Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Value of Plastic Surgeon Spinal Closures: A Review of 782 Spine Cases.

BACKGROUND The role of the plastic surgeon in wound management after complications from previous spinal surgeries is well established. PURPOSE The present study evaluates wound complications after plastic surgeon closure of the primary spinal surgery in a large patient population. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING This is a retrospective review of spine surgery patients undergoing plastic surgeon closure of spine surgeries at a single tertiary care center. PATIENT SAMPLE Spine surgery patients included those who were referred for plastic surgeon closure due to (a) concerns about patient healing potential, (b) concerns about difficulty of closure, (c) patient request, or (d) difficulties with closure intraoperatively. OUTCOME MEASURES The outcomes are physiologic measures, including intraoperative and postoperative complications, hospital length of stay, and 30-day readmissions and reoperations. METHODS Outcomes in this sample were compared with previously published outcomes using 2-sample z tests. The authors have no conflicts of interest. RESULTS Nine hundred twenty-eight surgeries were reviewed, of which 782 were included. Fourteen patients (1.8%) required readmission with 30 days. This compares favorably to a pooled analysis of 488,049 patients, in which the 30-day readmission rate was found to be 5.5% (z = 4.5, P < 0.0001). Seven patients (0.89%) had wound infection and 3 (0.38%) wound dehiscence postoperatively, compared with a study of 22,430 patients in the American College of Surgeons National Surgery Quality Improvement Program database, which had an infection incidence of 2.2% (z = 2.5, P = 0.0132) and 0.3% dehiscence rate (z = 0.4, P = 0.6889). The combined incidence of wound complications in the present sample was 1.27%, which is less than the combined incidence of wound complications in the population of 22,430 patients (z = 2.2, P = 0.029). CONCLUSIONS Thirty-day readmissions and wound complications are intensely scrutinized quality metrics that may lead to reduced reimbursements and other penalties for hospitals. Plastic surgeon closure of index spinal cases decreases these adverse outcomes. Further research must be conducted to determine whether the increased cost of plastic surgeon involvement in these cases is offset by the savings represented by fewer readmissions and complications.
MiSense Hierarchical Cluster-Based Routing Algorithm ( MiCRA ) for Wireless Sensor Networks

receiving significant attention due to their unlimited potential. These networks are used for various applications, such as habitat monitoring, automation, agriculture, and security. The efficient node-energy utilization is one of important performance factors in wireless sensor networks because sensor nodes operate with limited battery power. In this paper, we proposed the MiSense hierarchical cluster based routing algorithm (MiCRA) to extend the lifetime of sensor networks and to maintain a balanced energy consumption of nodes. MiCRA is an extension of the HEED algorithm with two levels of cluster heads. The performance of the proposed protocol has been examined and evaluated through a simulation study. The simulation results clearly show that MiCRA has a better performance in terms of lifetime than HEED. Indeed, MiCRA our proposed protocol can effectively extend the network lifetime without other critical overheads and performance degradation. It has been noted that there is about 35% of energy saving for MiCRA during the clustering process and 65% energy savings during the routing process compared to the HEED algorithm.
Relative output feedback based distributed tracking for leader-following MASs

This paper studies the leader-following consensus problem for relative output feedback control of multi-agent systems (MASs). In this paper, the leader-following consensus protocol via static output feedback is proposed. Then, we present two algorithms via a Lyapunov equation to determine the output feedback gain matrix, one is an iteration algorithm, and the other is proposing a structed Lyapunov matrix. Finally, a simulaion example is provided to test the effectiveness of algorithms.
Comprehensive Samples Constrain for Person Search

In this paper, we propose a method to further improve person search by fully utilizing the combination of pedestrian detection and person re-identification tasks. An improved constrain that utilizes comprehensive samples in the dataset is proposed to fully excavate information for recognition. Besides the label constrain for training the model in traditional classification task, unlabeled identities that do not have specific IDs are utilized as well to constitute a tailored triplet loss for more performance improvement. Meanwhile, a novel large-scale challenging dataset, SJTU318, which uses videos acquired through twelve cameras is proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. It contains 443 identities and 14,610 frames in which pedestrians are annotated with their bounding box positions and identities. Experiments conducted on a public dataset, CUHK-SYSU and our proposed dataset SJTU318 show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Raw diets for dogs and cats: a review, with particular reference to microbiological hazards

There is a recent trend to feed pet dogs and cats in Britain and other developed countries on raw meat and animal by‐products using either commercial preparations or home recipes. This shift from heat‐treated processed food has been driven by perceived health benefits to pets and a suspicion of industrially produced pet food. The diets of wild‐living related species have been used as a rationale for raw feeding, but differences in biology and lifestyle impose limitations on such comparisons. Formal evidence does exist for claims by raw‐feeding proponents of an altered intestinal microbiome and (subjectively) improved stool quality. However, there is currently neither robust evidence nor identified plausible mechanisms for many of the wide range of other claimed benefits. There are documented risks associated with raw feeding, principally malnutrition (inexpert formulation and testing of diets) and infection affecting pets and/or household members. Surveys in Europe and North America have consistently found Salmonella species in a proportion of samples, typically of fresh‐frozen commercial diets. Another emerging issue concerns the risk of introducing antimicrobial‐resistant bacteria. Raw pet food commonly exceeds hygiene thresholds for counts of Enterobacteriaceae. These bacteria often encode resistance to critically important antibiotics such as extended‐spectrum cephalosporins, and raw‐fed pets create an elevated risk of shedding such resistant bacteria. Other infectious organisms that may be of concern include Listeria, shiga toxigenic E scherichia coli, parasites such as Toxoplasma gondii and exotic agents such as the zoonotic livestock pathogen Brucella suis, recently identified in European Union and UK raw pet meat imported from Argentina.
An Parallax Image Stitching Method Based on Dynamic Mesh Partition

Parallax image stitching is a challenge in the field of image stitching. This paper proposes a method of stitching parallax images based on dynamic mesh partition. Firstly, we extract the matching feature points of the images to be stitched, by which the local zoom scale and the rotation angle between the images can be obtained. At the same time, the images is divided into basic grids, and the matching points can be interpolated to calculate the scaling and rotation angle parameters of each grid. These parameters are then used to calculate the similarity between the meshes and perform a refinement of the mesh based on the similarity. Merge the refined meshes to get the final grid. Finally, we use Moving DLT to calculate the local transformation matrix for each mesh and apply it to complete the image stitching. The experimental results show that our method performs better than the traditional methods.
Anti-arrhythmic and cardio-protective effects of atorvastatin and a potent pyridoindole derivative on isolated hearts from rats with metabolic syndrome.

OBJECTIVES Aims of this study were to investigate the anti-arrhythmic and cardio-protective effect of atorvastatin and of a new pyridoindole derivative (SMe1EC2) on isolated and perfused hearts while following the Langendorff principles. BACKGROUND Metabolic syndrome is a widely distributed condition progressing to cardiovascular disease. Many of the metabolic syndrome patients take (HMG)-co-enzyme A (CoA) reductase inhibitors with potential cardio-protective effects. SMe1EC2 is a promising new drug, exerting many positive effects in experimental settings. METHODS Rats with induced metabolic syndrome were treated with atorvastatin (25 mg/kg) and SMe1EC2 (25 mg/kg and 0.5 mg/kg, respectively) daily for 3 weeks. After the treatment, the hearts were isolated and perfused according to Langendorff. RESULTS Both atorvastatin and SMe1EC2 improved cardiac function by elevating the left ventricular developed pressure (VLDP) and cardiac contractility. Both SMe1EC2-treated groups improved LVDP during reperfusion, significantly increased ‒dP/dt, and moderately elevated +dP/dt values. The treatment with both atorvastatin and SMe1EC2 (25 mg/kg) significantly reduced malignant arrhythmia in comparison to control group and group treated with SMe1EC2 0.5 mg/kg. CONCLUSIONS Owing to its anti-arrhythmic and cardio-protective effects, atorvastatin and SMe1EC2 could be of benefit to patients suffering from metabolic syndrome (Tab. 3, Fig. 3, Ref. 41).
Adaptive Consensus of Nonlinearly Parameterized Multi-Agent Systems

This letter studies the distributed adaptive consensus problem for multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to nonlinearly parameterized uncertainties. In the existing research, an adaptive consensus scheme was developed for the same scenario but under the assumption that the uncertainties must be linearly parameterized in their unknown parameters. In this letter, the assumption is removed by using a novel distributed adaptive update law, which makes the scheme applicable for more general nonlinear MASs. This letter contains a general design paradigm using the certainty equivalence principle and specific implementation of it on nonlinear second-order MASs. The results are supported by rigorous mathematical analysis and numerical simulation.
Role of Starter Cultures on the Safety of Fermented Meat Products

Starters are microbial cultures used to promote and conduct the fermentation of meat products. Bacteria, particularly lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS), as well as yeasts and molds, may be used as starters. They can increase the safety of fermented meat products by means of rapid matrix acidification or due to the production of antimicrobial substances, such as bacteriocins. Besides, starters may help to standardize product properties and shorten ripening times. Safety of fermented meat products may be jeopardized by microbiological, namely foodborne pathogens (Salmonella spp., Listeria spp., etc), and chemical hazards, particularly biogenic amines, nitrosamines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and mycotoxins. Biogenic amines (BA) are potentially unsafe nitrogenous compounds that result from the decarboxylation of some amino acids. Some microorganisms may be responsible for their formation. Starters can cause a fast pH decrease, inhibiting the development of microorganisms with amino acid decarboxylative ability, thus preventing the accumulation of BA in fermented meat products. Besides, starters can compete with the autochthonous, non-starter microbiota throughout ripening and storage, thus reducing BA production. Some strains of Lactobacillus sakei and Lactobacillus plantarum have been shown to reduce the formation/accumulation of BA. On the other hand, Staphylococcus xylosus and Debaryomyces hansenii strains have been reported to degrade BA in food. PAH are organic compounds containing multiple aromatic rings and produced by the incomplete combustion of organic matter, such as the wood used for smoking meat. Mixed starters containing Lactobacillus spp. , Gram-positive catalase-positive cocci and yeasts have been used in the manufacturing of traditional meat sausages. However, the effect of starters on reducing the accumulation of PAH is poorly understood. Starters may also be engaged in competitive exclusion, outcompeting the spoiling or deteriorating autochthonous microbiota. For example, Pediococcus acidilactici has been shown to inhibit Listeria monocytogenes in meat products. Additionally, the role of molds, such as Penicillium nalgiovense, in the competitive exclusion of undesired filamentous fungi, has also been demonstrated. Most of these undesired fungi produce mycotoxins, secondary metabolites capable of causing disease. The current review addresses the role of starters on the microbiological and chemical safety of fermented meat products.
Supercapacitors: Electrical Characteristics, Modeling, Applications, and Future Trends

Energy storage systems are playing an increasingly important role in a variety of applications, such as electric vehicles or grid-connected systems. In this context, supercapacitors (SCs) are gaining ground due to their high power density, good performance, and long maintenance-free lifetime. For this reason, SCs are a hot research topic, and several papers are being published on material engineering, performance characterization, modeling. and post-mortem analysis. A compilation of the most important millstones on this topic is essential to keep researchers on related fields updated about new potentials of this technology. This review paper covers recent research aspects and applications of SCs, highlighting the relationship between material properties and electrical characteristics. It begins with an explanation of the energy storage mechanisms and materials used by SCs. Based on these materials, the SCs are classified, their key features are summarized, and their electrochemical characteristics are related to electrical performance. Given the high interest in system modeling and a large number of papers published on this topic, modeling techniques are classified, explained, and compared, addressing their strengths and weaknesses, and the experimental techniques used to measure the modeled properties are described. Finally, SCs are successfully used in the market sectors, as well as their growth expectations are analyzed. The analysis presented herein gives the account of the expansion that the SC market is currently undergoing and identifies the most promising research trends on this field.
BAN, A Barcode Accurate Detection Network

Barcode detection has been elaborately investigated before. Traditional hand-crafted feature based methods achieve promising performances across some simple and high-quality test databases. However, they usually fall short as a part of barcode decoding pipeline when dealing with challenging scenarios, because of the low robustness and accuracy achieved by low-level features. In this paper, we present a barcode detection network pipeline, designed to generate accurate barcode regions with category labels. We also build a rich barcodes detection dataset-Mixed Barcode Dataset. Experimental results conducted on different barcode databases show the superiority of our method in terms of F-score and decoding accuracy compared to the state of arts.
Supplementation with compound polysaccharides contributes to the development and metabolic activity of young rat intestinal microbiota.

Dietary intervention during early life has a significant impact on colonization of the gut microbiota. In addition, some polysaccharides have the potential to selectively stimulate the growth and metabolic activity of intestinal bacteria associated with health and well-being. However, less is known about the effect of polysaccharides on the development of gut microbiota in younger individuals. This study was conducted to investigate the health effects of supplementation with dietary compound polysaccharides (Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBP), Poria cocos polysaccharides (PCPs) and Lentinan, 1 : 1 : 1) on the intestinal microecosystem and metabolism of young rats. Male 21-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats received daily intragastric administration of either compound polysaccharides (three dosages, 6 g kg-1, 12 g kg-1 or 24 g kg-1) or saline for 28 consecutive days. 1H-NMR spectroscopy integrated with multi-variate pattern recognition analysis was applied to reveal the metabolism of the host and microflora, while 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to monitor the dynamic changes in the gut microbiota. The relative concentrations of 35 urinary metabolites and 24 faecal metabolites were significantly changed compared with the control group. 16S rRNA analysis showed that the relative abundances of 4 bacterial genera (Bifidobacterium, Lactobacillus, Allobaculum and Oligella) significantly increased, whereas the relative abundance of 1 bacterial genus (Enterococcus) significantly declined in the compound polysaccharide-treated groups compared with the control group. Meanwhile, dietary compound polysaccharide treatment promoted the functional maturation of the gut bacterial community, characterised by increased basic metabolism (amino acid metabolism and energy metabolism), short chain fatty acid (SCFA)-related metabolism and nucleotide metabolism. These findings suggest that compound polysaccharides may help to promote the colonisation and functional maturation of infant intestinal microbiota and maintain the health of the intestinal microecosystem.
Clinical practice guidelines for safe performance of endoscopic ultrasound/ultrasonography‐guided biliary drainage: 2018

Endoscopic ultrasound/ultrasonography‐guided biliary drainage (EUS‐BD) is a relatively new modality for biliary drainage after failed or difficult transpapillary biliary cannulation. Despite its clinical utility, EUS‐BD can be complicated by severe adverse events such as bleeding, perforation, and peritonitis. The aim of this paper is to provide practice guidelines for safe performance of EUS‐BD as well as safe introduction of the procedure to non‐expert centers. The guidelines comprised patient–intervention–comparison–outcome‐formatted clinical questions (CQs) and questions (Qs), which are background statements to facilitate understanding of the CQs. A literature search was performed using the PubMed and Cochrane Library databases. Statement, evidence level, and strength of recommendation were created according to the GRADE system. Four committees were organized: guideline creation, expert panelist, evaluation, and external evaluation committees. We developed 13 CQs (methods, device selection, supportive treatment, management of adverse events, education and ethics) and six Qs (definition, indication, outcomes and adverse events) with statements, evidence levels, and strengths of recommendation. The guidelines explain the technical aspects, management of adverse events, and ethics of EUS‐BD and its introduction to non‐expert institutions.
Software-Engineering Research Revisited

The author discusses three major changes that he suggests are occurring as a result of the software engineering industry adopting the industry-as-laboratory approach, in which researchers identify problems through close involvement with industrial projects and create and evaluate solutions in an almost indivisible research activity. This approach emphasizes what people actually do or can do in practice, rather than what is possible in principle. The three changes are a greater reliance on empirical definition of problems, an emphasis on real case studies, and a greater emphasis on contextual issues. >
The impact of poly-A microsatellite heterologies in meiotic recombination

Meiosis strongly influences the transmission and evolution of heterozygous poly-A repeats as measured experimentally in a large collection of single recombination products in a human hotspot. Meiotic recombination has strong, but poorly understood effects on short tandem repeat (STR) instability. Here, we screened thousands of single recombinant products with sperm typing to characterize the role of polymorphic poly-A repeats at a human recombination hotspot in terms of hotspot activity and STR evolution. We show that the length asymmetry between heterozygous poly-A’s strongly influences the recombination outcome: a heterology of 10 A’s (9A/19A) reduces the number of crossovers and elevates the frequency of non-crossovers, complex recombination products, and long conversion tracts. Moreover, the length of the heterology also influences the STR transmission during meiotic repair with a strong and significant insertion bias for the short heterology (6A/7A) and a deletion bias for the long heterology (9A/19A). In spite of this opposing insertion-/deletion-biased gene conversion, we find that poly-A’s are enriched at human recombination hotspots that could have important consequences in hotspot activation.
The Global Properties of Objects Play the Main Role in Facilitating Multiple Object Tracking Performance

Previous research has revealed the uniqueness-facilitation effect in the multiple object tracking (MOT) task: simple distinct identities and surface features of moving targets could facilitate attentional tracking. By adapting compound stimuli, the present study investigated whether the global or local properties played the main role in the uniqueness-facilitation effect in the MOT task. The uniqueness of local properties, of global properties or of both local and global properties were considered. Observers’ tracking performance in alternative conditions were compared with that in the homogeneous condition wherein all stimuli have identical local and global properties. Results from two experiments suggest that the global properties played the key role in facilitating tracking. The distinctiveness of local properties can also facilitate tracking with global properties being homogeneous. However, when the stimuli’s global properties are distinct from each other—whether the local properties being unique or not—observers’ tracking performance can achieve the same level as that in the unitary-uniqueness condition wherein the moving objects were distinct unitary letters. These results revealed a global superiority effect in the MOT task. Finally, the facilitation effects of the global and local properties might depend on the stimulus sparsity. When the compound stimuli had fewer local elements, the uniqueness facilitation effect on tracking decreased.
High Step-Up Y-Source Inverter With Reduced DC-Link Voltage Spikes

Impedance-source inverters using coupled inductors have been investigated as alternatives for providing high step-up voltages. However, leakage inductances of the coupled inductors have commonly led to lower overall effectiveness, in addition to generating high dc-link voltage spikes. The latter raises voltage stresses of switches, which in turn, may reduce the power levels of the inverters. A high step-up Y-source inverter has therefore been proposed in this paper to provide a high boost with a smooth dc-link voltage ensured by proper recycling of the leakage energy. These features have been verified by comparing simulation and experimental results of an existing Y-source and the proposed inverters. Factors compared are their respective boost ratios, voltage stresses, current stresses, and dc-link voltage spikes.