Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synergistic association of PI4KA and GRM3 genetic polymorphisms with poor antipsychotic response in south Indian schizophrenia patients with low severity of illness

Literature indicates key role of glutamatergic pathway genes in antipsychotic response among schizophrenia patients. However, molecular basis of their underlying role in antipsychotic response remained unexplained. Thus, to unravel their molecular underpinnings, we sought to investigate interactions amongst GRM3, SLC1A1, SLC1A2, SLC1A3, SLC1A4 gene polymorphisms with drug response in south Indian schizophrenia patients. We genotyped 48 SNPs from these genes in 423 schizophrenia patients stratified into low and high severity of illness groups. The SNPs and haplotypic combinations of associated SNPs were examined for their association with antipsychotic response. Multifactor‐dimensionality‐reduction was further used to explore gene‐gene interaction among these SNPs and 53 SNPs from previously studied genes (BDNF, RGS4, SLC6A3, PI4KA, and PIP4K2A). Single SNP and haplotype analyses revealed no significant association with drug response irrespective of severity of illness. Gene‐gene interaction analyses yielded promising leads, including an observed synergistic effect between PI4KA_rs165854 and GRM3_rs1468412 polymorphisms and incomplete antipsychotic response in schizophrenia patients with low severity of illness (OR = 12.4; 95%CI = 3.69–41.69). Further, this interaction was also observed in atypical monotherapy (n = 355) and risperidone (n = 260) treatment subgroups (OR = 11.21; 95%CI = 3.30–38.12 and OR = 13.5; 95%CI = 3.03–121.61 respectively). PI4KA is known to be involved in the biosynthesis of phosphatidylinositol‐4, 5‐bisphosphate which regulates exocytotic fusion of synaptic vesicles (glutamate, dopamine) with the plasma membrane and regulates duration of signal transduction of GPCRs. Whereas GRM3 regulates glutamate and dopamine transmission. Present findings indicate that PI4KA and GRM3 polymorphisms have potential to jointly modulate antipsychotic response. These results warrant additional replication studies to shed further light on these interactions. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Observer Variability in Assessing Lumbar Spinal Stenosis Severity on Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Its Relation to Cross-Sectional Spinal Canal Area

Study Design. Magnetic resonance image grading of lumbar spinal stenosis severity was analyzed retrospectively using a common clinical format. Objective. To assess the interobserver and intraobserver reliability of magnetic resonance image used to grade patients with lumbar spinal stenosis, as compared with cross-sectional spinal canal area. Summary of Background Data. Physicians currently classify the degree of lumbar spinal stenosis on magnetic resonance imaging as mild, moderate, or severe. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on criteria for these definitions. Methods. The magnetic resonance image scans of 15 patients with lumbar stenosis were blindly rated by seven observers for the degree of central, lateral recess, and foraminal stenosis between L1–L2 and L5–S1. Weighted kappa statistics were performed to analyze the inter- and intraobserver agreement. Digitized spinal canal area measurements were calculated. Linear regression models were used to assess the reliability of the grading system in predicting the cross-sectional area. Results. The average interobserver kappa score was 0.26. Within different specialties, the interobserver reliability was higher among radiologists (0.40), followed by neurosurgeons (0.21) and orthopedic surgeons (0.15). The average intraobserver kappa score was 0.11, rising to 0.43 after categories were combined (P = 0.001). The classification of central stenosis highly predicted spinal canal area (P < 0.001). Conclusions. The findings indicate only a fair level of agreement among all observers. However, the ability of the various readers to predict the degree of central stenosis was high. Further studies should evaluate a consensus-based, standardized magnetic resonance image classification aimed at improved agreement among observers.
On the construction of topology-preserving deformations

In this paper, we investigate a new method to enforce topology preservation on two/three-dimensional deformation fields for non-parametric registration problems involving large-magnitude deformations. The method is composed of two steps. The first one consists in correcting the gradient vector field of the deformation at the discrete level, in order to fulfill a set of conditions ensuring topology preservation in the continuous domain after bilinear interpolation. This part, although related to prior works by Kara¸cali and Davatzikos (Estimating Topology Preserving and Smooth Displacement Fields, B. Kara¸cali and C. Davatzikos, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 23(7), 2004), proposes a new approach based on interval analysis and provides, unlike their method, uniqueness of the correction parameter α at each node of the grid, which is more consistent with the continuous setting. The second one aims to reconstruct the deformation, given its full set of discrete gradient vector field. The problem is phrased as a functional minimization problem on a convex subset K of an Hilbert space V . Existence and uniqueness of the solution of the problem are established, and the use of Lagrange's multipliers allows to obtain the variational formulation of the problem on the Hilbert space V . The discretization of the problem by the finite element method does not require the use of numerical schemes to approximate the partial derivatives of the deformation components and leads to solve two/three uncoupled sparse linear subsystems. Experimental results in brain mapping and comparisons with existing methods demonstrate the efficiency and the competitiveness of the method.
Musical Performance: On teaching performance

Play from the soul, not like a trained bird! c. p. e. bach Introduction This chapter concentrates on performances in which a musician or group of musicians ‘self-consciously enacts music for an audience’, in which a pre-existing work is ‘realised’. Its particular focus is on the teaching of solo instrumental performance of Western art music. The timespan is from the late eighteenth century onwards, the geographical boundaries those of Western Europe, the emphasis on the teaching of those aspiring to professional standards, rather than of amateurs or beginners. Although instrumentalists are frequently advised to learn from singers, the teaching of singing itself is not addressed in this chapter, given the scope of the subject and the numerous strands particular to the history of voice teaching. Instead, the examples cited relate mainly to the piano and violin literature. Because of the popularity of these instruments and the emphasis placed on the mastery of solo repertoire and its presentation in concert, it is through them that the trends in instrumental performance teaching since the late eighteenth century can be seen most clearly. Since the phrase ‘teaching performance’ is used here with the implication that performance involves a consideration of the relationship between performer and audience, these are trends in the interpretation and communication of music in performance, rather than in instrumental technique.
Expression of phosphorylated Akt in patients with small cell carcinoma of the lung indicates good prognosis

Patients with pulmonary small cell carcinoma are well known to have a poor prognosis. However, predictors of prognosis and treatment outcome have not been reported for this type of cancer. We examined whether excision repair cross‐complementation group 1 (ERCC1), phosphorylated Akt (p‐Akt), phosphorylated mammalian target of rapamycin (p‐mTOR), and the uridine diphosphate glucuronosyl transferase1A1 (UGT1A1) genetic polymorphism were useful indicators of prognosis in cases of small cell carcinoma of the lung. We investigated 45 patients with advanced small cell lung cancer who received chemotherapy with irinotecan combined with cisplatin or carboplatin. Staining results showed that 12 of 45 cases (27%) were positive for p‐Akt, while 18 (40%) were positive for p‐mTOR and 16 (36%) were positive for ERCC1. As for UGT1A1, more than one polymorphism was found in 30 cases (67%). There was a significant relationship observed between the expressions of p‐Akt and p‐mTOR (P= 0.0006). Univariate analysis indicated a significantly better survival rate for patients positive for p‐Akt or p‐mTOR, while multivariate analysis using a Cox test showed p‐Akt to be the strongest prognostic factor. Our results indicate that p‐Akt is a reliable prognostic factor in patients with small cell carcinoma of the lung.
Inflammasome Activation Underlying Central Nervous System Deterioration in HIV-Associated Tuberculosis

Abstract Tuberculous meningitis (TBM) is a frequent cause of meningitis in individuals with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, resulting in death in approximately 40% of affected patients. A severe complication of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in these patients is neurological tuberculosis–immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS), but its underlying cause remains poorly understood. To investigate the pathogenesis of TBM-IRIS, we performed longitudinal whole-blood microarray analysis of HIV-infected patients with TBM and reflected the findings at the protein level. Patients in whom TBM-IRIS eventually developed had significantly more abundant neutrophil-associated transcripts, from before development of TBM-IRIS through IRIS symptom onset. After ART initiation, a significantly higher abundance of transcripts associated with canonical and noncanonical inflammasomes was detected in patients with TBM-IRIS than in non-IRIS controls. Whole-blood transcriptome findings complement protein measurement from the site of disease, which together suggest a dominant role for the innate immune system in the pathogenesis of TBM-IRIS.
Ownership structure and bank performance: An emerging market perspective

This study investigates whether ownership type does matter for bank performance in an emerging market. By tracing the identity of top owners, I group large shareholder of China’s commercial banks into government, state owned enterprises (SOEs), domestic private investors and foreign investors. These distinct types of shareholders have multiple motivations and incentives, in turn, this will affect how they perform their control rights and monitor over the invested banks. The main findings regarding the impact of ownership structure on bank performance suggest that banks with high state shareholding tend to have poorer performance and low profitability, consistent with much of the literature. In addition, banks with higher domestic privately shareholders are generally operated more profitably. Furthermore, higher foreign ownership may negatively affect bank performance. Moreover, ownership type diversity is positively associated with bank performance, and banks with concentrated ownership are worse performing. My findings are robustness under the different measures of bank performance.
Svr+rvr: a Robust Sparse Kernel Method for Regression

Support vector machine (SVM) and relevance vector machine (RVM) are two state of the art kernel learning methods. But both methods have some disadvantages: although SVM is very robust against outliers, it makes unnecessarily liberal use of basis functions since the number of support vectors required typically grows linearly with the size of the training set; on the other hand the solution of RVM is astonishingly sparse, but its performance deteriorates significantly when the observations are contaminated by outliers. In this paper, we present a combination of SVM and RVM for regression problems, in which the two methods are concatenated: firstly, we train a support vector regression (SVR) machine on the full training set; then a relevance vector regression (RVR) machine is trained only on a subset consisting of support vectors, but whose target values are replaced by the predictions of SVR. Using this combination, we overcome the drawbacks of SVR and RVR. Experiments demonstrate SVR+RVR is both very sparse and robust.
Practical implications of via-middle Cu TSV-induced stress in a 28nm CMOS technology for Wide-IO logic-memory interconnect

The impact of isolated and arrayed 10×60μm via-middle Cu TSVs on 8LM 28nm node CMOS poly-SiON P/NFETs was electrically measured for proximities >;4 μm at 27C and 105C. The largest observed shift in Ion (<;2.3%) is significantly less than that from other context-dependent sources such as dual stress liner boundaries (~10%). NanoBeam Diffraction measurements of Si strain within 5μm of TSVs were acquired for samples prepared from fully processed wafers, showing that for proximity >;1. 5μm the impact of TSVs is negligible. Interaction with overlying interconnect is mitigated through optimization of post-TSV plating anneal to achieve <; 200 ÅCu pumping and by introducing a TSV unit cell designed to minimize the impact on local environment.
Managing the care of schizophrenia. Lessons from a 4-year Massachusetts Medicaid study.

BACKGROUND In 1992, Massachusetts launched a state-wide managed care plan for all Medicaid beneficiaries. METHODS This retrospective, multi-year, cross-sectional study used administrative data from the Massachusetts Division of Medical Assistance and Department of Mental Health, consisting of claims for 16,400 disabled adult patients insured by Medicaid in Massachusetts between July 1, 1990, and June 30, 1994. The main outcome measures include annual rates of hospitalization, emergency department utilization, and follow-up care 30 days after discharge; length of inpatient stay; and per-person inpatient and outpatient expenditures. RESULTS Between 1991 and 1994, the likelihood of an inpatient admission decreased from 29% to 24% and was accompanied by a slight reduction in length of stay (median number of bed-days per admission dropped by 3.3 days). There was a slight decrease in the number of patients who sought care in general hospital emergency department utilization. However, there was a small increase in the fraction of patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Medicaid and Department of Mental Health expenditures for mental health per treated beneficiary decreased slightly, from $11,060 to $10,640, during the 4-year study period. CONCLUSION Although per-person expenditures dropped and most patient patterns of care remained the same, longer-term study is recommended to asses whether the trends can be maintained.
High angular resolution estimation methods for vehicle FMCW radar

This paper presents high angular resolution estimation methods applied to W-band vehicle Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar. This paper proposes 2 procedure of high angular resolution estimation for vehicle FMCW radar with sawtooth waveform. In this paper, to improve angular resolution using of multi-chirp signal of 2 types. One is using a multi-chirp signal, another is using a averaged multi-chirp signal. Angular estimation algorithm which Forward Backward SS-MUSIC(Spatial Smoothed MUltiple SIgnal Classification) is used in this paper. We show by computer simulation for multi-chirp signal of 2 types that the resolution of DOA(Direction of arrival) estimation using Forward Backward SS-MUSIC.
Multi-component mixture of dipolar hard spheres with surface adhesion

Mean spherical approximation (MSA) [1] occupies a special place among the liquid state integral equation theories [2–4] due to the availability of the analytical solution of the corresponding Ornstein-Zernike (OZ) equation for a number of simple albeit nontrivial models (see, for example [2–14]). In the present study we propose the method, which can be used to describe the properties of the fluid of multicomponent dipolar hard spheres with surface adhesion. It is based on the analytical solution of the corresponding version of the MSA with the surface adhesion accounted for following Baxter [15]. In the relevant publications of Blum and coworkers multi-component sticky hard-sphere ion-dipole mixture with orientationally dependent stickiness for dipoles of the same size [16] and one-component hard-sphere system with anisotropic adhesion of arbitrary symmetry and electric multipoles [17] have been studied.
Cyclophosphamide plus total body irradiation compared with busulfan plus cyclophosphamide as a conditioning regimen prior to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in patients with leukemia: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Cyclophosphamide plus total body irradiation (CYTBI) and oral busulfan plus cyclophosphamide (BUCY) are commonly used conditioning regimens prior to allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in patients with leukemia. However, there is conflicting data on the superiority of one regimen over the other. Our aim was to critically appraise and synthesize available evidence regarding the efficacy and safety of CYTBI compared to BUCY as a conditioning regimen. DESIGN AND SETTING Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) comparing BUCY with CYTBI. METHODS We did a systematic search of the indexed medical literature using appropriate keywords to identify potentially relevant articles. The primary outcome of interest was efficacy measured by overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). Acute and late toxicity were secondary endpoints. Meta-analysis was attempted only on RCTs. A relative risk or risk ratio (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated for each outcome in the meta-analysis. RESULTS Fifteen non-randomized comparative studies involving 6280 patients were included in a narrative review without attempting a pooled analysis, in view of the potential for significant bias. Outcome data from seven RCTs involving 730 patients randomly assigned to either CYTBI or BUCY was pooled using meta-analytic methods. CYTBI was associated with a modest but non-significant reduction in all cause mortality (RR=0.82, 95%CI: 0.64-1.05; P=.12) and relapse of leukemia (RR=0.89, 95%CI: 0.72-1.10; P=.28). Transplant-related mortality (TRM) was significantly lesser with CYTBI compared to oral BUCY (RR-0.53, 95%CI: 0.31-0.90; P=.02). The cumulative incidence of major complications was not significantly different between the two regimens, but specific complications varied according to the conditioning regimen. TBI-based regimens were associated with more severe late effects on growth and development in children. CONCLUSION This analysis represents the largest comparative analyses of CYTBI with BUCY as a conditioning regimen prior to HSCT in the indexed medical literature. Conditioning regimen and disease (type and setting) can significantly affect outcomes. TRM is significantly lesser with CYTBI, but this does not translate into a significant survival benefit. There remain valid concerns regarding the late effects of TBI, particularly in children. Although not overly superior, the weight of evidence favors CYTBI over BUCY as a first choice-conditioning regimen in patients with leukemia.
Green versus Brown: explaining environmental commitment in Australia.

Although there have been several studies of the growth in environmental group membership, analyzing the link between environmentalism, value change, and social location, few studies have attempted to explain potential environmental commitment or specific types of environmental beliefs as motivations for participation in such groups. We use multivariate methods on three pooled surveys conducted in Australia between 1990 and 1996 to explore the sources of commitment. We distinguish between committed and ordinary members of environmental groups. Committed members have stronger postmaterialist and secular values than ordinary members and are more likely to come from professional occupations. Perhaps most significant, committed members are motivated by a strong sense of the urgency of green (i.e., global) as opposed to brown (i.e., local) environmental concerns. The results point to a shift in the bases of environmental commitment, away from social location and to green environmental issues. Although issues are in principle an insecure basis for political mobilization, the inability of national governments to solve global environmental problems suggests that green rather than brown environmental concerns will provide a continuing basis from which environmental groups can recruit and mobilize
Thrombotic microangiopathic antiphospholipid syndromes: a continuum of conditions?

The original description and definition of the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) included predominantly thromboses of large veins and large arteries (deep vein thromboses [DVT] and strokes), fetal losses and thrombocytopenia (mild to moderate). The thromboses and fetal losses were often recurrent. Small vessel occlusions did occur (affecting renal and retinal skin vessels, etc.) but these did not dominate the clinical picture. The systemic nature of the syndrome was recognized in 1992 and is referred to as Hughes’ Syndrome. In 1992, a new subset consisting predominantly of small vessel microangiopathy, with considerably less large vessel occlusive disease, was defined as the catastrophic antiphospholipid syndrome (CAPS) and the eponym Asherson’s Syndrome has been attached. Severe thrombocytopenia and features of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome appear to accompany this very often fatal condition. Recurrences were very rare. A new subset is highlighted and reviewed in this paper and is termed the .
Afa, a Diffuse Adherence Fibrillar Adhesin Associated with Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli

ABSTRACT O55 is one of the most frequent enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) O serogroups implicated in infantile diarrhea in developing countries. Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis analysis showed that this serogroup includes two major electrophoretic types (ET), designated ET1 and ET5. ET1 corresponds to typical EPEC, whilst ET5 comprises strains with different combinations of virulence genes, including those for localized adherence (LA) and diffuse adherence (DA). Here we report that ET5 DA strains possess a DA adhesin, designated EPEC Afa. An 11.6-kb chromosomal region including the DA adhesin operon from one O55:H− ET5 EPEC strain was sequenced and found to encode a protein with 98% identity to AfaE-1, an adhesin associated with uropathogenic E. coli. Although described as an afimbrial adhesin, we show that both AfaE-1 and EPEC Afa possess fine fibrillar structures. This is the first characterization and demonstration of an Afa adhesin associated with EPEC.