Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fundamentals of microfabrication, the science of miniaturization, 2nd edition [Book Review]

Cancer Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Patient Management Edited by Raouf N.G. Naguib and Gajann V. Sherbet, CRC Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8493-9692-1, 216 pages, US$95. Despite initial formulation in the early 20th century, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have mainly been applied to problems in pattern recognition, control systems, and optimization for the past 20 years. This book concentrates on the application of ANNs in human cancer research including feature extraction, prognostic studies, survival analyses, and outcome prediction. The editors contend that the impact of ANNs on current cancer research includes prediction of an individual patient’s prognosis, more accurate disease management, and algorithms that allow adjustment of the markers as the understanding of specific cancers evolve. The authors present ANNs as complementary tools to existing statistical methods. This book is part of The Biomedical Engineering Series edited by Michael R. Neuman. There were 32 contributors to the book. The chapter authors are mathematicians, engineers, and clinical researchers based in Europe and the Americas. The book is divided into 13 chapters, the first of which is an introduction to ANN applications in oncology. The cancers presented in this book are breast cancer (Chapters 2 and 3), lung cancer (Chapters 4 and 5), oral cancer (Chapter 6), cancer of the oesophago-gastric junction (Chapter 7), urological cancers (Chapters 8-12), and skin cancer (Chapter 13). Chapter 1 introduces, on a very basic level, the biological neuron and the mathematical model of an artificial neuron. The authors emphasize the experimentation and simulation involved in resolving the relationships between input and output variables for the cancers studied. The introduction is short, and some of the chapter authors discuss some issues that could be addressed in the introduction. For example, Chapter 4 (Neural Networks for the Estimation of Prognosis in Lung Cancer) includes a discussion of the architecture, training, and reliability of ANNs that is not covered in the introduction. After a six-page introduction to ANNs, the rest of the book presents results from specific cancers. The discussion in most of these 12 chapters include a background on the disease, parameters selected for the input and output neurons, selection of training cases and ANN prediction accuracy for the test cases. Most of the chapters include a thorough discussion of their methodology and limitations of the results that will assist one in deciding whether or not to include ANNs in their work. This book presents an exciting alternative to traditional statistical techniques for use in outcome prediction and disease management for cancer patients. While readers that are new to ANNs will need an additional introductory reference that covers theory and implementation, most readers will be able to use the book immediately. —Kemi Ladeji-Osias Morgan State University
Sequencing cyclic peptides by multistage mass spectrometry

Some of the most effective antibiotics (e.g. Vancomycin and Daptomycin) are cyclic peptides produced by non‐ribosomal biosynthetic pathways. While hundreds of biomedically important cyclic peptides have been sequenced, the computational techniques for sequencing cyclic peptides are still in their infancy. Previous methods for sequencing peptide antibiotics and other cyclic peptides are based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, and require large amount (miligrams) of purified materials that, for most compounds, are not possible to obtain. Recently, development of MS‐based methods has provided some hope for accurate sequencing of cyclic peptides using picograms of materials. In this paper we develop a method for sequencing of cyclic peptides by multistage MS, and show its advantages over single‐stage MS. The method is tested on known and new cyclic peptides from Bacillus brevis, Dianthus superbus and Streptomyces griseus, as well as a new family of cyclic peptides produced by marine bacteria.
Multiple gonadotropin‐releasing hormone (GnRH)‐immunoreactive systems in the brain of the dwarf gourami,Colisa lalia: Immunohistochemistry and radioimmunoassay

The present study characterizes gonadotropin‐releasing hormone (GnRH) neuronal groups that are located in several different brain regions by investigating GnRH molecular species and projection patterns in an anabantid fish, Colisa lalia. First, we examined the molecular species of GnRHs in extracts of the brain and the pituitary by reverse‐phase high‐performance liquid chromatography followed by radioimmunoassays. We found salmon GnRH (sGnRH), chicken GnRH‐II (cGnRH‐II), and an unfamiliar GnRH‐like substance.
Effects of gate depletion and boron penetration on matching of deep submicron CMOS transistors

This paper presents new insights into the mechanisms of gate depletion and boron penetration in deep submicron CMOS technologies. MOSFET matching measurements show that these effects are stochastic in nature, and are associated with the gate poly-Si grain size distribution. Moreover, this work demonstrates that these effects can strongly degrade transistor matching performance of future CMOS generations.
Off-Label Use of Gastrointestinal Medications in the Intensive Care Unit

Purpose: Determine the level of evidence supporting off-label gastrointestinal (GI) medication use and identify the medication class and indication whereby off-label use was most common. Materials and Methods: This prospective, multicentered observational study evaluated all medication orders written in 37 intensive care units (ICUs) in the United States, over a 24-hour period. All medications classified as “GI” according to a national reference were identified. The class and indication whereby off-label use was most prominent were determined and the level of evidence was described. Results: There were 774 orders from 363 patients and 63% (489 of 774) were considered off-label. Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) accounted for most of the off-label usage (55% [271 of 489]), followed by laxatives (16% [77 of 489]) and histamine-2-receptor antagonists (H2RAs; 15% [71 of 489]). When prescribed, 99% (271 of 274) of PPIs, 99% (71 of 72) of H2RAs, and 79% (30 of 38) of promotility agents were off-label. Stress ulcer prophylaxis (100% [309 of 309]), GI bleeding (100% [18 of 18]), and gastric motility (88% [30 of 34]) were the most common off-label indications. The most common strength of recommendation and level of evidence for off-label use was indeterminate (58% [282 of 489]) and none (57% [280 of 489]), respectively. Conclusion: The PPIs are the most widely used off-label medications in the ICU. Stress ulcer prophylaxis is the most common indication. The level of evidence supporting off-label GI medication use is poor.
Cavity-Backed Patch Shared Aperture Antenna Array Approach for Mobile DBS Applications

Relatively low profile antennas can be implemented by sharing more than one aperture in order to realize a specified overall antenna gain. However, the overall radiation pattern of these combined apertures could have unacceptable side-lobe levels. In the case of mobile DBS antennas that require wide-angle steering capability, sharing could degrade the overall performance unless the system is carefully designed. The number of shared apertures is typically limited by the amount of insertion loss caused by the interconnecting feed structure and its mechanical flexibility, as required in the case of mechanical steering. Hence, overall system performance and interconnecting hardware details need to be optimized to minimize such degradation while achieving the greatest practical height reduction
Unsupervised event exploration from social text streams

Social media provides unprecedented opportunities for people to disseminate information and share their opinions and views online. Extracting events from social media platforms such as Twitter could help in understanding what is being discussed. However, event extraction from social text streams poses huge challenges due to the noisy nature of social media posts and dynamic evolution of language. We propose a generic unsupervised framework for exploring events on Twitter which consists of four major steps, filtering, pre-processing, extraction and categorization, and post-processing. Tweets published in a certain time period are aggregated and noisy tweets which do not contain newsworthy events are filtered by the filtering step. The remaining tweets are pre-processed by temporal resolution, part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition in order to identify the key elements of events. An unsupervised Bayesian model is proposed to automatically extract the structured representations of events in the form of quadruples and further categorize the extracted events into event types. Finally, the categorized events are assigned with the event type labels without human intervention. The proposed framework has been evaluated on over 60 million tweets which were collected for one month in December 2010. A precision of 78.01% is achieved for event extraction using our proposed Bayesian model, outperforming a competitive baseline by nearly 13.6%. Moreover, events are also clustered into coherence groups with the automatically assigned event type labels with an accuracy of 42.57%.
BRAIN EMOTIONAL LEARNING-BASED PATTERN RECOGNIZER

In this article, the brain emotional learning-based pattern recognizer (BELPR) is proposed to solve multiple input–multiple output classification and chaotic time series prediction problems. BELPR is based on an extended computational model of the human brain limbic system that consists of an emotional stimuli processor. The BELPR is model free and learns the patterns in a supervised manner and evaluates the output(s) using the activation function tansig. In the numerical studies, various comparisons are made between BELPR and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with a back-propagation learning algorithm. The methods are tested to classify 12 UCI (University of California, Irvine) machine learning data sets and to predict activity indices of the Earth's magnetosphere. The main features of BELPR are higher accuracy, decreased time and spatial complexity, and faster training.
Manpower shortage crisis in Indian information technology industry

Indian IT industry has drawn attention of the world for its spectacular growth over last decade. Concurrent emergence of global economy and boom in Information Technology industry has brought unexpected opportunity for India. Because of a variety of reasons, Indian IT industry has become globally competitive and a frontrunner in software services exports. However India's position as a leading IT nation could be seriously endangered soon for want of adequate skilled manpower. This paper assesses the manpower scenario of India's IT industry and its effect on the industry's long term prospects.
Physiological, biochemical, and mathematical studies of micro‐aerobic continuous ethanol fermentation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae. II: Intracellular metabolite and enzyme assays at steady state chemostat cultures

Intracellular metabolite concentration and enzyme activity measurements were made to explain the new metabolic and growth phenomena seen in the micro‐aerobic, continuous yeast cultures described in Part I. The results of these assays suggested mechanisms for the observed maximum in the specific ethanol productivity as a function of the oxygen feed rate, changing ATP yields, the effects of antifoam, and the sharp changes in the biomass concentration with small changes in the oxygenation. Measured were the intracellular concentrations of ATP, NADH, glucose 6‐phosphate, pyruvate, glycerol, and ethanol, and the activities of hexokinase and alcohol dehydrogenase. Rate‐limiting steps were identified by the accumulation of metabolites upstream and the depletion of metabolites downstream of the step.
An aspartate residue of the Yersinia pseudotuberculosis invasin protein that is critical for integrin binding.

The Yersinia pseudotuberculosis invasin protein mediates bacterial entry into mammalian cells by binding multiple beta 1‐chain integrins. Invasin binding to purified alpha 5 beta 1 integrin is inhibited by Arg‐Gly‐Asp (RGD)‐containing peptides, although invasin contains no RGD sequence. Fifteen mutations that diminished binding and bacterial entry were isolated after mutagenesis of the entire inv gene. All of the mutations altered residues within the C‐terminal 192 amino acids of invasin, previously delineated as the integrin binding domain, and 10 of the mutations fell within an 11 residue region. This small region was subjected to site‐directed mutagenesis and almost half of the 35 mutations generated decreased invasin‐mediated entry. D911 within this region was the most critical residue, as even a conservative glutamate substitution abolished bacterial penetration. Purified invasin derivatives altered at this residue were defective in promoting cell attachment and this defect was reflected in a 10‐fold or greater increase in IC50 for integrin binding. D911 may have a function similar to that of the aspartate residue in RGD‐containing sequences.
Novel C5a regulators in inflammatory disease

Complement is part of the innate immune system, acting to protect the host from microorganisms such as bacteria, and other foreign and abnormal cells. Although primarily protective, complement activation can also cause damage to the host. In a number of inflammatory diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and dermatitis, there is excessive and inappropriate complement activation. Many of the toxic effects seen in these conditions are attributable to the excessive production of the anaphylatoxin C5a, which may contribute to both the initiation and progression of the disease. Therefore, the regulation of C5a production and modulation of its function are good pharmacological targets in these disorders. As yet, there are no effective agents for the therapeutic regulation of C5a in routine clinical practice. This review describes the role of C5a in inflammatory disease, animal models used to study C5a-related effects, and current strategies aimed at regulating C5a. There is also a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, and an outline of the likely progress of this class of drugs in the future.
Comparative Circadian Metabolomics Reveal Differential Effects of Nutritional Challenge in the Serum and Liver*

Diagnosis and therapeutic interventions in pathological conditions rely upon clinical monitoring of key metabolites in the serum. Recent studies show that a wide range of metabolic pathways are controlled by circadian rhythms whose oscillation is affected by nutritional challenges, underscoring the importance of assessing a temporal window for clinical testing and thereby questioning the accuracy of the reading of critical pathological markers in circulation. We have been interested in studying the communication between peripheral tissues under metabolic homeostasis perturbation. Here we present a comparative circadian metabolomic analysis on serum and liver in mice under high fat diet. Our data reveal that the nutritional challenge induces a loss of serum metabolite rhythmicity compared with liver, indicating a circadian misalignment between the tissues analyzed. Importantly, our results show that the levels of serum metabolites do not reflect the circadian liver metabolic signature or the effect of nutritional challenge. This notion reveals the possibility that misleading reads of metabolites in circulation may result in misdiagnosis and improper treatments. Our findings also demonstrate a tissue-specific and time-dependent disruption of metabolic homeostasis in response to altered nutrition.
Theoretical and Experimental Study on Improved Frequency-Locked Multicarrier Generation by Using Recirculating Loop Based on Multifrequency Shifting Single-Sideband Modulation

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel scheme to generate optical frequency-locked multicarrier by using a recirculation frequency shifter (RFS) loop based on multifrequency shifting single-sideband (MFS-SSB) modulation with improved tone-to-noise ratio (TNR) performance. Theoretical study shows that we can generate N subcarriers for each round trip without interference by using MFS-SSB, and the recirculation times are reduced to 1/N of the regular scheme based on single-frequency shifting single-sideband (SFS-SSB) modulation. Finally, the double-frequency shifting SSB modulation is carried out for demonstration in our experiments with a double-carrier source from double ECLs and single ECL with carrier suppression. Using this scheme, we successfully generate more than 95 frequency-locked subcarriers with 15-GHz frequency spacing and TNR larger than 25.3 dB and 23.3 dB, respectively. Compared with the results of a regular SFS-SSB scheme, more subcarriers with improved TNR (10 dB and 8 dB for the 95th subcarrier) are obtained.
The use of helical computed tomography in pregnancy for the diagnosis of acute appendicitis.

OBJECTIVE Accurate diagnosis of acute appendicitis in pregnancy by clinical evaluation is difficult. A safe, reliable test was sought to decrease a delay in diagnosis and to avoid unnecessary invasive procedures. A helical or spiral computed tomographic technique has proven to be a very accurate test in the nonobstetric population for the identification of acute appendicitis. We report its use in pregnant patients with suspected acute appendicitis. STUDY DESIGN All pregnant patients who were undergoing helical computed tomography at our institution from April 1997 to February 1998 for the suspected clinical diagnosis of acute appendicitis were retrospectively reviewed. Helical computed tomography was performed by standard departmental protocol. A positive study was reported if an enlarged appendix, which did not fill with contrast material, was present with periappendiceal inflammatory changes. Outcomes were determined by the results of surgery and pathologic examination or clinical follow-up. RESULTS Seven patients were identified in the study period. Two patients had positive findings on helical computed tomography, and acute appendicitis was confirmed at laparotomy and by pathologic inspection. There were no further prenatal complications and both patients delivered at term. Five patients had a normal-appearing appendix on helical computed tomography, and all of these patients had resolution of their pain and symptoms. CONCLUSION Helical computed tomography appears to be a useful, noninvasive test to accurately diagnose acute appendicitis in pregnancy.
Tongue pressure against hard palate during swallowing in post-stroke patients.

OBJECTIVES The tongue plays an important role in swallowing by contacting the palate. The aim of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of tongue pressure production during swallowing in post-stroke patients using a newly developed sensor sheet. MATERIALS AND METHODS Ten post-stroke inpatients with hemiplegia and five healthy volunteers participated in this study. Magnitude of tongue pressure during a dry swallow was measured using a newly developed sensor sheet comprising five sensors applied directly to the palate or to the palatal surface of a maxillary denture using denture adhesive. Swallowing ability was evaluated by measuring the time taken to swallow 30 ml of water. The magnitude of tongue pressure was compared between the post-stroke patients and healthy subjects as well as between each measuring point in both groups. The relationship between tongue pressure and swallowing ability and that between tongue pressure and state of occlusal support were also examined. RESULTS The magnitude of tongue pressure in the post-stroke patients was smaller than that of the healthy subjects at the measuring points along the median line (Welch test, p < 0.05), larger in the non-paralysed side than in the paralysed side (two-way ANOVA, p < 0.05), and was influenced by swallowing ability and occlusal support (Welch test, p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Measurement of the magnitude of tongue pressure shows promise as a simple, non-invasive and quantitative method by which tongue activity in post-stroke patients, in whom swallowing ability is a concern, could be evaluated.
Molecular recognition of HER‐1 in whole‐blood samples

Multimode sensing was proposed for molecular screening and recognition of HER‐1 in whole blood. The tools used for molecular recognition were platforms based on nanostructured materials such as the complex of Mn(III) with meso‐tetra (4‐carboxyphenyl) porphyrin, and maltodextrin (dextrose equivalence between 4 and 7), immobilized in diamond paste, graphite paste or C60 fullerene paste. The identification of HER‐1 in whole‐blood samples, at molecular level, is performed using stochastic mode and is followed by the quantification of it using stochastic and differential pulse voltammetry modes. HER‐1 can be identified in the concentration range between 280 fg/ml and 4.86 ng/ml using stochastic mode, this making possible the early detection of cancers such as gastrointestinal, pancreatic and lung cancers. The recovery tests performed using whole‐blood samples proved that the platforms can be used for identification and quantification of HER‐1 with high sensitivity and reliability in such samples, these making them good molecular screening tools. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Changes in Lipid Profile of Wistar Rats after Sustained Consumption of Different Types of Commercial Vegetable Oil: A Preliminary Study

The amount of lipids in a diet and their source are determining factors of the lipid profile. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the addition of six types of different commercial vegetable oils (avocado, canola, high oleic safflower, soybean, grape seed and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) to the diet of Wistar rats at two different concentrations (14.4% and 25.6% of energy intake from each added oil) and check rats' tolerance and lipid profile effect following consumption for 5 weeks. Rats fed with soybean and avocado oils had significantly lower LDL (29.27 ±8.85 and 26.51±10.85 mg/dL, respectively) and total cholesterol values (48.10±11.41 and 45.83±5.78 mg/dL, respectively) vs. treatment with hydrogenated oil (p<0.05) (49.19±27.62 and 70.27±31.24 mg/dL, respectively). Rats' consumption and growth was satisfactory with both concentrations of added oils. Partially hydrogenated oil had a hypercholesterolaemic effect on rats; in contrast, avocado oil and especially soybean oil offered the best results.