Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vitamin C und Asthma

einem Zeitunterschied von mindestens 9 Jahren durchgeführten Untersuchungen bei Kindern, Jugendlichen und Erwachsenen im Verlauf zeigt in allen Fällen einen Anstieg der Prävalenz (8). Dieser Anstieg ist jedoch bei Erwachsenen nicht so stark ausgeprägt wie im Kindesalter. Aussagekräftige Studien zum Asthma im höheren Lebensalter fehlen. Die Häufi gkeit der Erkrankung ist in den westlichen Industrienationen wesentlich höher als in Osteuropa und in den sogenannten Entwicklungsund Schwellenländern. Allerdings zeigen neueste Untersuchungen, dass die Zunahme asthmatischer Erkrankungen in westlichen Ländern zum Stillstand kommt.
In defence of current treatment options: where are we now?

1.5–1.9-fold increase in the risk of mortality among affected individuals. 6 Known risk factors for AF include diabetes, hypertension, prior stroke, and increasing age. 7 Increasing age is a particularly powerful risk factor for AF, with the incidence of AF increasing dramatically after 55 years of age 8 —approximately doubling for every decade of life. The estimated prevalence of AF in the United States has been shown to increase from 0.5% in the sixth decade of life (50–59 years) to 10% in the ninth decade of life (80–89 years). 4 Results from the ATRIA (Anticoagulation and Risk Factors in Atrial Fibrillation) study have further demonstrated that, as a result of an increasingly elderly population, the number of adults affected by AF is likely to increase to more than 5.6 million in the United States by 2050. 3 In patients with acute ischaemic stroke, the presence of AF doubles the probability of permanent disability or handicap. 9 Furthermore, the risk of early death is increased, reflecting the greater age of patients and larger infarcts typical of AF. It can, therefore, clearly be seen that AF represents an increasingly important public health issue, and that the prevention and management of AF-associated stroke represents a major challenge for healthcare systems. How can we reduce the burden of AF-associated stroke? First and foremost, we can reduce it through appropriate use of antithrombotic therapy in patients with AF. Of the therapeutic options available to us, the oral vitamin K antagonist (VKA) warfarin is the most effective agent for stroke prophylaxis in AF, yet it is an agent that is clearly underused. 10–12 This article presents the case for warfarin, reviewing the evidence supporting its efficacy and examining how we can maximize the benefits of this highly effective agent.
Novel methodologies in metabolic profiling with a focus on molecular diagnostic applications

The metabolome contains all the biological end points of genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic perturbations, also including the influence of gut microbiota and the environment, giving a direct picture of an organism’s ongoing metabolic state. Metabolomics thus has the potential to be an effective tool for early diagnosis of disease, and also to be a predictor of treatment response and survival. In recent years, the development of instrumental systems has enabled more comprehensive coverage of the metabolome. Advances in mass spectrometry and chromatography have particularly improved both the efficiency of nontargeted metabolic profiling as well as the sensitivity and reliability of targeted analyses. Mass spectrometric techniques are also increasingly becoming accepted as a routine diagnostic tool in clinical laboratories. This review summarizes the most recent advances and current challenges in metabolomics, with a focus on mass spectrometric methods utilized in biomarker research, highlighted with selected examples.
Bridging the Ultimate Semantic Gap: A Semantic Search Engine for Internet Videos

Semantic search in video is a novel and challenging problem in information and multimedia retrieval. Existing solutions are mainly limited to text matching, in which the query words are matched against the textual metadata generated by users. This paper presents a state-of-the-art system for event search without any textual metadata or example videos. The system relies on substantial video content understanding and allows for semantic search over a large collection of videos. The novelty and practicality is demonstrated by the evaluation in NIST TRECVID 2014, where the proposed system achieves the best performance. We share our observations and lessons in building such a state-of-the-art system, which may be instrumental in guiding the design of the future system for semantic search in video.
Going for Brain-Scale Integration - using FPGAs, TSVs and NOC based Artificial Neural Networks: A Case Study

With better understanding of brain's massive parallel processing, brain-scale integration has been announced as one of the key research area in modern times and numerous efforts has been done to mimic such models. Multicore architectures, Network-On-Chip, 3D stacked ICs with TSVs, FPGA's growth beyond Moore's law and new design methodologies like high level synthesis will ultimately lead us toward single- and multi-chip solutions of Artificial Neural Net models comprising of millions or even more neurons per chip. Historically ANNs have been emulated as either software models, ASICs or a hybrid of both. Software models are very slow while ASICs based designs lacks plasticity. FPGA consumes a little more power but offer the flexibility of software and performance of ASICs along with basic requirement of plasticity in the form of reconfigurability. However, the traditional bottom up approach for building large ANN models is no more feasible and wiring along with memory becomes major bottlenecks when considering networks comprised of large number of neurons. The aim of this paper is to present a design space exploration of large-scale ANN models using a scalable NOC based architecture together with high level synthesis tools to explore the feasibility of implementing brain-scale ANNs on FPGAs using 3D stacked memory structures.
Neuroprosthetic devices: how far are we from recovering movement in paralyzed patients?

In October 2008, Eberhard Fetz’s group from the University of Washington dem-onstrated that a direct artificial connection from a region of the brain associated with the control of movement to muscles in the limb could restore movement induced by electrical stimulation in monkeys whose arms had been temporarily anesthetized. The report of this progress created tremen-dous public interest as a perceived mile-stone in the development of a seamless neurotechnological solution for restoring function in paralysis. This work relied on the combination of an implanted electrode array in the motor cortex and functional electrical stimulation (FES) to muscles in the paralyzed wrist. Indeed, the combina-tion of FES, a technique that has achieved a track record of clinical utility, with brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) has become the subject of study for several research groups. Based on progress from these groups, we suggest that the technology has reached sufficient maturation that the proof-of-concept clinical demonstration could be accomplished within the next 5 years. In this editorial, we provide a brief overview of the key technologies and several key issues that are being explored, and also discuss the importance of supporting translational neuroprosthetics research and development to achieve this goal.Paralysis resulting from neurological injury or disease places a significant burden on patients, their families and caregivers. Neuroprostheses offer the promise of restoring movement to paralyzed patients by bypassing damaged regions of the ner-vous system, ultimately giving patients the ability to live with greater indepen-dence and improving their quality of life. Indeed, the coordinated stimulation of paralyzed muscles through FES has been shown to be effective and safe for restoring hand grasp
From Scratch to “Real” Programming

Computer science (CS) activities for young students are widely used, particularly visual programming environments. We investigated the use of the Scratch environment for teaching CS concepts to middle school students. In a previous article [Meerbaum-Salant et al. 2013], we reported on the extent to which the CS concepts were successfully learned. In this article, we look at the transition from studying CS with the visual Scratch environment in middle school to studying CS with a professional textual programming language (C# or Java) in secondary school. We found that the programming knowledge and experience of students who had learned Scratch greatly facilitated learning the more advanced material in secondary school: less time was needed to learn new topics, there were fewer learning difficulties, and they achieved higher cognitive levels of understanding of most concepts (although at the end of the teaching process, there were no significant differences in achievements compared to students who had not studied Scratch). Furthermore, there was increased enrollment in CS classes, and students were observed to display higher levels of motivation and self-efficacy. This research justifies teaching CS in general and visual programming in particular in middle schools.
Retrospective study of bovine and human tuberculosis in abattoirs and hospitals in Enugu State, Southeast Nigeria

A study to generate epidemiological data on tuberculosis in cattle and humans in Enugu State, through a retrospective survey of abattoir and hospital records for a five-year period (2004 to 2008) was undertaken. A total of 748 and 2452 cases of tuberculosis were recorded in cattle and humans respectively. Statistical analysis showed that a variation in seasonal prevalence in both studied population, but the variation was not statistically significant. Sex-associated prevalence differed in both studied populations. Cows and male persons were both significantly (p<0.05) affected in cattle and humans, respectively. Patients within the age-group of 21 to 40 years had statistically significant (p<0.05) higher proportion of tuberculosis in humans. Overall mean prevalence of 1.4% and 12.9% was recorded for cattle and humans, respectively. This prompts intensification of control programmes against tuberculosis in both cattle and humans in the state. Key words: Cattle, humans, tuberculosis, Enugu State, prevalence.
Microbial handflora of nursing services workers in a Nigerian University Teaching Hospital

A study of the bacterial flora on the hands of 100 randomly selected nursing services workers comprising 56 nurses and 44 ward-maids working in Medical, Surgical, Ophthalmology, Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Paediatric wards in addition to Intensive Care Units and Special Care Baby units of Jos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria were carried out. The samples were inoculated onto dried Blood agar, MacConkey agar, Mannitol salt agar and Muellar-Hinton agar plates and incubated aerobically at 37°C for 18-24 hours. Overall, 38% of the cultures yielded growth, while 52% of the nurses yielded growth as against 75% of the ward-maids. The bacterial isolates are Staphylococcus aureus (27%), Coagulase negative Staphylococci (20%), Bacillus alvei (17%), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (4%). Out of the S. aureus isolates, 92.6% of them were methicillin-resistant (MRSA), and the highest prevalence (100%) was recorded in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology wards. The Ophthalmology ward, Intensive care unit and Special Care Baby Unit had no MRSA. The bacterial density ranged from 2 to 2010 5 CFU. This study has demonstrated that more stringent measures should be taken towards proper hand-washing so as to at least reduce the incidence of nosocomial infections, with the attendant consequences in our hospital. Nigerian Medical Practitioner Vol. 50(1) 2006: 12-14
Development of endothelin receptor antagonists as potential therapeutic agents

Endothelin-1 (ET-1), a potent vasoconstrictor and mitogen, is associated with several disease states including pulmonary hypertension, systemic hypertension and heart failure. There are two endothelin (ET) receptor subtypes known as ETA and ETB. Selective ETA receptor antagonists, as well as non-selective (dual) ETA/ETB antagonists, represent a new therapeutic target for disease states associated with elevated ET-1 levels. In vivo studies and early phase clinical trials have provided strong evidence that these agents are effective in the treatment of heart failure, essential hypertension, pulmonary hypertension and atherosclerosis. FDA approved the use of the orally active dual antagonist bosentan (Tracleer™, Roche Holding AG) for primary pulmonary hypertension in 2001. Despite important advances in this field, the complexity of biological effects mediated by two different receptor subtypes complicates the use of selective versus dual ET receptor antagonists. The number of patent applications filed in recent years emphasises the importance of this emerging class of therapeutics. From 1997 to date, ∼ 192 patents have been filed. In this review, compounds patented between 1999 and 2002 will be reviewed and clinical implications will be discussed.
Recognizing Stress, Engagement, and Positive Emotion

An intelligent interaction should not typically call attention to emotion. However, it almost always involves emotion: For example, it should engage, not inflict undesirable stress and frustration, and perhaps elicit positive emotions such as joy or delight. How would the system sense or recognize if it was succeeding in these elements of intelligent interaction? This keynote talk will address some ways that our work at the MIT Media Lab has advanced solutions for recognizing user emotion during everyday experiences.
Management of antipsychotic-related weight gain

Despite variations across individuals and agents, antipsychotics are associated with clearly documented weight gain and adverse metabolic effects. Although increased appetite/caloric intake and various receptors, hormones and peptides have been implicated, biological mechanisms contributing to the increase in weight and glucose and lipid abnormalities with antipsychotics are largely unknown. This has hampered the creation of antipsychotics that are free of cardiometabolic effects, even in antipsychotic-naive/early-phase patients, as well as the development of strategies that can prevent or drastically diminish the adverse cardiometabolic effects. In general, three strategies can reduce the cardiometabolic risk of antipsychotics: switching to a less orexigenic/metabolically adverse antipsychotic; adjunctive behavioral treatments; and adjunctive pharmacologic interventions. However, each of these strategies has only been shown to be modestly effective. Among different behavioral interventions (N = 14, n = 746), group and individual treatment, dietary counseling and cognitive–behavioral therapy seem to be similarly effective. Among 15 different pharmacologic strategies (N = 35, n = 1629), only metformin, fenfluramine, sibutramine, topiramate and reboxetine were more effective than placebo, with the most evidence being available for metformin, and no head-to-head trials comparing individual pharmacologic interventions. However, even in the most successful trials the risk reduction was modest. Weight was not decreased to a pretreatment level, and despite superiority compared with placebo, weight gain still often occurred, particularly in antipsychotic-naive patients and when interventions were ‘preventively’ coinitiated with antipsychotics. Future research should focus on combining treatment modalities or agents and on exploring novel mechanism-based interventions.
EUKLAS: Supporting Copy-and-Paste Strategies for Integrating Example Code

Researchers have paid increasing attention in recent years to the fact that much development occurs though example modification. Helping programmers with some of the pit-falls and vagaries of working with example code is the goal of our tool, called Euklas. It helps developers to integrate JavaScript example code into their own projects by using familiar IDE interaction techniques of the Eclipse IDE. The Euklas plugin uses static, heuristic source code checks to highlight potential errors and to recommend potential fixes, when incomplete sections of code are copied from a work-ing JavaScript example and pasted into the program being edited. The most unique feature of the tool is the ability to automatically import missing variable and function defini-tions from an example file into a new project file. Our preliminary user study of Euklas suggests that it supports users in fixing errors more easily.
Use of intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator in patients outside the defined criteria: safety and feasibility issues

Currently, intravenous thrombolysis is by far the most effective treatment of acute ischemic stroke, and its use can independently strongly increase the proportion of stroke patients surviving. While the use of recombinant tissue plasminogen activator in accordance to licensed criteria has continuously risen, off-label use is also frequent. In this review the most important reasons to transcend current license criteria are discussed and evidence is summarized from new studies, such as IST-3, contributing to the balance of increased benefit as opposed to possible harm in situations of off-label use of recombinant tissue plasminogen activator in stroke. In addition, several scores to predict risk and outcome in patients undergoing thrombolysis are compared.
Static energy reduction by performance linked cache capacity management in tiled CMPs

With the rapid growth in semiconductor technology, modern processor chips have multiple number of processor cores with multi-level on-chip caches. Recent study about the chip power consumption indicates that, the principal amount of chip power is consumed by the on chip caches which can be divided into two major parts: dynamic power and static power. Dynamic power is consumed when the cache is accessed and static power is generally referred as leakage power of the cache. This increased power consumption of chip increases chip-temperature which increases on chip leakage power. In this paper we attempt to reduce the static power consumption by intelligently powering off cache banks and mapping its requests to other active cache banks. We use a performance based criteria for the shutdown decision and the bank to be powered off is chosen based on usage statistics. The remapping of requests for a powered off cache bank is done at the L2-controller and thus the L1 caches are transparent to this approach. Thus, depending on the applications workload and data distribution, a controlled number of banks can be dynamically shutdown saving on the leakage power dissipation. Experimental analysis shows 43% reduction in static power and 19% reduction in EDP.
Alguns aspectos epidemiológicos da mortalidade por acidentes de trânsito de veículo a motor na Cidade de São Paulo, Brasil

Foram estudadas algumas caracteristicas dos obitos por acidentes de trânsito de veiculos a motor, no municipio de Sao Paulo, ocorridos entre 1. ° de janeiro a 31 de dezembro de 1970. Todas as caracteristicas do falecido e do acidente foram coletadas a partir dos dados registrados nos laudos de necropsias existentes no Instituto Medico Legal. O estudo evidenciou que a mortalidade por acidentes de veiculo a motor e alta, maior no sexo masculino, aumenta com a idade, sendo que o maior coeficiente foi para maiores de 60 anos. A zona da cidade com maior numero de acidentes e a zona Sul, existindo areas (distritos policiais) e vias publicas preferenciais quanto a ocorrencia, em todas as 4 zonas do municipio; a maior ocorrencia de acidentes foi aos sabados e domingos; os pedestres compreendem a grande maioria dos falecidos; proporcao apreciavel dos falecidos recebeu atendimento hospitalar apos o acidente. Foram relacionados tambem o numero total de acidentes, vitimas e mortes mostrando que para cada 100 acidentes ocorreram 62,50 vitimas e 5,13 mortes, e para cada 100 vitimas, 18, 22 mortes.
Colonization and antibiotic susceptibility pattern of methicillin resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) among farm animals in Saudi Arabia

Methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major human pathogen that causes severe morbidity and mortality worldwide. Additionally MRSA is widely spread in different animals. There are a growing number of MRSA cases have been reported in dogs, cats, horses, sheep, and other animals indicating the animal health treat too. To assess the frequency of MRSA among animals in Qassim region, a total of 400 samples were collected from camels, sheep, cows, and goats from 334 Staphylococci recovered, 158 (47.3%) were coagulase positive Staphylococcus , among them 90 (57%) were MRSA and 68 (43%) were methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA). The reaming strains 176 (52.7%) were coagulase negative Staphylococcus , including 32 (18.2%) were methicillinresistant coagulase negative Staphylococcus and 144 (81.8%) were methicillin -sensitive coagulase negative Staphylococcus . High rate of MRSA and MRCoNS were isolated from camel and sheep while lower rates were observed in goat and cow. Multi drug resistance (MDR) rate among MRSA and MRCoNS isolates was high. MRSA strains are highly prevalent among animals in Qassim region and they may play a potential role of disseminating pathogens between animal and human as well as to the community. Detection of MRSA will be essential for early prevention and control of community acquired infections.
A new approach to biometric recognition based on hand geometry

In the past years recognition by biometric information has been increasingly adopted. This paper presents a new approach to biometric recognition based on hand geometry. A database with 100 individuals and samples of both sides of the hands was used. The process prioritizes user comfort during capture and produces segmentation of hands and fingers with high precision. Altogether, 54 features have been extracted and different classification and training methods were evaluated. Tests using cross-validation and stratified random subsampling techniques were performed. The experiments demonstrated competitive results when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The proposed approach obtained 100% accuracy using the Logist Boost together with Random Forest learning strategy and Bagging together with FLR combination.