Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Turning on the light for brain tumor surgery: A 5-aminolevulinic acid story

Abstract To aid surgeons in more complete and safe resection of brain tumors, adjuvant technologies have been developed to improve visualization of target tissue. Fluorescence-guided surgery relies on the use of fluorophores and specific light wavelengths to better delineate tumor tissue, inflammation, and areas of blood–brain barrier breakdown. 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), the first fluorophore developed specifically for brain tumors, accumulates within tumor cells, improving visualization of tumors both at the core, and infiltrative margin. Here, we describe the background of how 5-ALA integrated into the modern neurosurgery practice, clinical evidence for the current use of 5-ALA, and future directions for its role in neurosurgical oncology. Maximal safe resection remains the standard of care for most brain tumors. Gross total resection of high-grade gliomas (HGGs) is associated with greater overall survival and progression-free survival (PFS) in comparison to subtotal resection or adjuvant treatment therapies alone.1–3 A major challenge neurosurgeons encounter when resecting infiltrative gliomas is identification of the glioma tumor margin to perform a radical resection while avoiding and preserving eloquent regions of the brain. 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) remains the only optical-imaging agent approved by the FDA for use in glioma surgery and identification of tumor tissue.4 A multicenter randomized, controlled trial revealed that 5-ALA fluorescence-guided surgery (FGS) almost doubled the extent of tumor resection and also improved 6-month PFS.5 In this review, we will highlight the current evidence for use of 5-ALA FGS in brain tumor surgery, as well as discuss the future directions for its use.
The Age-Competency Model to the Study of the Age-Wage Profiles for Workers

In this article, I present a new approach and a novel model to the study of the life cycle of wages. The key idea is that wage can be thought as remuneration paid for the competency. It is assumed with the approach that there are three mechanisms acting at micro level and resulting in the change of workers' competencies during their lives. These are an endogenous growth of workers' initial competencies; a rate of investments in schooling in the life cycle of wages; and an effect of relative losses in workers' competencies. The developed model is to shed light on the processes resulting in the age-wage profiles seen in mass. The model obeys a nonlinear integro-differential equation. The found analytic solution of the equation has the form of Fisk PDF of a special type. The solution and its features are discussed. The regression technique is used to check the model upon reliability. The model provides better fitting to the data (Elo and Salonen, 2004) than minceraninan earnings function (Mincer, 1974) does.
The impact of intrapartum and immediate post‐partum complications and newborn care practices on breastfeeding initiation in Ethiopia: A prospective cohort study

Abstract This study aimed to investigate the impact of intrapartum and post‐partum complications and newborn care practices on early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF). Data for the study came from a prospective cohort study in Ethiopia that recruited and followed pregnant and post‐partum women from 2019 to 2021. Resident enumerators conducted interviews at enrolment in 2019 and follow‐ups at 6 weeks, 6 months and 1 year post‐partum. The present analysis is based on data from the baseline survey and 6 weeks follow‐up. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the effects of newborn care practices and intrapartum and post‐ partum complications on EIBF (the proportion of newborns who initiated breastfeeding within the first hour of birth). Overall, 2660 mother–infant pairs were included in this analysis. After adjustment, EIBF was less likely among women who experienced intrapartum haemorrhage (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 0.76, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.59–0.97), malpresentation (AOR: 0.46, 95% CI: 0.30–0.72) and convulsions (AOR: 0.48, 95% CI: 0.34–0.66) during childbirth. Mother–newborn skin‐to‐skin contact increased the likelihood of EIBF (AOR: 1.47, 95% CI: 1.11–1.94). Women who experienced post‐partum haemorrhage (AOR: 0.63, 95% CI: 0.47–0.84), retained placenta for more than 30 min (AOR: 0.36, 95% CI: 0.24–0.52) and convulsions after delivery (AOR: 0.57, 95% CI: 0.41–0.79) were less likely to initiate breastfeeding early. Also, women who had a caesarean birth (AOR: 0.28, 95% CI: 0.18–0.41), delivered outside of a healthcare facility (AOR: 0.70, 95% CI: 0.50–0.99) or had twin birth (AOR: 0.43, 95% CI: 0.22–0.85) were less likely to initiate breastfeeding early. Skin‐to‐skin contact should be encouraged whenever possible, and women with obstetric complications should be encouraged and supported to initiate breastfeeding early.
The contribution of social and family networks in supporting care of children with sickle cell disease in Tanzania

Background: The care of children with Sickle cell disease (SCD) in Africa has been the work of mothers or women within communities. Previous studies have indicated that mothers in these families are supported by other women within the family or even from outside family structures. Such support has allowed significant sharing of responsibilities in both domestic and care giving roles for children with sickle cell disease. However, there is limited recognition of this informal support and its importance as a key element in health care provision. Objective: In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how these support networks have been used by mothers in shouldering their caregiving roles. We also propose how the networks can be integrated into the health care system to improve quality of care of the children with SCD. Methods: We conducted interviews with families of children who are diagnosed with sickle cell disease through newborn screening program in Tanzania between 2015 and 2019. In total, 15 families were included through focus group discussions (FGDs), dyadic interviews, and individual interviews. Also, a survey was conducted involving 100 families of children with SCD aged between 0 and 17 years to assess the different networks of care that exists within families and communities. Thematic analysis was used for the qualitative data while data from the survey was presented in proportions as pie charts. Results: The results from the FGDs and IDIs demonstrated three ways in which the networks of care were supportive to mothers (1) Facilitating sickle cell disease diagnosis to children who were undiagnosed (2) Caring for the sick child (children) after diagnosis and (3) Support at home in caring for other children who are not sick and helping with domestic work responsibilities. Survey results indicated that the highest proportion of the respondents listed mothers of the children as the primary care giver (88%), followed by grandmothers (10%) and close family members (2%). Extended family members (20%) were recognized as the largest network of care in the absence of the primary caregiver outside the parents, followed by siblings, defined as elder brothers and sisters (18%) and grandparents (16%). Conclusion: The findings from this study confirm that there is an important network supporting care of children with SCD in communities supporting parents. Enabling these support networks to be more formally integrated into the health care system will ensure those members of the community providing care are equipped with knowledge on sickle cell disease and having positive impact on the quality of care of the children born with SCD in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 genomic variants in wastewater sequencing data with LolliPop

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater-based epidemiology has progressively taken a central role as a pathogen surveillance tool. Tracking viral loads and variant outbreaks in sewage offers advantages over clinical surveillance methods by providing unbiased estimates and enabling early detection. However, wastewater-based epidemiology poses new computational research questions that need to be solved in order for this approach to be implemented broadly and successfully. Here, we address the variant deconvolution problem, where we aim to estimate the relative abundances of genomic variants from next-generation sequencing data of a mixed wastewater sample. We introduce LolliPop, a computational method to solve the variant deconvolution problem by simultaneously solving least squares problems and kernel-based smoothing of relative variant abundances from wastewater time series sequencing data. We derive multiple approaches to compute confidence bands, and demonstrate the application of our method to data from the Swiss wastewater surveillance efforts.
Digital Commons@Becker Digital Commons@Becker Dendritic cell-based vaccines: Shining the spotlight on signal 3 Dendritic cell-based vaccines: Shining the spotlight on signal 3

vaccines have yielded disappointing results in a multitude of clinical trials. New data suggest that the clinical efficacy of DC-based vaccines may be dependent on the paracrine production of interleu-kin-12 in the course of antigen presentation and the consequent development of therapeutic Type 1 CD8 + T-cell immunity.
Giving Instructions in Linear Temporal Logic

Our aim is to develop a formal semantics for giving instructions to taskable agents, to investigate the complexity of decision problems relating to these semantics, and to explore the issues that these semantics raise. In the setting we consider, agents are given instructions in the form of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae; the intuitive interpretation of such an instruction is that the agent should act in such a way as to ensure the formula is satisfied. At the same time, agents are assumed to have inviolable and immutable background safety requirements, also specified as LTL formulae. Finally, the actions performed by an agent are assumed to have costs, and agents must act within a limited budget. For this setting, we present a range of interpretations of an instruction to achieve an LTL task Υ, intuitively ranging from “try to do this but only if you can do so with everything else remaining unchanged” up to “drop everything and get this done. ” For each case we present a formal pre-/post-condition semantics, and investigate the computational issues that they raise. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Logic and verification
Decentralised Runtime Verification of Timed Regular Expressions

Ensuring the correctness of distributed cyber-physical systems can be done at runtime by monitoring properties over their behaviour. In a decentralised setting, such behaviour consists of multiple local traces, each offering an incomplete view of the system events to the local monitors, as opposed to the standard centralised setting with a unique global trace. We introduce the first monitoring framework for timed properties described by timed regular expressions over a distributed network of monitors. First, we define functions to rewrite expressions according to partial knowledge for both the centralised and decentralised cases. Then, we define decentralised algorithms for monitors to evaluate properties using these functions, as well as proofs of soundness and eventual completeness of said algorithms. Finally, we implement and evaluate our framework on synthetic timed regular expressions, giving insights on the cost of the centralised and decentralised settings and when to best use each of them.
Paleobiology of Jefferson's Ground Sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) Derived from Three Contemporaneous, Ontogenetically Distinct Individuals Recovered from Southwestern Iowa, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT Although known from more than 180 sites in North America, sites with records of multiple Megalonyx elements and individuals are rare. The Tarkio site in southwestern Iowa is unique with three contemporaneous individuals at different stages of development. Among these is one of the largest (ca. 1286 kg) and most complete adult Megalonyx jeffersonii skeletons (ca. 50%, NISP, 123) known. An intermingled sub-adult (ca. 25%, NISP, 63) represents a comparatively complete skeleton for this ontogenetic stage. A third individual, an infant known only from both scapulae (NISP 2), is commingled with sub-adult remains. Scapula sizes indicate that the two juveniles were 50 and 30% of the adult's size. Differential bone preservation and pattern of scatter shows that the adult decomposed lying on its left side and the remains were partially scavenged. Multiple taphonomic proxies demonstrate that the skeletons were subaerially exposed for a limited period, but fluvial transport was not a factor. These individuals, preserved in the same low-energy microstratigraphic unit, apparently died concurrently and probably represent a Megalonyx social unit. Using mammal body size to estimate life history, the estimated average lifespan for M. jeffersonii was around 19 years; gestation time was about 14 months; the interbirth interval was approximately 3 years; and sexual maturation occurred at around 6.5 years. OSL analysis indicates that the sloths were deposited about 106,000 years ago (MIS substage 5ec). Paleoenvironmental proxies suggest an interglacial environment of open woodland along a stream with marshes, like the environment in southwest Iowa today.
Language beyond flags: teachers misunderstanding of translanguaging in preschools

ABSTRACT Based on an analysis of the video recording and transcript of one lesson chosen by preschool teachers in Luxembourg as an example of translanguaging pedagogy, this article shows the teachers’ limited understandings of translanguaging. As a result of a new 2017 multilingual education policy for early childhood, the first author designed a professional development project in which the teachers in this preschool participated. During a lesson, the teachers insisted that these young children had a home language associated with a national affiliation depicted by a flag, despite the children themselves telling them repeatedly that their home language practices were complex and included Luxembourgish, which was part of their identity. The teachers’ actions and discourse reveal raciolinguistic ideologies and misappropriation of the term translanguaging to simply implement what could be better described as a multilingual awareness activity. On the surface, the teachers have shifted from monolingual instruction to one that recognizes the children’s multilingualism. Yet, teachers continue to associate the notion of language with flags and political states, instead of taking up an inside-view of the bilingual speaker, the kernel of translanguaging theory.
Continuously observing a dynamically decoupled spin-1 quantum gas

We continuously observe dynamical decoupling in a spin-1 quantum gas using a weak optical measurement of spin precession. Continuous dynamical decoupling modifies the character and energy spectrum of spin states to render them insensitive to parasitic fluctuations. Continuous observation measures this new spectrum in a single preparation of the quantum gas. The measured time series contains seven tones, which spectrogram analysis parses as splittings, coherences, and coupling strengths between the decoupled states in real time. With this we locate a regime where a transition between two states is decoupled from magnetic-field instabilities up to fourth order, complementary to a parallel work at higher fields [D. Trypogeorgos et al., preceding paper, Phys. Rev. A 97, 013407 (2018)]. The decoupled microscale quantum gas offers magnetic sensitivity in a tunable band, persistent over many milliseconds: the length scales, frequencies, and durations relevant to many applications, including sensing biomagnetic phenomena such as neural spike trains.
A tractable mathematical model for rectified diffusion

Abstract A core unresolved challenge in rectified diffusion is the lack of predictive models, which allow accurate modelling of the growth of bubbles over millions of cycles of oscillation. The spherically symmetric problem involves two asymptotic regions in space for the convection and diffusion of the dissolved gas in the liquid, an inner region adjacent to the bubble and an outer region. It also involves three time scales: the shortest time scale associated with the bubble oscillation, the intermediate and the longest time scales for the mass transport across the bubble interface and the outer region, respectively. The problem is analysed systematically using matched asymptotic expansions in space and multi-scales in time, the large parameter being the Péclet number for mass transfer. A tractable mathematical model is formulated for rectified diffusion. It comprises the Rayleigh–Plesset equation for the spherical oscillations of the bubble on the shortest time scale, an ordinary differential equation for the mass of gas in the bubble on the intermediate time scale and a diffusion equation on the longest time scale and the long length scale. Predictions of this simplified model have excellent agreement with experimental results for a single spherical bubble in the bulk over millions of cycles of oscillation. A parametric study is undertaken with several new phenomena/features observed for acoustic frequencies in the range 12 to 62 kHz, acoustic field $0.12$ to $0.22$ bar and the initial gas concentration in the liquid being $0.95$ to $1.0$ of the saturation concentration.
The large-scale environment from cosmological simulations II: The redshift evolution and distributions of baryons

Following Cui et al. 2018 (hereafter Paper I) on the classification of large-scale environments (LSE) at z = 0, we push our analysis to higher redshifts and study the evolution of LSE and the baryon distributions in them. Our aim is to investigate how baryons affect the LSE as a function of redshift. In agreement with Paper I, the baryon models have negligible effect on the LSE over all investigated redshifts. We further validate the conclusion obtained in Paper I that the gas web is an unbiased tracer of total matter -- even better at high redshifts. By separating the gas mainly by temperature, we find that about 40 per cent of gas is in the so-called warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). This fraction of gas mass in the WHIM decreases with redshift, especially from z = 1 (29 per cent) to z = 2.1 (10 per cent). By separating the whole WHIM gas mass into the four large-scale environments (i.e. voids, sheets, filaments, and knots), we find that about half of the WHIM gas is located in filaments. Although the total gas mass in WHIM decreases with redshift, the WHIM mass fractions in the different LSE seem unchanged.
Immunological Control of HIV-1 Disease Progression by Rare Protective HLA Allele

HLA-B57 is a relatively rare allele around world and the strongest protective HLA allele in Caucasians and African black individuals infected with HIV-1. Previous studies suggested that the advantage of this allele in HIV-1 disease progression is due to a strong functional ability of HLA-B57-restricted Gag-specific T cells and lower fitness of mutant viruses selected by the T cells. ABSTRACT Rare HLA alleles such as HLA-B57 are associated with slow progression to AIDS. However, the evidence for the advantage of rare protective alleles is limited, and the mechanism is still unclear. Although the prevalence of HLA-B*67:01 is only 1.2% in Japan, HLA-B*67:01-positive (HLA-B*67:01+) individuals had the lowest plasma viral load (pVL) and highest CD4 count in HIV-1 clade B-infected Japanese individuals. We investigated the mechanism of immunological control of HIV-1 by a rare protective allele, HLA-B*67:01. We identified six novel HLA-B*67:01-restricted epitopes and found that T cells specific for four epitopes were significantly associated with good clinical outcomes, pVL and/or CD4 count. The wild type or cross-reactive sequences of three protective and immunodominant Pol and Gag epitopes were found in around 95% of the circulating HIV-1, indicating that T cells specific for three conserved or cross-reactive epitopes contributed to good clinical outcomes. One escape mutation (Nef71K) in the Nef protective epitope, which was selected by T cells restricted by either HLA allele in the HLA-B*67:01-C*07:02 haplotype, affected the HLA-B*67:01-restricted RY11-specific T-cell recognition. These results imply that the further accumulation of the Nef71K mutation in the population will negatively affect the control of HIV-1 replication by RY11-specific CD8+ T cells in HIV-1-infected HLA-B*67:01+ individuals. The present study demonstrated that conserved or cross-reactive epitope-specific T cells mainly contribute to control of HIV-1 by a rare protective allele, HLA-B*67:01. IMPORTANCE HLA-B57 is a relatively rare allele around world and the strongest protective HLA allele in Caucasians and African black individuals infected with HIV-1. Previous studies suggested that the advantage of this allele in HIV-1 disease progression is due to a strong functional ability of HLA-B57-restricted Gag-specific T cells and lower fitness of mutant viruses selected by the T cells. HLA-B*57 is a very rare allele and has not been reported as a protective allele in Asian countries, whereas a rare allele, HLA-B*67:01, was shown to be a protective allele in Japan. Therefore, the analysis of HLA-B*67:01-restricted T cells is important to clarify the mechanism of immunological control of HIV-1 by a rare protective HLA allele in Asia. We found that HLA-B*67:01-restricted T cells specific for three conserved or cross-reactive Gag and Pol epitopes are associated with good clinical outcomes in HLA-B*67:01+ individuals. It is expected that T cells specific for conserved or cross-reactive epitopes contribute to a curing treatment.
Interaction of Isotropic Turbulence with a Shock Wave

Abstract : As a first step to understand the compressibility effects, interaction of isotropic quasi-incompressible turbulence with a weak shock wave was studied by three-dimensional time-dependent direct numerical simulations. In addition, linear analysis was used to study interaction of isotropic turbulence with shock waves of a wide range of strengths. The effects of the fluctuation Mach number M sub t and the average Mach number M sub 1 superscript u of the upstream turbulence on turbulence statistics were investigated. Both numerical simulations and linear analyses of the interaction show that turbulence is enhanced during the interaction with a shock wave. Turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) and transverse vorticity components are amplified, and turbulent length scales are decreased. The predictions of the linear analyses compare favorably with simulation results for flows with M sub t < M sub 1 superscript U-1, which suggests that the amplification mechanism is mainly linear.
Coq Tacticals and PVS Strategies: A Small Step Semantics

The need for a small step semantics and more generally for a thorough documentation and understanding of Coq's tacticals and PVS's strategies arise with their growing use and the progressive uncovering of their subtleties. The purpose of the following study is to provide a simple and clear formal framework to describe their detailed semantics, and highlight their differences and similarities.