Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role and mechanisms of gram-negative bacterial outer membrane vesicles in inflammatory diseases

Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are spherical, bilayered, and nanosized membrane vesicles that are secreted from gram-negative bacteria. OMVs play a pivotal role in delivering lipopolysaccharide, proteins and other virulence factors to target cells. Multiple studies have found that OMVs participate in various inflammatory diseases, including periodontal disease, gastrointestinal inflammation, pulmonary inflammation and sepsis, by triggering pattern recognition receptors, activating inflammasomes and inducing mitochondrial dysfunction. OMVs also affect inflammation in distant organs or tissues via long-distance cargo transport in various diseases, including atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. In this review, we primarily summarize the role of OMVs in inflammatory diseases, describe the mechanism through which OMVs participate in inflammatory signal cascades, and discuss the effects of OMVs on pathogenic processes in distant organs or tissues with the aim of providing novel insights into the role and mechanism of OMVs in inflammatory diseases and the prevention and treatment of OMV-mediated inflammatory diseases.
Effect of ionized calcium level on short-term prognosis in severe multiple trauma patients: a clinical study

Background Hypocalcemia has been reported as an independent predictor of trauma mortality. We investigated the relationship between temporal variations in blood ionized calcium concentration (iCa) and prognosis in severe trauma patients who underwent massive transfusion protocol (MTP). Methods This single-center, retrospective, observational study investigated 117 severe trauma patients treated with MTP in the Department of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care, Saitama Medical Center, Saitama Medical University, between March 2013 and March 2019. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed, assigning pH-corrected initial and minimum blood ionized calcium concentration within 24 hours of admission (iCa_min), age, initial systolic blood pressure and Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score, and incidence of Ca supplementation as independent variables and 28-day mortality as dependent variable. Results The logistic regression analysis identified iCa_min (adjusted OR 0.03, 95% CI 0.002 to 0.4), age (adjusted OR 1.05, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.09), and GCS score (adjusted OR 0.84, 95% CI 0.74 to 0.94) as significant independent predictors of 28-day mortality. The receiver operating characteristic analysis identified optimal cut-off value of iCa_min for predicting 28-day mortality as 0.95 mmoL/L (area under the curve 0.74). Conclusion In the management of patients with traumatic hemorrhagic shock, aggressive correction of the iCa to maintain 0.95 mmol/L or higher within 24 hours of admission may improve short-term outcomes. Level of evidence Therapeutic/care management, level III.
Regional Lymph Node Metastasis Distribution in Resectable Middle-Third Gastric Cancer: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction Lymph node (LN) metastasis happens even in early gastric cancer (GC) even in LN stations that are not adjacent to the primary tumor. Total or subtotal gastrectomy (TG or sTG) can be performed in the middle third of the GC if the negative proximal margin is maintained. These procedures differed in the extent of LN dissection; therefore, oncology considerations must be taken into consideration when selecting the appropriate procedure. Methods This was a cross-sectional study involving 98 patients suffering from middle-third GC. The metastatic lymph nodes (mLN) ratio was calculated in each case by the ratio between the number of mLN and the number of total LNs retrieved. We compare the difference in the total LN retrieved, number of mLN, and rate of positive LN (N+) between the two groups TG and sTG. Results The majority of patients had advanced GC (82.7% pT2-4). About 65.3% of patients had metastasis LN. The events of LN metastasis and skipped LN metastasis happened even in tumors contained in the submucosal layer. The metastasis rates in each LN station were also increasing in correlation with the depth of tumor invasion. For LN station No. 2, 4sa, 10, 11d (which are not mandatory) in sTG, the rate of mLN was 0% for the pT1-3 tumor, regardless of tumor longitudinal location. The rate of mLN for each station was higher in adjacent stations of the tumor (No. 1-3-5-7 in lesser curvature, No. 4sb-4d-6 in greater curvature, No.1-3-4sb in the anterior wall, No. 3-7-12a in the posterior wall). The total LN retrieved, number of mLN, and rate of positive LN were statistically higher in the TG group compared to the sTG group. However, the mean mLN ratios between the two groups were comparable (p = 0.116). Conclusion In accordance with the macroscopic and microscopic characteristics, we observed a stratified distribution of mLN in the middle third of the GC. With these early results, sTG combined with standard lymphadenectomy was an acceptable treatment for T1-T3 middle-third GC in terms of mLN distribution. Total No. 4sb LN dissection might also be reserved in gastrectomy for T1-T3 GC.
Synergy and Mechanism of Leflunomide Plus Fluconazole Against Resistant Candida albicans: An in vitro Study

Objective The global rise in the resistance of Candida albicans to conventional antifungals makes Candida albicans infections harder to treat. The main objective of this study was to investigate the antifungal effects and underlying mechanisms of leflunomide in combination with triazoles against resistant Candida albicans. Methods In this study, the microdilution method was used to determine the antifungal effects of leflunomide in combination with three triazoles on planktonic cells in vitro. The morphological transition from yeast to hyphae was observed under a microscope. The effects on ROS, metacaspase, efflux pumps, and intracellular calcium concentration were investigated, respectively. Results Our findings suggested that leflunomide + triazoles showed a synergistic effect against resistant Candida albicans in vitro. Further study concluded that the synergistic mechanisms were resulted from multiple factors, including the inhibited efflux of triazoles, the inhibition of yeast-to-hyphae transition, ROS increasing, metacaspase activation, and [Ca2+]i disturbance. Discussion Leflunomide appears to be a potential enhancer of current antifungal agents for treating candidiasis caused by resistant Candida albicans. This study can also serve as an example to inspire the exploration of new approaches to treating resistant Candida albicans.
Characterization of dynamic loudspeakers using electrical and acoustical measurement data

Electrodynamic loudspeakers can be characterized by a set of Thiele-Small parameters [1] (Fig.1) when operated in the low-signal linear regime. The measurement of these parameters allows the prediction of the membrane velocity and sound pressure for arbitrary input signals. It is investigated whether a sound pressure measurement in the speaker’s far field is suited for speaker characterization and how it performs compared to surface velocity measurements using a laser vibrometer, regarding the accuracy and reproducibility of the results.
Development of next generation tempered and ODS reduced activation ferritic/martensitic steels for fusion energy applications

Reduced activation ferritic/martensitic steels are currently the most technologically mature option for the structural material of proposed fusion energy reactors. Advanced next-generation higher performance steels offer the opportunity for improvements in fusion reactor operational lifetime and reliability, superior neutron radiation damage resistance, higher thermodynamic efficiency, and reduced construction costs. The two main strategies for developing improved steels for fusion energy applications are based on (1) an evolutionary pathway using computational thermodynamics modelling and modified thermomechanical treatments (TMT) to produce higher performance reduced activation ferritic/martensitic (RAFM) steels and (2) a higher risk, potentially higher payoff approach based on powder metallurgy techniques to produce very high strength oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) steels capable of operation to very high temperatures and with potentially very high resistance to fusion neutron-induced property degradation. The current development status of these next-generation high performance steels is summarized, and research and development challenges for the successful development of these materials are outlined. Material properties including temperature-dependent uniaxial yield strengths, tensile elongations, high-temperature thermal creep, Charpy impact ductile to brittle transient temperature (DBTT) and fracture toughness behaviour, and neutron irradiation-induced low-temperature hardening and embrittlement and intermediate-temperature volumetric void swelling (including effects associated with fusion-relevant helium and hydrogen generation) are described for research heats of the new steels.
Robust visual tracking via self-similarity learning

Self-similarity is an attractive image property that has been successfully applied to object recognition due to its robustness to severe target appearance variations. However, less attention has been paid to explore self-similarity for visual tracking, mainly because it is difficult to learn self-similarity information between different features suitable for visual tracking. To address this issue, a simple, yet effective approach is presented to learn self-similarity information among the local features extracted from the different regions of the target. The target is first divided into some non-overlapping regions, in which each region is described by the histogram of gradient (HOG) features. Then, an explicit polynomial kernel feature map is constructed, which is capable of characterising the self-similarity information among all the local regions in the targets. Finally, based on the feature maps, a linear support vector machine (SVM) is learnt via an online dual coordinate descent method that offers fast convergence guarantee. Experiments on a large tracking benchmark dataset with 50 sequences demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods.
Outcomes of Bariatric Surgery in People With Human Immunodeficiency Virus: A Retrospective Analysis From the ATHENA Cohort

Abstract Background The implications of bariatric surgery (BS) on virologic and metabolic outcomes in people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV; PWH) on antiretroviral therapy (ART) are unknown. Methods Here, we report a retrospective analysis up to 18 months post-BS in PWH from the AIDS Therapy evaluation in The Netherlands (ATHENA) cohort with data from all dutch HIV treating Centers. Primary end points were a confirmed virologic failure (2 consecutive HIV-RNA measurements >200 copies/mL) and the percentage of patients who achieved >20% total body weight loss up to 18 months post-BS. Switches from baseline ART and trough plasma concentrations of antiretrovirals were also reported post-BS. Metabolic parameters and medication usage were compared pre- and post-BS. Results Fifty-one patients were included. One case of confirmed virologic failure and 3 cases with viral blips were detected in this cohort up to 18 months post-BS. Eighty-five percent of patients achieved >20% total body weight loss at 18 months post-BS, with a mean difference from baseline (95% confidence interval) of −33.5% (−37.7% to −29.3%). Trough plasma concentrations of measured antiretroviral agents were all above minimum effective concentrations, except for 1 sample of darunavir. Lipid profiles, but not serum creatinine and blood pressure, improved significantly (P < .01) post-BS. Total medications and obesity-related comedications declined from 203 to 103 and from 62 to 25, respectively, at 18 months post-BS. Conclusions BS was an effective intervention for weight loss and lipid control in PWH using ART in this cohort with no clear link to poor virologic outcomes.
Tick‐borne encephalitis: A comprehensive review of the epidemiology, virology, and clinical picture

Tick‐borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) is a flavivirus commonly found in at least 27 European and Asian countries. It is an emerging public health problem, with steadily increasing case numbers over recent decades. Tick‐borne encephalitis virus affects between 10,000 and 15,000 patients annually. Infection occurs through the bite of an infected tick and, much less commonly, through infected milk consumption or aerosols. The TBEV genome comprises a positive‐sense single‐stranded RNA molecule of ∼11 kilobases. The open reading frame is > 10,000 bases long, flanked by untranslated regions (UTR), and encodes a polyprotein that is co‐ and post‐transcriptionally processed into three structural and seven non‐structural proteins. Tick‐borne encephalitis virus infection results in encephalitis, often with a characteristic biphasic disease course. After a short incubation time, the viraemic phase is characterised by non‐specific influenza‐like symptoms. After an asymptomatic period of 2–7 days, more than half of patients show progression to a neurological phase, usually characterised by central and, rarely, peripheral nervous system symptoms. Mortality is low—around 1% of confirmed cases, depending on the viral subtype. After acute tick‐borne encephalitis (TBE), a minority of patients experience long‐term neurological deficits. Additionally, 40%–50% of patients develop a post‐encephalitic syndrome, which significantly impairs daily activities and quality of life. Although TBEV has been described for several decades, no specific treatment exists. Much remains unknown regarding the objective assessment of long‐lasting sequelae. Additional research is needed to better understand, prevent, and treat TBE. In this review, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the epidemiology, virology, and clinical picture of TBE.
Sleep disorders in Lewy body dementia: Mechanisms, clinical relevance, and unanswered questions

In Lewy body dementia (LBD), disturbances of sleep and/or arousal including insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder, obstructive sleep apnea, and restless leg syndrome are common. These disorders can each exert a significant negative impact on both patient and caregiver quality of life; however, their etiology is poorly understood. Little guidance is available for assessing and managing sleep disorders in LBD, and they remain under‐diagnosed and under‐treated. This review aims to (1) describe the specific sleep disorders which occur in LBD, considering their putative or potential mechanisms; (2) describe the history and diagnostic process for these disorders in LBD; and (3) summarize current evidence for their management in LBD and consider some of the ongoing and unanswered questions in this field and future research directions.
Detection-Recovery and Detection-Refutation Gaps via Reductions from Planted Clique

Planted Dense Subgraph (PDS) problem is a prototypical problem with a computational-statistical gap. It also exhibits an intriguing additional phenomenon: different tasks, such as detection or recovery, appear to have different computational limits. A detection-recovery gap for PDS was substantiated in the form of a precise conjecture given by Chen and Xu (2014) (based on the parameter values for which a convexified MLE succeeds) and then shown to hold for low-degree polynomial algorithms by Schramm and Wein (2022) and for MCMC algorithms for Ben Arous et al. (2020). In this paper, we demonstrate that a slight variation of the Planted Clique Hypothesis with secret leakage (introduced in Brennan and Bresler (2020)), implies a detection-recovery gap for PDS. In the same vein, we also obtain a sharp lower bound for refutation, yielding a detection-refutation gap. Our methods build on the framework of Brennan and Bresler (2020) to construct average-case reductions mapping secret leakage Planted Clique to appropriate target problems.
Outcome-based Evaluation of Systematic Review Automation

Current methods of evaluating search strategies and automated citation screening for systematic literature reviews typically rely on counting the number of relevant publications (i.e. those to be included in the review) and not relevant publications (i.e. those to be excluded). Significant importance is put into promoting the retrieval of all relevant publications through great attention to recall-oriented measures, and demoting the retrieval of non-relevant publications through precision-oriented or cost metrics. This established practice, however, does not accurately reflect the reality of conducting a systematic review, because not all included publications have the same influence on the final outcome of the systematic review. More specifically, if an important publication gets excluded or included, this might significantly change the overall review outcome, while not including or excluding less influential studies may only have a limited impact. However, in terms of evaluation measures, all inclusion and exclusion decisions are treated equally and, therefore, failing to retrieve publications with little to no impact on the review outcome leads to the same decrease in recall as failing to retrieve crucial publications. We propose a new evaluation framework that takes into account the impact of the reported study on the overall systematic review outcome. We demonstrate the framework by extracting review meta-analysis data and estimating outcome effects using predictions from ranking runs on systematic reviews of interventions from CLEF TAR 2019 shared task. We further measure how closely the obtained outcomes are to the outcomes of the original review if the arbitrary rankings were used. We evaluate 74 runs using the proposed framework and compare the results with those obtained using standard IR measures. We find that accounting for the difference in review outcomes leads to a different assessment of the quality of a system than if traditional evaluation measures were used. Our analysis provides new insights into the evaluation of retrieval results in the context of systematic review automation, emphasising the importance of assessing the usefulness of each document beyond binary relevance.
Reconstruction des photons et recherche d’un second boson de Higgs dans le canal di-photon au sein de l’expérience CMS au LHC

Une particule compatible avec le boson de Higgs du modele standard de la physique des particules a ete decouverte au grand collisionneur de hadrons (LHC) en juillet 2012 par les experiences Atlas et CMS. A ce jour, l'ensemble des mesures des couplages de ce boson de Higgs sont compatibles avec ceux predits par le modele standard. Toutefois le modele standard possede des limitations et d'autres theories, telles la supersymetrie, ont ete bâties afin de pallier a ces manques. Certaines de ces theories predisent en particulier un secteur scalaire enrichi avec la presence de bosons de Higgs additionnels.D'un point de vue experimental, le canal de desintegration du boson de Higgs en deux photons offre une signature claire et permet d'explorer le secteur de Higgs avec une grande precision. Les travaux presentes dans cette these ont ete effectues dans le cadre de l'experience CMS au LHC.La premiere partie est dediee a l'etude de la reconstruction experimentale des photons. Tout d'abord, une methode de correction en energie des photons est exposee. Puis des prospectives concernant l'evolution de la qualite de leur reconstruction avec le vieillissement du detecteur sont presentees.La deuxieme partie fait l'objet de la recherche d'un second boson de Higgs de basse masse(en dessous de 110 GeV) dans le canal di-photon. Les resultats complets obtenus avec le jeu de donnees collecte en 2012, ayant fait l'objet d'une publication officielle, sont tout d'abord presentes. Les premiers resultats obtenus avec le jeu de donnees collecte en 2015 sont enfin introduits
Unraveling higher-order dynamics in collaboration networks

The interactions between individuals play a pivotal role in shaping the structure and dynamics of social systems. Complex network models have proven invaluable in uncovering the underlying mechanisms that govern the formation and evolution of these systems. However, conventional network representations primarily emphasize pairwise interactions, represented as edges in the network. In reality, many social interactions occur within groups rather than individual pairs. To capture this crucial aspect, higher-order network representations come into play, especially to describe those complex systems that are inherently composed of agents interacting with group dynamics. Despite recent research advancements in exploring temporal higher-order networks in various systems, our understanding of collaboration networks remains limited. Specifically, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the patterns of group interactions within scientific collaborations. How do groups form and evolve in this context? In this study, we aim to delve into the temporal properties of groups within collaboration networks. Our investigation focuses on uncovering the mechanisms that govern the global, group, and individual-level dynamics, shedding light on how individuals collaborate and how groups form and disband over time. By studying these temporal patterns, we take a significant stride forward in comprehending the intricate dynamics of higher-order interactions within human collaboration systems.
Ethics in rotten apples: A network epidemiology approach for active cyber defense

As Internet of Things (IoT) technology grows, so does the threat of malware infections. A proposed countermeasure, the use of benevolent"white worms"to combat malicious"black worms", presents unique ethical and practical challenges. This study examines these issues via network epidemiology models and simulations, considering the propagation dynamics of both types of worms in various network topologies. Our findings highlight the critical role of the rate at which white worms activate themselves, relative to the user's system update rate, as well as the impact of the network structure on worm propagation. The results point to the potential of white worms as an effective countermeasure, while underscoring the ethical and practical complexities inherent in their deployment.
Single Sample Prophet Inequality for Uniform Matroids of Rank 2

We study the prophet inequality when the gambler has an access only to a single sample from each distribution. Rubinstein, Wang and Weinberg showed that an optimal guarantee of 1/2 can be achieved when the underlying matroid has rank 1, i.e. in the case of a single choice. We show that this guarantee can be achieved also in the case of a uniform matroid of rank 2 by a deterministic mechanism, and we show that this is best possible among deterministic mechanisms. We also conjecture that a straightforward generalization of our policy achieves the guarantee of 1/2 for all uniform matroids.