives the pros and cons of the method in comparison with other, more established techniques.
A cost analysis of radiologic imaging in pediatric trauma patients.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to examine the cost of radiologic imaging in pediatric trauma patients admitted to the pediatric emergency department. METHODS All patients were retrospectively evaluated according to age, gender, details of injury, radiological investigations ordered and their results, cost of radiologic imaging, length of stay, outcome of the injury, and hospitalization rates. RESULTS The cost of radiologic imaging was retrospectively analyzed in 1231 trauma patients aged between one month and 15 years (mean 5.91 +/- 3.82 years). For the 996 patients who had radiological imaging, 3382 images were taken in total. Of these, only 300 (8.8%) were abnormal. The mean (and SD) total cost of radiologic imaging was US$ 40.42 ($34.38) (range $4.67 to $139.26). Total cost correlated inversely with Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) (r = -0.37, p < 0.001), directly with Injury Severity Score (ISS) (r = -0.27, p < 0.001) and was not correlated with the Pediatric Trauma Score (PTS) (r = -0.16, p > 0.05). The mean (and SD) duration of hospital stays was 8.54 (10.91) hours. CONCLUSION Advanced radiological images may help in early diagnosis of trauma cases. However, periodic education programs to prevent unnecessary radiological imaging in emergency departments are also necessary to decrease the cost of these imaging modalities.