Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shelterin Telomere Protection Protein 1 Reduction Causes Telomere Attrition and Cellular Senescence via Sirtuin 1 Deacetylase in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

&NA; Lung cellular senescence and inflammatory response are the key events in the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) when cigarette smoke (CS) is the main etiological factor. Telomere dysfunction is induced by either critical shortening or disruption of the shelterin complex, leading to cellular senescence. However, it remains unknown whether disruption of the shelterin complex is responsible for CS‐induced lung cellular senescence. Here we show that telomere protection protein 1 (TPP1) levels are reduced on telomeres in lungs from mice with emphysema, as well as in lungs from smokers and from patients with COPD. This is associated with persistent telomeric DNA damage, leading to cellular senescence. CS disrupts the interaction of TPP1 with the Sirtuin 1 (Sirt1) complex, leading to increased TPP1 acetylation and degradation. Lung fibroblasts deficient in Sirt1 or treated with a selective Sirt1 inhibitor exhibit increased cellular senescence and decreased TPP1 levels, whereas Sirt1 overexpression and pharmacological activation protect against CS‐induced TPP1 reduction and telomeric DNA damage. Our findings support an essential role of TPP1 in protecting CS‐induced telomeric DNA damage and cellular senescence, and therefore provide a rationale for a potential therapy for COPD, on the basis of the shelterin complex, in attenuating cellular senescence.
Mercury, cadmium and arsenic contents of calcium dietary supplements

The cadmium (Cd) and arsenic (As) contents of calcium (Ca) supplements available on the Korean market were determined by a graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometer using Zeeman background correction and peak area mode after microwave digestion. The mercury (Hg) content of the supplements was measured using an Hg analyser. Recoveries ranged from 92 to 98% for Hg, Cd and As analyses. Fifty-five brands of Ca supplements were classified into seven categories based on the major composite: bone, milk, oyster/clam shell, egg shell, algae, shark cartilage and chelated. The means of Hg, Cd and As in Ca supplements were 0.01, 0.02, and 0.48 mg kg−1, respectively. Ca supplements made of shark cartilage had the highest means of Hg (0.06 mg kg−1) and Cd (0.13 mg kg−1). The mean daily intakes of Hg and Cd from the supplement were estimated as about 0.1–0.2 μg, with both contributing less than 0.4% of provisional tolerable daily intakes set by the Food and Agricultural Organization/World Health Organization Joint Food Additive and Contaminants Committee.
Initial Lesions in Bell’s Palsy and Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome

Conclusion: The antidromic facial nerve response (AFNR) revealed that the initial lesion in both Bell’s palsy and Hunt syndrome was mainly located around the geniculate ganglion within 1 week after onset of paralysis. The preoperative AFNR reflected the response near the initial lesion. Objectives: To review the initial lesion in Bell’s palsy and Ramsay-Hunt syndrome using intraoperative monitoring of the AFNR. Methods: 15 patients, including 8 with Bell’s palsy and 7 with Ramsay-Hunt syndrome, were checked for the AFNR before and during transmastoid decompression surgery within 1 week after onset of paralysis. The AFNR monitoring was performed at the posterosuperior part of the anulus tympanicus preoperatively and at 4 points of the facial nerve during surgery. The nerve conduction block sites were diagnosed by the AFNR waveform. Results: The monophasic wave revealing the block site was mainly observed at the geniculate ganglion in both diseases. The latencies of the preoperative responses corresponded to those recorded intraoperatively around the pyramidal segment of the facial nerve.
Enhanced Visualization of Latent Fingermarks on Rough Aluminum Surfaces Using Sequential Au and Zn/ZnS/ZnO Depositions

Detection and visualization of fingermarks on rough and diffuse surfaces is a relatively challenging task. We succeeded in developing latent fingermarks on scratched and rough aluminum surfaces by sequential deposition of a thin layer of gold followed by one of zinc or zinc‐based compounds on the fingermarks. The best image enhancement was achieved with sequential Au and ZnS depositions. Using this combination, we could enhance the visualization of latent fingermarks aged over 65 days in normal conditions. The optical reflectance from the fingermarks with the deposited layers of metal/dielectric is analyzed as a stratified medium. Significant contrast in the reflectance from the regions of the ridges and the valleys of the fingermark would enhance the visualization. Our results show that the Au and ZnS bi‐layer combination can have a large reflection contrast and improved fingermark visualization at wavelengths corresponding to the green light for specific thickness of ZnS.
Recognition and Retrieval in Natural Scene Images

In the past few years, text in natural scene images has gained potential to be a key feature for content based retrieval. They can be extracted and used in search engines, providing relevant information about the images. Robust and efficient techniques from the document analysis and the vision community were borrowed to solve the challenge of digitizing text in such images in the wild. In this thesis, we address the common challenges towards scene text analysis by proposing novel solutions for the recognition and retrieval settings. We develop end to end pipelines which detect and recognize text, the two core challenges of scene text analysis. For the detection task, we first study and categorize all major publications since 2000 based on their architecture. Broadening the scope of a detection method, we propose a fusion of two complementary styles of detection. The first method evaluates MSER clusters as text or non-text using an adaboost classifier. The method outperforms the other publicly available implementations on standard ICDAR 2011 and MRRC datasets. The second method generates text region proposals using a CNN based text/nontext classifier with high recall. We compare the method with other object region proposal algorithms on the ICDAR datasets and analyse our results. Leveraging on the high recall of the proposals, we fuse the two detection methods to obtain a flexible detection scheme. For the recognition task, we propose a conditional random field based framework for recognizing word images. We model the character locations as nodes and the bigram interactions as the pairwise potentials. Observing that the interaction potentials computed using the large lexicon are less effective than the small lexicon setting, we propose an iterative method, which alternates between finding the most likely solution and refining the interaction potentials. We evaluate our method on public datasets and obtain nearly 15% improvement in recognition accuracy over baseline methods on the IIIT-5K word dataset with a large lexicon containing 0.5 million words. We also propose a text query based retrieval task for word images and evaluate retrieval performance in various settings. Finally, we present two contrasting end to end recognition frameworks for scene text analysis on scene images. The first framework consists of text segmentation and a standard printed text OCR. The text segmented image is fed to Tesseract to get word regions and labels. This case sensitive and lexicon free approach performs at par with the other successful pipelines of the decade on the ICDAR 2003 dataset. The second framework combines the CNN based region proposal method with the CRF based recognizer with various lexicon sizes. Additionally, we also use the latter to retrieve scene images with text queries.
Power line inspection via an unmanned aerial system based on the quadrotor helicopter

The inspection of high voltage power transmission lines is mainly carried out by manned aerial vehicles or foot patrol. However, these maintenance methodologies for inspection are somehow inefficient and expensive. Moreover, helicopter assisted inspection endangers the human life. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles have been under development in several research centers all over the world due to its potential applications. In this paper, we present an unmanned aerial system based on the quadrotor helicopter for high voltage power line inspection. Our interest is to equip the quadrotor helicopter with the necessary payload in order to be able to carry out a qualitative inspection, therefore the hardware architecture of the aerial robotic system is presented. Finally, some experimental results are shown to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.
Pharmacologic therapy for diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy remains one of the major causes of acquired blindness in developed nations. This is true despite the development of laser treatment, which can prevent blindness in the majority of those who develop macular oedema (ME) or proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). ME is manifest by retinal vascular leakage and thickening of the retina. The hallmark of PDR is neovascularisation (NV) – abnormal angiogenesis that may ultimately cause severe vitreous cavity bleeding and/or retinal detachment. Pharmacologic therapy aimed specifically at preventing vascular leakage and NV would be a welcome addition to the armamentarium. PDR and ME could be prevented by improved metabolic control or by pharmacologically blunting the biochemical consequences of hyperglycaemia (e.g., with aldose reductase inhibitors, inhibitors of non-enzymatic glycation or by protein kinase C [PKC] inhibition). The angiogenesis in PDR could be treated via growth factor (e.g., vascular endothelial growth factor [VEGF], insulin like growth factor-1 [IGF-1]) blockade, integrin (e.g., alpha-v beta-3) blockade, extracellular matrix alteration (e.g., with steroid compounds) or interference with intracellular signal transduction pathways (e.g., PKC and mitogen activated protein kinase [MAPK] pathway proteins). Some of these antiangiogenic agents may also prove useful for treating or preventing ME. Numerous potentially useful antiangiogenic compounds are in development; two drugs are presently in clinical trials for treatment of the preproliferative stage of PDR, while two are in clinical trials for treatment of ME.
Chlamydia pneumoniae and atherosclerosis

Exposure to Chlamydia pneumoniae is extremely common, and respiratory infections occur repeatedly among most people. Strong associations exist between C. pneumoniae infection and atherosclerosis as demonstrated by: (i) sero‐epidemiological studies showing that patients with cardiovascular disease have higher titres of anti‐C. pneumoniae antibodies compared with control patients; (ii) detection of the organism within atherosclerotic lesions, but not in adjacent normal tissue by immunohistochemistry, polymerase chain reaction and electron microscopy and by culturing the organism from lesions; and (iii) showing that C. pneumoniae can either initiate lesion development or cause exacerbation of lesions in rabbit and mouse animal models respectively. The association of this organism with atherosclerosis has also provided sufficient impetus to conduct a variety of human secondary prevention antibiotic treatment trials. The results of these studies have been mixed and, thus far, no clear long‐lasting benefit has emerged from these types of investigations. Studies of C. pneumoniae pathogenesis have shown that the organism can infect many cell types associated with both respiratory and cardiovascular sites, including lung epithelium and resident alveolar macrophages, circulating monocytes, arterial smooth muscle cells and vascular endothelium. Infected cells have been shown to exhibit characteristics associated with the development of cardiovascular disease (e.g. secretion of proinflammatory cytokines and procoagulants by infected endothelial cells and foam cell formation by infected macrophages). More detailed analysis of C. pneumoniae pathogenesis has been aided by the availability of genomic sequence information. Genomic and proteomic analyses of C. pneumoniae infections in relevant cell types will help to define the pathogenic potential of the organism in both respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
Planification robuste avec (L)RTDP

Resume : Les problemes de chemin le plus court stochastique (SSP : Stochastic Shortest Path problem), un sous-ensemble des problemes de decision markoviens (MDPs), peuvent etre efficacement traites en utilisant l’algorithme Real-Time Dynamic Programming (RTDP). Toutefois, les modeles des MDPs sont souvent incertains (obtenus a l’aide de statistiques ou par intuition). Une approche usuelle est alors la planification robuste : chercher la meilleure politique sous le pire modele. Cet article montre comment RTDP peut etre rendu robuste dans le cas commun ou l’on sait que les probabilites de transition se trouvent dans un intervalle donne. Cela permet d’effectuer une planification en tenant compte de l’incertitude d’un modele appris alors que les approches classiques font l’hypothese d’un modele “moyen”.
HGFK1 is associated with a better prognosis and reverses inhibition by gefitinib in NSCLC cases.

PURPOSE Non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the leading worldwide source of cancer-related deaths. Although some drugs targeting EGFR mutations have been developed, most advanced cases are still incurable. New targets for anticancer drugs are demanded. The kringle 1 domain of hepatocellular growth factor alpha chain (HGFK1) is a potent anti-angiogenesis factor. It has also emerged as a potential anticancer factor in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The expression of HGFK1 protein in patients with NSCLC has not been reported to date. METHOD Here, we assessed HGFK1 expression by Western blotting in 103 cases with advanced NSCLC to investigate the impact of HGFK1 on survival. RESULTS Results revealed 33 (30.1%) patients were classified as high expressors, this being significantly associated with less remote metastasis (P = 0.002) but not with lymph node metastasis (P = 0.062). There was also a significant association between HGFK1 expression and tumor size (P = 0.025) as well as clinical stage (P = 0.012). Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that both overall survival (OS) and progression free survival (PFS) of patients with HGFK1 expression were longer than those of patients without HGFK1 expression (P = 0.004 and P = 0.001 respectively). HGFK1 reversed gefitinib inhibition in the resistant NSCLC cell line A431/GR but did not inhibit the proliferation of NSCLC cells A431 and A431/GR directly. Reversion of gefitinib inhibition in A431/GR cells by HGFK1 was related to decreased phosphorylation of ERK and STAT5. CONCLUSIONS HGFK1 may be a useful prognostic factor of advanced NSCLC patients and a potential drug for gefitinib resistant patients.
Medical manifestations associated with hashish.

Thirty-one American soldiers who smoked enormous quantities of illicit hashish for several months temporally related a number of medical effects to their habit. Their ailments were principally respiratory and included bronchitis, sinusitis, asthma, and rhinopharyngitis. Irritation of the respiratory tract by hashish smoke appeared to be responsible. Uvular edema is reported as a useful physical sign in the evaluation of the suspected user of hashish.
Neurodevelopmental Disorders Following Thimerosal-Containing Childhood Immunizations: A Follow-Up Analysis

The authors previously published the first epidemiological study from the United States associating thimerosal from childhood vaccines with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDs) based upon assessment of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). A number of years have gone by since their previous analysis of the VAERS. The present study was undertaken to determine whether the previously observed effect between thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and NDs are still apparent in the VAERS as children have had a chance to further mature and potentially be diagnosed with additional NDs. In the present study, a cohort of children receiving thimerosal-containing diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccines in comparison to a cohort of children receiving thimerosal-free DTaP vaccines administered from 1997 through 2000 based upon an assessment of adverse events reported to the VAERS were evaluated. It was determined that there were significantly increased odds ratios (ORs) for autism (OR = 1.8, p < .05), mental retardation (OR = 2.6, p < .002), speech disorder (OR = 2.1, p <.02), personality disorders (OR=2.6, p <.01), and thinking abnormality (OR=8.2, p <.01) adverse events reported to the VAERS following thimerosal-containing DTaP vaccines in comparison to thimerosal-free DTaP vaccines. Potential confounders and reporting biases were found to be minimal in this assessment of the VAERS. It was observed, even though the media has reported a potential association between autism and thimerosal exposure, that the other NDs analyzed in this assessment of the VAERS had significantly higher ORs than autism following thimerosal-containing DTaP vaccines in comparison to thimerosal-free DTaP vaccines. The present study provides additional epidemiological evidence supporting previous epidemiological, clinical and experimental evidence that administration of thimerosal-containing vaccines in the United States resulted in a significant number of children developing NDs.
A preliminary study of autobiographical memory in remitted bipolar and unipolar depression and the role of imagery in the specificity of memory

Autobiographical memory was investigated in a sample of 19 individuals with remitted bipolar affective disorder and a community sample of 16 individuals with remitted unipolar depression who had similar low levels of current symptoms. Each participant was prompted to recall one positive memory and one negative memory, to rate it on several scales, and to describe it in detail. Relative to the remitted unipolar group, the remitted bipolar group reported more general than specific negative memories and more frequent recollections of the negative memory during their everyday life. Across the sample, 95% of all specific memories involved a mental image, whereas only 56% of all general memories involved a mental image, suggesting a role of imagery in the retrieval of a specific memory. Characteristic examples of memories are provided. These results are preliminary yet they suggest that patients with bipolar disorder in remission may show memory characteristics that are often associated with symptomatic unipolar depression.
National survey of hospital patients

Abstract Objective: To survey patients' opinions of their experiences in hospital in order to produce data that can help managers and doctors to identify and solve problems. Design: Random sample of 36 NHS hospitals, stratified by size of hospital (number of beds), area (north, midlands, south east, south west), and type of hospital (teaching or non-teaching, trust or directly managed). From each hospital a random sample of, on average, 143 patients was interviewed at home or the place of discharge two to four weeks after discharge by means of a structured questionnaire about their treatment in hospital. Subjects: 5150 randomly chosen NHS patients recently discharged from acute hospitals in England. Subjects had been patients on medical and surgical wards apart from paediatric, maternity, psychiatric, and geriatric wards. Main outcome measures: Patients' responses to direct questions about preadmission procedures, admission, communication with staff, physical care, tests and operations, help from staff, pain management, and discharge planning. Patients' responses to general questions about their degree of satisfaction in hospitals. Results: Problems were reported by patients, particularly with regard to communication with staff (56% (2824/5020) had not been given written or printed information); pain management (33% (1042/ 3162) of those suffering pain were in pain all or most of the time); and discharge planning (70% (3599/ 5124) had not been told about warning signs and 62% (3177/5119) had not been told when to resume normal activities). Hospitals failed to reach the standards of the Patient's Charter—for example, in explaining the treatment proposed and giving patients the option of not taking part in student training. Answers to questions about patient satisfaction were, however, highly positive but of little use to managers. Conclusions: This survey has highlighted several problems with treatment in NHS hospitals. Asking patients direct questions about what happened rather than how satisfied they were with treatment can elucidate the problems that exist and so enable them to be solved.
Liquid-based cytology for cervical cancer screening

In multiple studies during the last decade, liquid-based cytology for cervical cancer screening has been shown to increase the detection rate for preneoplastic squamous intraepithelial lesions equal to or greater than the conventional Papanicolaou (Pap) smear method. Liquid-based collection and processing provide more representative cervical sampling than conventional smearing of the specimen on a glass slide. Currently, there are two test methodologies that are widely marketed and available to clinical laboratories, health systems and clinicians that undertake cervical cytology. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the methodology and performance of SurePath™ Liquid-Based Pap Test in cervical cytology screening. The SurePath liquid-based Pap test significantly reduces the unsatisfactory rate of Pap test slides, and detects a significantly higher number of low- and high-grade squamous lesions when compared with the conventional Pap smear technique. Biopsy confirmation shows that this increased detection does not come at a cost of decreasing specificity, and sensitivity for histologic dysplasia is equal to or greater than the best available data for the conventional Pap method. The SurePath collection vial provides residual cellular material for adjunctive out-of-the-vial molecular testing, including sexually transmitted diseases and oncologic biomarkers associated with cervical carcinoma. Finally, SurePath slides can be placed on an automated cervical cytology screening device (FocalPoint™), thus providing improved disease detection and enhanced laboratory productivity.