Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of injuries in sows housed in gestation stalls versus group pens with electronic sow feeders.

OBJECTIVE To compare the location and severity of injuries in pregnant sows housed in individual gestation stalls with that in pregnant sows housed in dynamic groups in pens with electronic sow feeders. DESIGN Prospective study. ANIMALS 100 pregnant sows of parity 1 to 3 and various body weights. PROCEDURE Fifty sows each were randomly allotted to gestation stalls or group pens with electronic sow feeders. Injuries were scored on the basis of location, number, and depth of wounds. Injury scores for sows in both housing systems were compared during a period of 90 days. The influence of factors such as duration of stay in the housing system, parity, and body weight on sow injuries was also examined. RESULTS Injury scores were higher in group pens with electronic sow feeders. As body weight increased, injury scores decreased for sows housed in group pens with electronic sow feeders and increased for sows housed in gestation stalls. There was a significant negative association between second parity and total injury scores. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Modifications in housing system design and management procedures are needed to reduce injuries in pregnant sows.
Improved Turbulence Modeling Of Film CoolingFlow And Heat Transfer

Film-cooling flows are characterized by a row of jets injected at an angle from the blade surface or endwalls into the heated crossflow. The resulting flowfield is quite complex, and accurate predictions of the flow and heat transfer have been difficult to obtain using traditional two-equation turbulence models employed with ReynoldsAveraged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solvers. Recently, a four-equation model, the e k f v − 2 model, has been shown to yield improved predictions in a wide range of applications including gas turbine flows. However, this model retains some of the drawbacks inherent with e-based models, and in many applications exhibits significant numerical stiffness. In the present chapter, a new model is presented (the ω k f v − 2 model), which is based on ω as the relevant length scale, and provides predictive accuracy that is comparable to or better than the e k f v − 2 , but with significantly improved numerical stability. This new model is tested on a filmcooling flow application, and computations are compared with detailed flow and cooling effectiveness measurements. It is shown that the ω k f v − 2 model provides improved flow predictions over other turbulence models, but that a variable Prandtl number formulation is necessary for improved cooling effectiveness predictions. A Prandtl number expression is proposed and shown to yield improved predictions. www.witpress. com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 15, © 2005 WIT Press doi:10.2495/978-1-85312-956-8/04
Discrimination of agonist and antagonist forms of CXCL10 in biological samples

The ready access to commercially available multiplex assays and the importance of inflammation in disease pathogenesis has resulted in an abundance of studies aimed at identifying surrogate biomarkers for different clinically important questions. Establishing a link between a biomarker and disease pathogenesis, however, is quite complex, and in some instances this complexity is compounded by post‐translational modifications and the use of immunoassays that do not always discriminate between the different forms of the same protein. Herein, we provide a detailed description of an assay system that has been established to discriminate the agonist form of CXCL10 from the NH2‐terminal truncated form of the molecule generated by dipeptidylpeptidase IV (DPP4) cleavage. We demonstrate the utility of this assay system for monitoring agonist and antagonist forms of CXCL10 in culture supernatant, patient plasma and urine samples. Given the important role of CXCL10 in chronic inflammatory diseases and its suggested role as a predictive marker in managing patients with chronic hepatitis C, asthma, atopic dermatitis, transplantation, tuberculosis, kidney injury, cancer and other diseases, we believe that our method will be of general interest to the research and medical community.
Prevalence of pituitary adenomas: a community‐based, cross‐sectional study in Banbury (Oxfordshire, UK)

Background Pituitary adenomas (PAs) are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The optimal delivery of services and the provision of care for patients with PAs require distribution of the resources proportionate to the impact of these conditions on the community. Currently, the resource allocation for PAs in the health care system is lacking a reliable and an up‐to‐date epidemiological background that would reflect the recent advances in the diagnostic technologies, leading to the earlier recognition of these tumours.
Shrinking lung syndrome in systemic lupus erythematosus: a single-centre experience

Introduction Shrinking lung syndrome (SLS) is a rare manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), characterized by decreased lung volumes and extra-pulmonary restriction. The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics of SLS in our lupus cohort with emphasis on prevalence, presentation, treatment and outcomes. Patients and methods Patients attending the Toronto Lupus Clinic since 1980 (n = 1439) and who had pulmonary function tests (PFTs) performed during follow-up were enrolled (n = 278). PFT records were reviewed to characterize the pattern of pulmonary disease. SLS definition was based on a restrictive ventilatory defect with normal or slightly reduced corrected diffusing lung capacity for carbon monoxide (DLCO) in the presence of suggestive clinical (dyspnea, chest pain) and radiological (elevated diaphragm) manifestations. Data on clinical symptoms, functional abnormalities, imaging, treatment and outcomes were extracted in a dedicated data retrieval form. Results Twenty-two patients (20 females) were identified with SLS for a prevalence of 1.53%. Their mean age was 29.5 ± 13.3 years at SLE and 35.7 ± 14.6 years at SLS diagnosis. Main clinical manifestations included dyspnea (21/22, 95.5%) and pleuritic chest pain (20/22, 90.9%). PFTs were available in 20 patients; 16 (80%) had decreased maximal inspiratory (MIP) and/or expiratory pressure (MEP). Elevated hemidiaphragm was demonstrated in 12 patients (60%). Treatment with prednisone and/or immunosuppressives led to clinical improvement in 19/20 cases (95%), while spirometrical improvement was observed in 14/16 patients and was mostly partial. Conclusions SLS prevalence in SLE was 1.53%. Treatment with glucocorticosteroids and immunosuppressives was generally effective. However, a chronic restrictive ventilatory defect usually persisted.
What Will Quantitative Measures of Teamwork Look Like in 10 Years?

Nationwide there is a need for cost-effective training solutions that are highly automated, adaptable, and capable of producing quantifiable behavioral changes in teams that are indicative of deep learning. In contrast to what is known about individual skill acquisition and persistence, relatively little is known about how team process skills develop; how well these skills once learned in one context transfer to another context; how long the skills persist when unused; and, what interventions or training will most rapidly restore them? Answering these questions is challenging due to the limited number of quantitative teamwork measures that track team performance, cohesion and flexibility across teams, time, environments and training protocols. Adopting a scientific approach for studying the effects of training interventions is problematic without theory and methods that are aligned and capable of representing and capturing the dynamics of team performance. A confluence of new technologies will soon generate enormous amounts of new data at an unprecedented level of detail about teams. But these data will also raise questions of their own; principally how researchers will make sense of the expected onslaught of data and derive general organizing principles that guide the co-evolution of the complex team and task interactions. This suggests the need for novel methods and ways of thinking about team dynamics and measurement. Our goals are to speculate, given where we are, where the measurement and assessment of learning and performance of teams and of individuals in teams might go in the next decade and how we might get there. As such, some sample ‘Big’ Questions’ that the panelists were asked to consider in their presentations include: • What types of high and low level data abstractions might provide the most useful quantitative information about teamwork? • Across which biologic and interpersonal scales of teamwork will the strongest information flows be found? • Can dynamical clues tell us how well a team is performing / will perform? • In addition to performance assessment, what can we learn from dynamics about team flexibility, cohesion, leadership, and resilience? • How can we disentangle individual contributions from the team contribution and accurately measure them?
Phylogenetic relationships and evolution of growth form in Cactaceae (Caryophyllales, Eudicotyledoneae).

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Cactaceae is one of the most charismatic plant families because of the extreme succulence and outstanding diversity of growth forms of its members. Although cacti are conspicuous elements of arid ecosystems in the New World and are model systems for ecological and anatomical studies, the high morphological convergence and scarcity of phenotypic synapomorphies make the evolutionary relationships and trends among lineages difficult to understand. METHODS We performed phylogenetic analyses implementing parsimony ratchet and likelihood methods, using a concatenated matrix with 6148 bp of plastid and nuclear markers (trnK/matK, matK, trnL-trnF, rpl16, and ppc). We included 224 species representing approximately 85% of the family's genera. Likelihood methods were used to perform an ancestral character reconstruction within Cactoideae, the richest subfamily in terms of morphological diversity and species number, to evaluate possible growth form evolutionary trends. KEY RESULTS Our phylogenetic results support previous studies showing the paraphyly of subfamily Pereskioideae and the monophyly of subfamilies Opuntioideae and Cactoideae. After the early divergence of Blossfeldia, Cactoideae splits into two clades: Cacteae, including North American globose and barrel-shaped members, and core Cactoideae, including the largest diversity of growth forms distributed throughout the American continent. Para- or polyphyly is persistent in different parts of the phylogeny. Main Cactoideae clades were found to have different ancestral growth forms, and convergence toward globose, arborescent, or columnar forms occurred in different lineages. CONCLUSIONS Our study enabled us to provide a detailed hypothesis of relationships among cacti lineages and represents the most complete general phylogenetic framework available to understand evolutionary trends within Cactaceae.
Evidence for the importance of measuring total brain activity in neuroimaging

A principal goal in neuroscience is to understand how neuronal populations across different brain regions process information from the vibrant world, rich in moment-to-moment variations of sight, smell, sound, touch, etc. Traditional inquiries examine how the evoked neuronal responses differ with stimuli (e.g., sound or touch). However, the brain detects stimuli reliably even when ambient (or background) conditions shift owing to external (e.g., light vs. dark) and/or internal (e.g., alert vs. sleepy) factors. Recent investigations have assessed whether evoked neuronal activity (ΔN) varies when the brain's operational (or baseline) state is altered, whereby including an independent measure of baseline (or spontaneous) neuronal activity (No) provides a total measure of neuronal activity for the perturbed state (N). In PNAS, Li et al. (1) demonstrate in the rat's olfactory bulb that total bulbar activity level reached upon odor exposure (i.e., N = ΔN + No)—measured by extracellular recordings—is independent of the bulb's baseline activity level. This result agrees well with previous observations from other cortical sensory systems, using a variety of neuroimaging techniques [e.g., functional MRI (fMRI), optical imaging, and electrophysiology (2–9)]. Taken together, these studies (1–9) imply that there may be inherent neuronal mechanisms to ensure a similar level of information transfer from sensory input, regardless of external/internal situations that may impact the brain's baseline state (10).
Five versus three days of ofloxacin therapy for traveler's diarrhea: a placebo-controlled study

In this double-blind study with 232 patients, 300 mg of ofloxacin given orally twice daily for 5 or 3 days was compared with placebo for the treatment of acute diarrhea in U.S. students visiting Guadalajara, Mexico. The 3-day regimen of ofloxacin was found to be as effective as the 5-day regimen in producing a clinical and microbiologic cure. Clinical cures for patients who received ofloxacin for 5 days occurred in 59 of 66 (89%) subjects, whereas clinical cure occurred in 77 of 81 (95%) of those who received ofloxacin for 3 days and in 56 of 79 (71%) of those who took placebo (P = 0.0001). When the duration of diarrhea after therapy was begun was compared in subgroups, a significant (P less than 0.05) shortening of posttreatment illness occurred in comparison with that in the placebo group for the following groups: for 5 days of ofloxacin, cases of shigellosis (32 versus 98 h); for 3 days of ofloxacin, all cases (28 versus 56 h), cases of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli diarrhea (26 versus 66 h), cases of shigellosis (24 versus 98 h), all cases of illnesses associated with a bacterial enteropathogen (28 versus 69 h), and cases of illnesses in which numerous leukocytes were found in stool by microscopy (22 versus 49 h). Microbiologic eradication rates were 75 of 78 (96%) for patients who received ofloxacin and 37 of 46 (80%) for patients who received placebo (P = 0.009). There was no significant difference in the number of adverse events reported by patients in either of the treatment groups. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Greedy-Ant: Ant Colony System-Inspired Workflow Scheduling for Heterogeneous Computing

The last decades have seen a considerable progress on workflow scheduling in heterogeneous computing environments. However, existing methods still need to be improved on the performance in the makespan-based metrics. This paper proposes a novel workflow scheduling algorithm named Greedy-Ant to minimize total execution time of an application in heterogeneous environments. First, the ant colony system is applied to scheduling from a new standpoint by guiding ants to explore task priorities and simultaneously assign tasks to machines. Second, forward/backward dependence is defined to indicate the global significance of each node, based on which, a new heuristic factor is proposed to help ants search for task sequences. Finally, a greedy machine allocating strategy is presented. Experimental results demonstrate that Greedy-Ant outperforms the state of the art up to 18% in the metric of speedup.
Changes in Quality of Life following Buprenorphine Treatment: Relationship with Treatment Retention and Illicit Opioid Use

Abstract Studies of substance abuse treatment outcomes that give priority to cessation of all drug use may obscure other tangible benefits of treatment that are important to patients. The aim of this study was to examine the association between changes in quality of life (QoL) and: (1) retention in treatment; and (2) opioid use as measured by self-report and urine testing. Participants were 300 African American men and women starting outpatient buprenorphine treatment. Participants completed assessments at baseline, three and six months consisting of the World Health Organization’s Quality of Life brief scale, Addiction Severity Index, and urine testing for opioids. There were statistically significant increases over time across all four QoL domains: physical, psychological, environmental, and social. Self-reported frequency of opioid use was negatively associated with psychological QoL, but opioid urine test results were not significantly associated with any QoL domains. Continued treatment enrollment was significantly associated with higher psychological QoL and environmental QoL. Patients entering buprenorphine treatment experience improvements in QoL, which are amplified for patients who remain in treatment. Point-prevalence opiate urine test results obtained at each assessment were not associated with any of the QoL domains and may not accurately reflect improvements perceived by patients receiving buprenorphine treatment.
Antimicrobial drug resistance threat: our duty towards future generations.

1Assistant-Director General, Health Security and Environment, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland (fukudak@who.int). Since their availability in the 1940s, antimicrobial drugs have been a miracle. For example, penicillin reduced death rates among patients with pneumonia and bacteraemia from approximately 90% to 10%. Seventy years later, however, increasing levels of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on all continents is endangering the prevention and treatment of infections ranging from the common to the life-threatening ones which disproportionately affect the poor, such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV. The emergence of new resistance mechanisms is making some Gramnegative infections virtually untreatable, while other community-acquired bacterial infections, including those affecting children, are becoming progressively more difficult to treat. In January 2013 the World Economic Forum warned that antibiotic resistance was one of the major global risks humanity needs to address [1]. Recently, the United Kingdom’s Chief Medical Officer recently called AMR a “catastrophic threat,” stating that unless resistance is curbed, “We will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th century” in which organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy, joint replacements and even minor surgeries become life-threatening [2]. In essence, AMR is a situation in which the simultaneous pandemic spread of multiple drug-resistant organisms is fast outpacing available solutions and is creating a major global public health threat. The underlying challenge is that the inherent capacity of microbes to develop resistance to antimicrobial drugs is being fuelled by the widespread use, and misuse, of such agents in all regions of the world in both health and agricultural practices [3]. Currently, over 80% of the antimicrobial drugs (including penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, cephalosporins) sold in the United States of America are used in agriculture. About 90% of the antimicrobial drugs used for animals are added to their feed or drinking-water, primarily for growth promotion and feed efficiency [4]. Moreover, environmental contamination by antimicrobials from agricultural, medical and pharmaceutical industry sources is driving the evolution of a pool of resistant bacteria that can spread globally [5,6] underscoring the need for a broad multisectoral “one health” approach. [7]. The impact of AMR on lives, health systems and economies is already considerable and will continue to grow. For example, hospital-acquired antibioticresistant infections contribute to significant numbers of deaths every year while losses to gross domestic product have been estimated at 0.4% to 1.6 % [1]. Many critical actions are needed: However, of paramount importance is to immediately move beyond current perceptions of the issues as “technical” or “medical” in nature. AMR poses a broad social challenge with serious health security implications. Now is the time for key stakeholders, especially governments and sectors such as industry, agriculture and health, to become fully engaged.
Performance and carcass characteristics of weaned lambs either grazed on orchardgrass, ryegrass, or alfalfa or fed all-concentrate diets in drylot.

Four-paddock rotational grazing of orchardgrass, ryegrass, or alfalfa was compared to an all-concentrate diet fed in drylot using 202 weaned lambs. Comparisons of animal performance ended in each of the 3 yr (1983, 1984, 1985) for all animals when drylot lambs reached a subjective body condition score of 12 (range 1 to 15) and estimated fat depth over the rib was 5.5 to 7.0 mm. A total of 84 representative lambs were slaughtered over the 3 yr for carcass evaluation. Mature put-and-take ewes were used to maintain forages in the vegetative stage. Average daily gain and total gain of lambs were in the order of drylot > alfalfa > grasses; performance of lambs grazing alfalfa approached performance of those fed the drylot diet. Better performance (P < .01) of lambs grazing alfalfa than of those grazing grasses is atributed to more CP (P < .01) and less NDF, ADF, and hemicellulose (P < .01) in alfalfa. Lambs grazed on grasses had smaller carcasses with less muscle, fat, and bone (P < .01) than either of the other two treatments. Although carcasses of lambs grazed on alfalfa were lighter, they had the same muscle mass as concentrate-fed lambs, indicated by leg conformation, longissimus muscle area, and by physically separated absolute muscle weight. However, these carcasses contained less fat (P < .01) and had more desirable yield grades (P < .01) than the carcasses of concentrate-fed lambs.
Lesions of the acetabular labrum: accuracy of MR imaging and MR arthrography in detection and staging.

PURPOSE To determine the accuracy of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and MR arthrography in the detection and staging of lesions of the acetabular labrum. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-seven hips of 56 patients with chronic hip pain and a strong clinical suspicion of labral lesions were examined with a three-dimensional gradient-echo sequence in the coronal oblique and sagittal oblique projections before and after the intraarticular injection of gadopentetate dimeglumine. The labra were evaluated on the basis of morphology, signal intensity, the presence or absence of a tear, and their attachment to the acetabulum. Twenty-two of the hips underwent surgical intervention, and 35 hips were treated conservatively. RESULTS Twenty of the 22 labra with surgical proof were staged accurately with MR arthrography. On the conventional MR images, only eight of the 22 labra were staged correctly. Whereas the sensitivity of MR arthrography was 90% and its accuracy was 91%, the sensitivity of MR imaging was 30% and its accuracy was 36%, compared with surgical findings. CONCLUSION MR arthrography enables accurate detection and staging of lesions of the acetabular labrum and appears to be indicated in the assessment of chronic hip pain in patients with a strong suspicion of labral lesions.