Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prediction of Inadequate Bowel Preparation Using Total and Segmental Colon Transit Time in Patients with Chronic Constipation: Some Different Outcomes

Aims Radio-opaque markers have been widely used in the study of colon motility in patients with chronic functional constipation (FC). Here, we evaluate the relationship between the colon transit time (CTT) and the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale (BBPS) to determine whether CTT is a sufficient predictor of bowel preparation in patients with chronic functional constipation. Methods A total of fifty-six patients with constipation and fifty-two healthy controls (HC) were enrolled in this study. All subjects underwent the colonic transit study using radio-opaque markers and were given a follow-up colonoscopy examination on day 3 to 7 to determine BBPS. The correlation between total and segmental CTT and BBPS was evaluated, and risk factors for predicting inadequate bowel preparation were determined. Results In our study, we found some distinct outcomes compared with previous studies. The mean total CTT (TCTT) was determined to be 43.37 ± 18.82 h in the FC group and 23.08 ± 10.18 h in the HC group. This difference was found to be significant for both the total and segmental CTTs between the two groups (P < 0.05). Further, TCTT was negatively correlated with BBPS both in the FC (r = −0.899, 95% CI -0.748 to -0.925, P < 0.001) and the HC (r = −0.978, 95% CI -0.854 to -1.003, P = 0.004) groups, as was segmental CTTs and segmental BBPS (P < 0.05). In the case of patients with slow transit constipation, multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that prolonged TCTT (OR 0.722, 95% CI 0.589-0.885, P = 0.002) was independently associated with poor bowel preparation. The total and right to left CTTs were found to predict inadequate bowel preparation and exhibited the best sensitivity and specificity at 48.0 h, 15.5 h, 17.5 h, and 19.0 h, based on ROC curve analysis. Conclusions The CTT test represents a valuable method for predicting the level of bowel preparation prior to a colonoscopy examination. That is, both total and segmental CTTs can be considered an objective predictor of bowel preparation prior to colonoscopy. The present study demonstrates some distinct results relative to previous studies, including STC subtype proportion in FC, the proportion of inadequate bowel preparation in the STC subtype, and the cut-off value of TCTT for predicting inadequate bowel preparation.
ADAPTATION OF INTERACTION WITH CHATTERBOTS FOR USE IN THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

One mean of obtaining information on the Web, which complements or replaces other forms of access, is with the use of Chatterbots. To use this technology, several factors must be considered in its development, especially when oriented at children, such as choice of technology, design and assemble knowledge in a database, with the help of many professionals of different areas to understand and adapt the system. In this work, we emphasized the development of a Virtual Learning Companion, calling Buti, to provide information of healthy lifestyle for children and preteens, which have similar cognitive development, but are differently from adults. Initially, the system’s interaction was created taking in consideration the existing systems, which have a passive characteristic, centering the interaction from the user to the system. From tests carried through the help of psychologist and taking in consideration the relation with the concepts of the human development defended by theoreticians of the education area, we verified the necessity of adjustments in the system’s interaction for this public. Complementary to this modification, the use of Affective Computing was made; applying personality and emotion, in order to obtain a better relationship between system and user.
Data Aggregation Mechanism Using Dynamic Routing With Cyber Physical Systems

In wireless sensors the data can be send through network without any data collusions. Here, we are transmitting the data in the form of encrypted packets through network to destination without any misplacement of data packets . To fulfilling that, data aggregation is used. Data aggregation has been widely recognized as an efficient method to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks, which can support a wide range of applications such as monitoring temperature, humidity, level, speed etc. The data sampled by the same kind of sensors have much redundancy since the sensor nodes are usually quite dense in wireless sensor networks. To make data aggregation more efficient, the packets with the same attribute, defined as the identifier of different data sampled by different sensors such as temperature sensors, humidity sensors, etc., should be gathered together. However, to recognize that the present data aggregation mechanisms did not take packet attribute into consideration. In this paper, we take the lead in introducing packet attribute into data aggregation and propose an Data Aggregation mechanism using Dynamic Routing (DADR) which can make packets with the same attribute convergent as much as possible and therefore improve the efficiency of data aggregation.
The prophylactic efficacy of Cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) extract against aspirin-induced gastric ulcer in a rat model

The gastroprotective and therapeutic effects of cardamom was examined using aspirin-induced gastric ulcers. Male albino rats were separated into healthy control and peptic ulcer-induced groups. The latter group was treated with cardamom extract before or after ulcer induction to investigate its protective and therapeutic effects. Another group was treated with Omeprazole. Rats were sacrificed; the gastric tissue was examined for ulcer index and score, pH and total acidity measurements. Moreover, we studied antiinflammatory and antioxidant biomarkers. Results demonstrated that cardamom exerts an ameliorative effect, shown by a decrease in the gastric ulcer index and score. The extract restores the free radical-scavenging enzymes and reduces inflammatory markers. Pepsin and putrescine levels decreased significantly, while hydroxyproline levels increased in groups treated with cardamom extract, either as a protective or therapeutic agent. Cardamom is therapeutically valuable for enhancing and hastening gastric ulcer remediation as it is capable of inhibiting aspirin-induced damage.
DNA Copy Number Gain in Lung Cancer and NonInvolved Tissue

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Eighty five percent (85%) of lung cancers are non-small-cell (NSCLC). NSCLC remains the number one cause of cancer related mortality for men and women in the U.S and its prevalence continues to increase worldwide. NSCLC has a wide range of patients’ survival and despite potentially curative resection in early-stage, survival remains sub-optimal and recurrence rates are high. Therefore, early detection and staging is crucial to increase the patient’s survival. Copy number (CN) changes in lung cancer have been shown to be located in certain genomic regions and detection of copy number changes in cancer population can essentially help with the treatment and/or prevention. In turn, identification of genes with significant CN gain can potentially be used for early detection of the disease. One approach is CN analysis of each subject individually, however the results may vary among subjects and it becomes difficult to find the common probes in population analyses. In the proposed approach here, the analysis is performed at the population level directly. We perform genome-wide analyses of CNs in a collection of 50 NSCLC tumors to identify probes with significantly gained CNs. We propose a formal statistical test for CN analysis between lung tumor and its non-involved (normal) tissue over all 50 subjects, subjects with gained CN in tumor, and subjects with gained CN in normal tissue.
The Behavior of a Multi-Story Steel Frame Subject to Measured Fire Using Calibrated Simple Approach

Structural steels are one of the most popular construction materials with a number of merits, such as cost-effectiveness, durability, lightweight, versatility, etc. However, when exposed to a high temperature, their thermal expansion rate is high and the strength reduces substantially, making the steel structures vulnerable to fire. So far, a number of studies have been performed to understand the behavior of steel in fire. Rigorous tests, from the material to structural level, have led the advancement of modeling techniques. Among various analytical techniques, one of the most widely used approaches is the finite element modeling (FEM). While FEM can demonstrate geometrical and material nonlinearities, due to the complexity, the approach may result in high computational loads to ensure the convergence. Thus, in this paper, a simple calculation method is instead used to understand the steel frame subject to fire, in conjunction with experimentally collected temperature and displacement data. Then, at each temperature (before and after critical temperature and the formation of plastic hinges), the effect of elevated temperature on global behavior is examined using frame analysis. Results of the study have demonstrated that when structural integrity is of concern, the critical temperature of the structure must be examined in terms of fundamental characteristics of the structure.
Tailored Termination for Optimal Supercompilation

Supercompilation is a simple, powerful program specialization technique, but it can face issues with tractability and code bloat. In this paper, we examine how the choice of the termination criteria, one of the key components of the supercompilation algorithm, can effect the performance of supercompiled programs. We have conducted an empirical study of the effect of selecting a termination criteria which is optimal with respect to the program being specialized. We observe that such a tailored criteria can yield significant improvements over a one-size-fits-all criteria, with no potential for performance degradation. While our study focuses on user-supplied termination criteria, we theorize how this tailoring process might be automated.
Reducing the cancer burden among African Americans

Since the "War on Cancer" was declared in 1971, numerous strides have been made in terms of cancer prevention, detection, treatment, and quality of life. However, although the nation boasts of the progress being achieved relative to cancer prevention, risk reduction, detection, treatment, and rehabilitation, the burden of cancer borne by of African Americans continues to surpass the burden borne by other racial or ethnic populations within the United States. The trends by which basic components of cancer prevention and cancer care are used among and administered to African Americans have long been recognized by our nation's scientists and clinicians. However, they can be ignored no longer. Armed with the new knowledge of what cancer is; how it develops; who is at risk; how best to screen, detect, diagnose, and treat cancer; and how to improve the quality of life of cancer patients and survivors, priority should be given to reducing the cancer burden among African Americans in the United States. The strides that have been made in the area of cancer are laudable. However, they are meaningless if they are not used aggressively to lighten the cancer burden of those who are known to carry the greatest load. Cancer 1998;83:1877‐1884. © 1998 American Cancer Society.
Attitudes Toward the Saudi Southern Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Investigation

This study examined attitudes toward the Southern dialect among speakers from the southern region who live in or visit Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The study sample consists of 51 southerners participants, who were asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding their attitudes towards the Southern dialect. This study also investigated the use of the southern dialect among southerners who live in Jeddah or have contact with the Jeddah dialect (Hijazi). The findings showed that southerners hold significantly positive attitudes towards their Southern dialect and there was a significant positive correlation between attitudes towards the Southern dialect and its reported use.
Novel Biomarkers in Pancreatic Cancer

Simona O. Dima1, Cristiana Tanase2, Radu Albulescu2, Anca Botezatu3 and Irinel Popescu1 1Center of General Surgery and Liver Transplantation, Fundeni Clinical Institute of Digestive Disease and Liver Transplantation, Bucharest, 2Biochemistry and Proteomics Department, “Victor Babes” National Institute of Pathology, Bucharest, 3Viral Genetic Engineering Laboratory, Romanian Academy ‘Stefan S. Nicolau’ Virology Institute, Bucharest, Romania
Fast and Multilevel Semantic-Preserving Discrete Hashing

Deep hashing methods have achieved great success in multi-label image retrieval due to its computation and storage efﬁciency. However, most existing methods adopt a relaxation-and-quantization optimization strategy, which inevitably degrades the performance. Besides, existing discrete hashing methods are very time-consuming due to the bit-wise learning strategy. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel deep asymmetric discrete hashing method, named F ast and M ultilevel semantic-preserving D iscrete H ashing(FMDH). FMDH makes the best of supervised information to preserve the multilevel semantic similarities between multi-label images, and further accelerates the training process. Extensive experiments on two widely used multi-label image datasets demonstrate that FMDH can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on both accuracy and training time efﬁciency.
Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth

The focus of this paper is a consideration of the role that financial stress plays in a student’s study outcomes, in particular, whether individual circumstances influence this relationship; for example, the extent to which the combination of work and study or living status (living independently compared with living with parents) contributes to financial stress. Financial stress has other obvious effects on overall wellbeing, but the focus of this research is the effect on education outcomes. This paper explores the financial wellbeing of tertiary students participating in LSAY. The finance topic in LSAY includes questions on government payments, income, credit card activity, shortage of money, saving, and how respondents are generally managing financially. Also of interest is the effect that financial stress has had on students’ learning, a theme not specifically explored in LSAY but which is explored in an additional survey of LSAY participants described in the paper. This report is available at . Research report no.69: Do schools influence student engagement in the high school years? Sinan Gemici and Tham Lu, NCVER Abstract There is a well-established link between young people’s engagement with school and their longerterm education and labour market outcomes. The key policy question explored in this research is the extent to which student engagement can be influenced by the manner in which schools are organised and run. This report uses LSAY data to examine a wide range of school characteristics and their impact on students’ emotional and cognitive engagement with school at age 15 years.There is a well-established link between young people’s engagement with school and their longerterm education and labour market outcomes. The key policy question explored in this research is the extent to which student engagement can be influenced by the manner in which schools are organised and run. This report uses LSAY data to examine a wide range of school characteristics and their impact on students’ emotional and cognitive engagement with school at age 15 years. This report is available at . Impact of the 2013 LSAY research This section presents a summary of the media interest (measured in terms of media citations) and report usage (measured in terms of the number of unique page views) of each report published on the LSAY website in 2013 to gauge the level of research impact. The use of website downloads and media citations as proxy measures of impact follows a similar approach to that set by Hargraves (2012) in the impact assessment of research arising from the LSAY Research Innovation and Expansion Fund (RIEF). Figure 46 shows the most popular 2013 LSAY reports based on Google Analytics data on website hits. As can be seen, the school effects suite of research was the most frequently viewed 2013 research. Refer to the chapter on school effects for more information on the findings from this research.
Radiation-protective drugs and their reaction mechanisms

The objective of this book is to provide the reader with a concise review of radioprotective drugs and their reaction mechanisms. The first chapter reviews the effect of radiation on biological systems at the atomic, molecular, and subcellular levels. The second chapter discusses endogenous factors that influence radioresistance. Chapter 3 presents the main theme of the book, chemical radioprotection and its mechanisms, and examines the basis of natural radioprotection and how it may be affected by exogenous chemicals. Chapter 4, the Therapy of Radiation Damage, is a very brief general discussion that only touches on some of the experimental approaches to therapy. Chapter 5 contains recommendations for future research. The two appendices list research in progress in the United States and some radioprotective compounds of possible investigational interest. Also included is a brief discussion of structure-activity relationships.
Mechanical Shear Stress and Leukocyte Phenotype and Function : Implications for VAD Development and Use

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İNÖNÜ ÜNİVERSİTESİ TIP FAKÜLTESİ ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN MESLEK SEÇİMİNİ ETKİYEN FAKTÖRLER

The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of major factors on students? decision for preferring medicine as a profession The study was carried out on medical students studying at Inonu University through 2OO2 2OO3 academic year A total of 362 students out of 448 participated in the study 81 2 participation A five point Likert Type of questionnaire was developed and volunteer students were asked to complete the questionnaire form Of the students 248 68 1 were male and 116 31 9 were female Of the students who participated in the study 280 77 3 preferred medicine as their first choice whereas the rest 22 7 preferred other programs The first five reasons for medical students to select medicine included respectively enjoying helping others 4 27 being successful at high school 3 89 having a highly appreciated profession 3 82 having an interest in medicine 3 73 and being skillful in medicine 3 73
MiNgMatch - A Fast N-gram Model for Word Segmentation of the Ainu Language

Word segmentation is an essential task in automatic language processing for languages where there are no explicit word boundary markers, or where space-delimited orthographic words are too coarse-grained. In this paper we introduce the MiNgMatch Segmenter—a fast word segmentation algorithm, which reduces the problem of identifying word boundaries to finding the shortest sequence of lexical n-grams matching the input text. In order to validate our method in a low-resource scenario involving extremely sparse data, we tested it with a small corpus of text in the critically endangered language of the Ainu people living in northern parts of Japan. Furthermore, we performed a series of experiments comparing our algorithm with systems utilizing state-of-the-art lexical n-gram-based language modelling techniques (namely, Stupid Backoff model and a model with modified Kneser-Ney smoothing), as well as a neural model performing word segmentation as character sequence labelling. The experimental results we obtained demonstrate the high performance of our algorithm, comparable with the other best-performing models. Given its low computational cost and competitive results, we believe that the proposed approach could be extended to other languages, and possibly also to other Natural Language Processing tasks, such as speech recognition.
Unsworth, AJ and Bye, AP and Gibbins, JM (2017)Platelet-Derived Inhibitors of Platelet Activation. In: Platelets in Thrombotic and Non-Thrombotic Disorders: Pathophysiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics: an Update

When blood vessels are damaged, circulating platelets come into contact with activating stimuli that trigger aggregation and enable them to form a haemostatic plug. This process is subject to both positive and negative feedback to ensure that platelets respond appropriately to damage and do not form thrombi that totally occlude the vessel. Dysregulation of negative feedback mechanisms is believed to contribute to the increased risk of thrombosis associated with some diseases. Despite the association with thrombosis, platelet derived negative regulators of platelet activation are relatively poorly understood in comparison to mediators of platelet activation. However, it is increasingly apparent that the mechanisms by which platelets restrain activation are diverse and of equal complexity to those that mediate positive signalling. Some regulators, such as RASA3 and JAM-A, act as gatekeepers that must be deactivated for platelet activation to occur. In contrast, regulators that contain ITIMs, such as PECAM-1, are activated following stimulation and mediate negative regulation via phosphatases that restrain activation. Wnt3a and ESAM are thought to directly limit plateletplatelet adhesion by blocking activation of the fibrinogen receptor, integrin αIIbβ3. The various isoforms of PKC expressed by platelets provide a diverse and complex array of inhibitory effects including receptor desensitisation. Many platelet derived inhibitors have been identified but not fully characterised and so questions remain regarding the mechanisms that underlie their effects on platelet activity following their activation, inhibition or genetic disruption. In this chapter the current understanding and recent developments in the field of platelet-derived inhibitors of platelet activation will be discussed.
Cryptographic Hashing in P4 Data Planes

P4 introduces a standardized, universal way for data plane programming. Secure and resilient communication typically involves the processing of payload data and specialized cryptographic hash functions. We observe that current P4 targets lack the support for both. Therefore, applications and protocols, which require message authentication codes or hashing structures that are resilient against attacks such as denial-of-service, cannot be implemented. To enable authentication and resilience, we make the case for extending P4 targets with cryptographic hash functions. We propose an extension of the P4 Portable Switch Architecture for cryptographic hashes and discuss our prototype implementations for three different P4 target platforms: CPU, NPU, and FPGA. To assess the practical applicability, we conduct a performance evaluation and analyze the resource consumption. Our prototype implementations show that cryptographic hashing can be integrated efficiently. We cannot identify a single hash function delivering satisfying performance on all investigated platforms. Therefore, we recommend a set of hash functions to optimize target-specific performance.