Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Auditory Word Comprehension Is Less Incremental in Isolated Words

Partial speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations of words, from sound to meaning. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that this type of incremental processing is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic word recognition process than is often assumed. We present evidence from isolated words that neural effects of phoneme probability, quantified by phoneme surprisal, are significantly stronger than (statistically null) effects of phoneme-by-phoneme lexical uncertainty, quantified by cohort entropy. In contrast, we find robust effects of both cohort entropy and phoneme surprisal during perception of connected speech, with a significant interaction between the contexts. This dissociation rules out models of word recognition in which phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy are common indicators of a uniform process, even though these closely related information- theoretic measures both arise from the probability distribution of wordforms consistent with the input. We propose that phoneme surprisal effects reflect automatic access of a lower level of representation of the auditory input (e.g., wordforms) while the occurrence of cohort entropy effects is task-sensitive, driven by a competition process or a higher-level representation that is engaged late (or not at all) during the processing of single words.
Validity and Reliability of the Student Refractive Error and Eyeglasses Questionnaire—Revised Version in Myopic Children

SIGNIFICANCE Multiple vision-related quality of life (VRQol) instruments exist, but questionnaires designed specifically for myopic children that are appropriate for assessing the impact of refractive error are rare. PURPOSE This study aimed to assess the validity and reliability of the Student Refractive Error and Eyeglasses Questionnaire – Revised (SREEQ-R) in school-aged children with myopia in the United Kingdom. METHODS Community optometrists in the United Kingdom invited children up to the age of 18 years presenting for an eye examination with current or previous reported use of eyeglasses for myopia to complete the SREEQ-R, which consists of 20 specific items divided into two sections each with three response categories. The “without glasses” section relates to perceptions of uncorrected vision/not wearing glasses, and the “with glasses” relates to corrected vision/wearing glasses. Rasch analysis was used to explore the psychometric performance (content, construct validity, and reliability) of the questionnaire items and scale using Winsteps software (Winsteps.com. Portland, OR). RESULTS A total of 125 eligible children with a mean ± standard deviation age of 12.7 ± 2.9 years completed the SREEQ-R. All items fit the Rasch model and were retained, and the scale was found to be unidimensional. All children and item infit and outfit mean square statistics fell within the recommended fit criteria. As per the Rasch analysis, the person reliability coefficients were 0.84 and 0.91, whereas item reliabilities were 0.99 and 0.80 for the without glasses and with glasses sections, respectively. The internal consistency for the SREEQ-R was good; Cronbach α values were 0.84 for without glasses and 0.91 for with glasses. CONCLUSIONS The SREEQ-R had satisfactory validity and reliability evidence. Construct validity of the scale was supported to measure the impact of uncorrected and corrected refractive error on vision-related quality of life in myopic school-aged children in the United Kingdom. The SREEQ-R could be used in future studies to evaluate vision-related quality of life in children with myopia.
Magnetic fluctuations affect circadian patterns of locomotor activity in zebrafish

The locomotor activity of zebrafish (Danio rerio) has a pronounced, well-studied circadian rhythm. Under constant illumination, the period of free-running locomotor activity in this species usually becomes less than 24 hours. To evaluate the entraining capabilities of slow magnetic variations, zebrafish locomotor activity was evaluated at constant illumination and fluctuating magnetic field with a period of 26.8 hours. Lomb-Scargle periodogram revealed significant free-running rhythms of locomotor activity and related behavioral endpoints with a period close to 27 hours. Obtained results reveal the potential of slow magnetic fluctuations for entrainment of the circadian rhythms in zebrafish. The putative mechanisms responsible for the entrainment are discussed, including the possible role of cryptochromes.
LRP-1 Commands Two Parallel Signalling Mechanisms to Support Constitutive Tumour Cell Motility in the Absence of Blood Supply

Tumour cells often face the stress of ischemic (nutrient paucity and hypoxia) environment and must act self-sufficient to migrate toward the nearest blood supply or die. The mechanism that supports the constitutive motility of tumour cells under stress is poorly understood. We and others have previously shown that the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP-1) plays a critical role in tumour cell migration and invasion in vitro and tumour formation in mice. Herein we show that depletion of LRP-1 completely abolishes the self-supported and serum-independent tumour cell motility. More intriguingly, we demonstrate that LRP-1 commands the full tumour cell motility by connecting with two independent cell surface signalling pathways. First, LRP-1 mediates secreted Hsp90α signalling via the “Hsp90α > LRP-1 receptor autocrine loop” for a half of tumour cell motility. Second, LRP1 stabilizes constitutively activated EGFR signalling that contributes the other half of tumour cell motility. Only combined inhibitions of the secreted Hsp90α autocrine and the EGFR signalling reproduces the effect of LRP1 down-regulation on constitutive tumour cell motility. This study reveals a novel mechanism of how tumour cells migrate in the absence of blood support.
EGFR-RAS-MAPK signaling is confined to the plasma membrane and associated endorecycling protrusions

Ras GTPases are key membrane-associated elements of the EGFR-MAPK signaling pathway. Surve et al. demonstrate that endogenous KRAS and NRAS are predominantly localized to the plasma membrane and its tubular shaped protrusions and show that a small pool of surface EGFRs sustain signaling along the RAS-MAPK pathway, whereas internalized EGFRs do not significantly contribute to MAPK activity.
Clinical and genetic spectrum of a large cohort of patients with δ-sarcoglycan muscular dystrophy

Abstract Sarcoglycanopathies include four subtypes of autosomal recessive limb-girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMDR3, LGMDR4, LGMDR5 and LGMDR6) that are caused, respectively, by mutations in the SGCA, SGCB, SGCG and SGCD genes. Delta-sarcoglycanopathy (LGMDR6) is the least frequent and is considered an ultra-rare disease. Our aim was to characterize the clinical and genetic spectrum of a large international cohort of LGMDR6 patients and to investigate whether or not genetic or protein expression data could predict a disease’s severity. This is a retrospective study collecting demographic, genetic, clinical and histological data of patients with genetically confirmed LGMDR6 including protein expression data from muscle biopsies. We contacted 128 paediatric and adult neuromuscular units around the world that reviewed genetic data of patients with a clinical diagnosis of a neuromuscular disorder. We identified 30 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of LGMDR6 of which 23 patients were included in this study. Eighty-seven per cent of the patients had consanguineous parents. Ninety-one per cent of the patients were symptomatic at the time of the analysis. Proximal muscle weakness of the upper and lower limbs was the most common presenting symptom. Distal muscle weakness was observed early over the course of the disease in 56.5% of the patients. Cardiac involvement was reported in five patients (21.7%) and four patients (17.4%) required non-invasive ventilation. Sixty per cent of patients were wheelchair-bound since early teens (median age of 12.0 years). Patients with absent expression of the sarcoglycan complex on muscle biopsy had a significant earlier onset of symptoms and an earlier age of loss of ambulation compared to patients with residual protein expression. This study confirmed that delta-sarcoglycanopathy is an ultra-rare neuromuscular condition and described the clinical and molecular characteristics of the largest yet-reported collected cohort of patients. Our results showed that this is a very severe and quickly progressive disease characterized by generalized muscle weakness affecting predominantly proximal and distal muscles of the limbs. Similar to other forms of sarcoglycanopathies, the severity and rate of progressive weakness correlates inversely with the abundance of protein on muscle biopsy.
Early Detection of QoE Deterioration in HTTP Adaptive Streaming

Apart from video rate (or requested bitrate), Mean Opinion Score (MOS) has increasingly become a primary term representing Quality of Experience (QoE) in HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS). By monitoring this metric, QoE management can effectively maximize QoE for the users. However, due to various behaviors of particular commercial HAS players, deciding an appropriate monitoring interval has not been fully investigated yet. In this paper, an optimal interval is proposed to be equal to duration of a video chunk in order to aid service managers in early detecting QoE deterioration and limiting the probability of video rate deterioration. The optimal monitoring interval is evaluated by comparing with other values of interval in terms of ratio of video rate deterioration. Furthermore, MOS-based QoE monitoring method which takes into account the proposed interval is thus compared with video rate based monitoring method. The results show that with optimal interval, MOS monitoring guarantees a low ratio of video rate deterioration (around 10% for buffering state and 40% for steady state) and small average CPU Load (about 11.45%).
Lycorine ameliorates isoproterenol-induced cardiac dysfunction mainly via inhibiting inflammation, fibrosis, oxidative stress and apoptosis

ABSTRACT Alleviating cardiac dysfunction improves the prognosis of heart failure patients. Lycorine is an alkaloid with several beneficial biological properties. Here, we used mice to evaluate the effect of lycorine on cardiac dysfunction elicited by isoproterenol. Mice were divided into four groups: control, lycorine, isoproterenol, and isoproterenol + lycorine. Mice in the combined group were treated daily with 10 mg/kg isoproterenol intraperitoneally for 2 weeks and 5 mg/kg lycorine was given simultaneously intraperitoneally for 4 weeks. Cardiac structure and function were assessed by echocardiography, hematoxylin and eosin staining, and Masson’s trichrome staining. Isoproterenol-induced cardiac dysfunction and histopathological injury that was significantly improved by treatment with lycorine. Western blotting and the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction were used to explore the molecular mechanisms of these effects. Levels of the inflammatory cytokines, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor-α, were increased by treatment with isoproterenol; these increases were significantly reduced by lycorine, with involvement of the NF-κB signaling pathway. The fibrotic factors, collagen I and collagen III, were increased by isoproterenol and decreased by treatment with lycorine through inhibiting activation of the Smad signaling pathway. In addition, lycorine alleviated oxidative stress as evidenced by a reduction in total reactive oxygen species in the isoproterenol + lycorine group compared to the isoproterenol group. Lycorine exerted an anti-apoptotic effect as evidenced by upregulating Bcl-2 and downregulating Bax. Overall, our findings demonstrate that lycorine protects against cardiac dysfunction induced by isoproterenol by inhibiting inflammation, fibrosis, oxidative stress, and apoptosis.
Epicardial Transplantation of Autologous Cardiac Micrografts During Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery

Background: Cardio-regenerative cell therapies offer additional biologic support to coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) and are aimed at functionally repairing the myocardium that suffers from or is damaged by ischemia. This non-randomized open-label study assessed the safety and feasibility of epicardial transplantation of atrial appendage micrografts (AAMs) in patients undergoing CABG surgery. Methods: Twelve consecutive patients destined for CABG surgery were included in the study. Six patients received AAMs during their operation and six patients were CABG-operated without AAMs transplantation. Data from 30 elective CABG patients was collected for a center- and time-matched control group. The AAMs were processed during the operation from a biopsy collected from the right atrial appendage. They were delivered epicardially onto the infarct scar site identified in preoperative late gadolinium enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI). The primary outcome measures at the 6-month follow-up were (i) patient safety in terms of hemodynamic and cardiac function over time and (ii) feasibility of therapy administration in a clinical setting. Secondary outcome measures were left ventricular wall thickness, change in myocardial scar tissue volume, changes in left ventricular ejection fraction, plasma concentrations of N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide levels, NYHA class, number of days in hospital and changes in the quality of life. Results: Epicardial transplantation of AAMs was safe and feasible to be performed during CABG surgery. CMRI demonstrated an increase in viable cardiac tissue at the infarct site in patients receiving AAMs treatment. Conclusions and Relevance: Transplantation of AAMs shows good clinical applicability as performed during cardiac surgery, shows initial therapeutic effect on the myocardium and has the potential to serve as a delivery platform for cardiac gene therapies. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT02672163.
Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1 Prevents Escherichia coli-Induced Apoptosis Through PINK1/Parkin-Mediated Mitophagy in Bovine Mastitis

Escherichia coli is one of the most important pathogens that cause clinical mastitis in dairy cattle worldwide and lead to severe economic losses. Antibiotics are often used to treat this inflammatory disease; however, antimicrobial resistance and environmental pollution cannot be ignored. Probiotic is the best alternative; however, its mechanisms of action to prevent mastitis remain unclear. Moreover, the role of probiotics in regulating mitophagy, a selective autophagy that maintains mitochondrial quality, needs to be explored. E. coli infection induced NOD-like receptor family member pyrin domain-containing protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome assembly, Caspase-1 activation, and apoptosis in MAC-T cells. Infection also resulted in mitochondrial damage and subsequent increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. Moreover, inhibition of ROS release by scavenger N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) abrogated the importance of ROS in NLRP3 assembly and apoptosis in MAC-T cells. Pretreatment with Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1 (LGR-1), a probiotic, alleviated E. coli-induced NLRP3 inflammasome activation and apoptosis via ROS inhibition. Besides, E. coli infection inhibited mitophagy while LGR-1 pretreatment augmented PINK1/Parkin–mediated mitophagy activation, which further blocked ROS generation. To explore the effect of LGR-1 in vivo, a mouse mastitis model was established. The results showed that LGR-1 pretreatment had preventive and protective effects on E. coli induced mastitis, and could reduce cytokines levels such as IL-1β and TNF-α. In accordance with the results in vitro, E. coli can inhibit mitophagy and activate NLRP3 inflammasome and apoptosis, while LGR-1 can weaken the effect of E. coli. Taken together, our data indicated that LGR-1 pretreatment induced PINK1/Parkin-mediated mitophagy that eliminated damaged mitochondria and reduced ROS production and NLRP3 inflammasome activation, which subsequently decreased E. coli-induced apoptosis. To conclude, our study suggests that therapeutic strategies aiming at the upregulation of mitophagy under E. coli-induced mastitis may preserve mitochondrial function and provide theoretical support for the application of probiotics in bovine mastitis.
Comparison of Corneal Biomechanics in Post-SMILE, Post-LASEK, and Keratoconic Eyes

Significance: Our study found that SP-A1 (stiffness parameter at time of first applanation) was statistically different between post-laser-assisted subepithelial keratomileusis (LASEK) and post-small incision lenticule extraction (SMILE) eyes. The stiffness of keratoconus was lower than that of post-refractive surgery corneas. Purpose: To compare corneal biomechanics among post-SMILE, post-LASEK, and keratoconic eyes. Methods: In this retrospective study, 36 eyes of 36 patients after SMILE, 36 eyes of 36 patients after LASEK, and 36 eyes of 36 patients with keratoconus with matching (±5 μm) central corneal thickness (CCT) were examined using Scheimpflug corneal topography (Pentacam HR) and dynamic Scheimpflug analyzer (CorVis ST). Mixed linear model analysis with Bonferroni-adjusted post-hoc comparisons was performed to compare the differences in corneal biomechanics and topographic parameters among the three groups with the CCT and the bIOP (intraocular pressure with biomechanical correction) as the random factor. Results: All groups had comparable CCT at baseline. The bIOPs between the three groups were comparable. The mean values of the Belin/Ambrósio Deviation (BAD-D) in the keratoconus group were significantly higher than those of the SMILE (post hoc p < 0.001) and LASEK groups (post hoc p < 0.001). The SP-A1 in the keratoconus group was the lowest when compared with those of the SMILE (post hoc p = 0.003) and LASEK groups (post hoc p < 0.001). The SMILE group SP-A1 values were slightly lower than those of the LASEK group (post hoc p = 0.044). Conclusions: Keratoconus eyes were significantly softer when compared to post-refractive surgery corneas with comparable corneal thickness in terms of SP-A1 and BAD-D values, while the LASEK group may have the greatest stiffness. Post-SMILE and post-LASEK corneas showed significant differences in SP-A1.
Effects of Dilution Rate on Fermentation Characteristics of Feeds With Different Carbohydrate Composition Incubated in the Rumen Simulation Technique (RUSITEC)

This study investigated the impact of carbohydrate source and fluid passage rate (dilution rate) on ruminal fermentation characteristics and microbial crude protein (MCP) formation. Three commonly used feeds (barley grain [BG], beet pulp [BP], and soybean hulls [SBH]), which differ considerably in their carbohydrate composition, were incubated together with a mixture of grass hay and rapeseed meal in two identical Rusitec apparatuses (each 6 vessels). Differences in fluid passage rate were simulated by infusing artificial saliva at two different rates (1.5% [low] and 3.0% [high] of fermenter volume per h). This resulted in six treatments (tested in 3 runs): BGhigh, BGlow, BPhigh, BPlow, SBHhigh and SBHlow. The system was adapted for 7 d, followed by 4 d of sampling. Production of MCP (mg/g degraded organic matter [dOM]; estimated by 15N analysis) was greater with high dilution rate (DL; p < 0.001) and was higher for SBH compared to both BG and BP (p < 0.001). High DL reduced OM degradability (OMD) compared to low DL (p < 0.001), whereas incubation of BG resulted in higher OMD compared to SBH (p < 0.002). Acetate:propionate ratio decreased in response to high DL (p < 0.001). Total gas and methane production (both /d and /g dOM) were lower with high DL (p < 0.001). In our study increasing liquid passage rate showed the potential to increase MCP and decrease methane production simultaneously. Results encourage further studies investigating these effects on the rumen microbial population.
Multimodal MR Images-Based Diagnosis of Early Adolescent Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Using Multiple Kernel Learning

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common brain diseases among children. The current criteria of ADHD diagnosis mainly depend on behavior analysis, which is subjective and inconsistent, especially for children. The development of neuroimaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), drives the discovery of brain abnormalities in structure and function by analyzing multimodal neuroimages for computer-aided diagnosis of brain diseases. This paper proposes a multimodal machine learning framework that combines the Boruta based feature selection and Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) to integrate the multimodal features of structural and functional MRIs and Diffusion Tensor Images (DTI) for the diagnosis of early adolescent ADHD. The rich and complementary information of the macrostructural features, microstructural properties, and functional connectivities are integrated at the kernel level, followed by a support vector machine classifier for discriminating ADHD from healthy children. Our experiments were conducted on the comorbidity-free ADHD subjects and covariable-matched healthy children aged 9–10 chosen from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. This paper is the first work to combine structural and functional MRIs with DTI for early adolescents of the ABCD study. The results indicate that the kernel-level fusion of multimodal features achieves 0.698 of AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curves) and 64.3% of classification accuracy for ADHD diagnosis, showing a significant improvement over the early feature fusion and unimodal features. The abnormal functional connectivity predictors, involving default mode network, attention network, auditory network, and sensorimotor mouth network, thalamus, and cerebellum, as well as the anatomical regions in basal ganglia, are found to encode the most discriminative information, which collaborates with macrostructure and diffusion alterations to boost the performances of disorder diagnosis.
Constrained Dual-Level Bandit for Personalized Impression Regulation in Online Ranking Systems

Impression regulation plays an important role in various online ranking systems, e.g., e-commerce ranking systems always need to achieve local commercial demands on some pre-labeled target items like fresh item cultivation and fraudulent item counteracting while maximizing its global revenue. However, local impression regulation may cause “butterfly effects” on the global scale, e.g., in e-commerce, the price preference fluctuation in initial conditions (overpriced or underpriced items) may create a significantly different outcome, thus affecting shopping experience and bringing economic losses to platforms. To prevent “butterfly effects”, some researchers define their regulation objectives with global constraints, by using contextual bandit at the page-level that requires all items on one page sharing the same regulation action, which fails to conduct impression regulation on individual items. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a personalized impression regulation method that can directly makes regulation decisions for each user-item pair. Specifically, we model the regulation problem as a Constrained Dual-level Bandit (CDB) problem, where the local regulation action and reward signals are at the item-level while the global effect constraint on the platform impression can be calculated at the page-level only. To handle the asynchronous signals, we first expand the page-level constraint to the item-level and then derive the policy updating as a second-order cone optimization problem. Our CDB approaches the optimal policy by iteratively solving the optimization problem. Experiments are performed on both offline and online datasets, and the results, theoretically and empirically, demonstrate CDB outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.