Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Degenerative Lumbar Spine Disease: Estimating Global Incidence and Worldwide Volume

Study Design: Meta-analysis-based calculation. Objectives: Lumbar degenerative spine disease (DSD) is a common cause of disability, yet a reliable measure of its global burden does not exist. We sought to quantify the incidence of lumbar DSD to determine the overall worldwide burden of symptomatic lumbar DSD across World Health Organization regions and World Bank income groups. Methods: We used a meta-analysis to create a single proportion of cases of DSD in patients with low back pain (LBP). Using this information in conjunction with LBP incidence rates, we calculated the global incidence of individuals who have DSD and LBP (ie, their DSD has neurosurgical relevance) based on the Global Burden of Disease 2015 database. Results: We found that 266 million individuals (3.63%) worldwide have DSD and LBP each year; the highest and lowest estimated incidences were found in Europe (5.7%) and Africa (2.4%), respectively. Based on population sizes, low- and middle-income countries have 4 times as many cases as high-income countries. Thirty-nine million individuals (0.53%) worldwide were found to have spondylolisthesis, 403 million (5.5%) individuals worldwide with symptomatic disc degeneration, and 103 million (1.41%) individuals worldwide with spinal stenosis annually. Conclusions: A total of 266 million individuals (3.63%) worldwide were found to have DSD and LBP annually. Significantly, data quality is higher in high-income countries, making overall quantification in low- and middle-income countries less complete. A global effort to address degenerative conditions of the lumbar spine in regions with high demand is important to reduce disability.
Lactobacillus johnsonii BS15 Prevents Psychological Stress–Induced Memory Dysfunction in Mice by Modulating the Gut–Brain Axis

Researchers are attempting to harness the advantages of the gut–brain axis to prevent neurocognitive disorders by enhancing intestinal health. In this study, four groups of ICR mice were orally gavaged with either phosphate-buffered saline (control and CW groups) or the probiotic strain Lactobacillus johnsonii BS15 (P and PW group; daily amounts of 2 × 108 colony-forming units) for 28 days. From days 22 to 28, the mice in the CW and PW groups were subjected to water-avoidance stress (WAS). The issue of whether psychological stress–induced memory dysfunction can be prevented via L. johnsonii BS15 pretreatment to modulate the gut–brain axis was investigated. Results show that L. johnsonii BS15 enhanced gut development by increasing villus height in the jejunum and ileum as well as villus height:crypt depth ratio in the ileum. L. johnsonii BS15 increased the activities of digestive enzymes, including trypsin and lipase in the jejunum and ileum. The intestinal goblet cell number was also increased by L. johnsonii BS15 pretreatment. Moreover, L. johnsonii BS15 balanced the gut microbiota by increasing the log10 DNA gene copies of Lactobacillus spp. and L. johnsonii and decreasing that of Enterobacteriaceae in the cecum. L. johnsonii BS15 also exerted preventive effects on intestinal permeability WAS by modulating diamine oxidase and D-lactate levels in the serum and mRNA expression levels of the tight junction proteins claudin-1, occludin, and ZO-1 in the jejunum and ileum. L. johnsonii BS15 pretreatment modulated inflammatory factors, specifically tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interferon-gamma, and interleukin-10. L. johnsonii BS15 pretreatment improved their performance in two behavioral tests, namely the novel object and T-maze tests. This result indicates that psychological stress–induced memory dysfunction possibly could be prevented through the gut–brain axis. In addition, L. johnsonii BS15 exerted beneficial effects on the hippocampus by modulating memory-related functional proteins, especially those related to synaptic plasticity, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor and stem cell factor. Moreover, L. johnsonii BS15 recovered antioxidant capacity and exerted protective effects on mitochondrion-mediated apoptosis in the hippocampus. Collectively, the modulation of the gut–brain axis by L. johnsonii BS15 could be considered a promising non-invasive treatment modality for psychological stress–induced memory dysfunction.
Caracterização e modelagem de fenômenos de migração e agregação celular in vitro

ix 1 Introdução e Motivação 1 2 Caracterização da migração celular in vitro 4 2.1 Motivação . 4 2.2 Breve discussão sobre difusão normal e difusão anômala . 6 2.3 Metodologia experimental, análise de imagens e obtenção dos dados de movimentos migratórios . 8 2.4 Quantidades físicas utilizadas para a caracterização de movimentos celulares . 10 2.5 Resultados . 15 2.6 Modelo de uma caminhada q-Gaussiana com persistência de curto alcance . 25 2.7 Conclusões e perspectivas futuras . 30 3 Caracterização da dinâmica de agregação celular in vitro 33 3.1 Motivação . 33 3.2 Revendo nossos dados experimentais relativos à agregação celular observada in vitro . 40 3.2.1 Distribuições de densidade acumulada complementar dos tamanhos dos agregados . 40
Heterogeneous Variance-Covariance Structures for Repeated Measures

This article provides a unified discussion of a useful collection of heterogeneous covariance structures for repeated-measures data. The collection includes heterogeneous versions of the compound symmetry and first-order autoregressive structures, the HuynhFeldt structure, the independent-increments structure, correlated random coefficients models, the first-order antedependence model, and a simplified factor-analytic construction. These structures significantly broaden the arsenal of covariance models available to statistical researchers for accounting for and explaining variability. The structures have a simple and interpretable parameterization which is well-suited for likelihood-based estimation, testing, and selection, and they are easily fit with commercial software. Two examples are used to illustrate the following advantages of considering this class of heterogeneous covariance structures: (1) Parameter interpretability is retained by avoiding transformations. (2) The choice between the traditional univariate and multivariate approaches, involving "parsimony means power," is generalized, thus enabling more accurate inferences on mean-model parameters. (3) Alternatives to and connections with the "empirical sandwich" estimator are provided. (4) Scientific discovery is enhanced.
Improving Knowledge Distillation via Regularizing Feature Norm and Direction

Knowledge distillation (KD) exploits a large well-trained model (i.e., teacher) to train a small student model on the same dataset for the same task. Treating teacher features as knowledge, prevailing methods of knowledge distillation train student by aligning its features with the teacher's, e.g., by minimizing the KL-divergence between their logits or L2 distance between their intermediate features. While it is natural to believe that better alignment of student features to the teacher better distills teacher knowledge, simply forcing this alignment does not directly contribute to the student's performance, e.g., classification accuracy. In this work, we propose to align student features with class-mean of teacher features, where class-mean naturally serves as a strong classifier. To this end, we explore baseline techniques such as adopting the cosine distance based loss to encourage the similarity between student features and their corresponding class-means of the teacher. Moreover, we train the student to produce large-norm features, inspired by other lines of work (e.g., model pruning and domain adaptation), which find the large-norm features to be more significant. Finally, we propose a rather simple loss term (dubbed ND loss) to simultaneously (1) encourage student to produce large-\emph{norm} features, and (2) align the \emph{direction} of student features and teacher class-means. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our explored techniques help existing KD methods achieve better performance, i.e., higher classification accuracy on ImageNet and CIFAR100 datasets, and higher detection precision on COCO dataset. Importantly, our proposed ND loss helps the most, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/WangYZ1608/Knowledge-Distillation-via-ND}.
Arti�cial neural networks improve LDCT lung cancer screening: A comparative validation study

Background: This study proposes a prediction model for the automatic assessment of lung cancer risk based on an arti�cial neural network (ANN) with a data-driven approach to the low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) standardized structure report. Methods: This comparative validation study analysed a prospective cohort from Chiayi Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan. In total, 836 asymptomatic patients who had undergone LDCT scans between February 2017 and August 2018 were included, comprising 27 lung cancer cases and 809 controls. A derivation cohort of 602 participants (19 lung cancer cases and 583 controls) was collected to construct the ANN prediction model. A comparative validation of the ANN and Lung-RADS was conducted with a prospective cohort of 234 participants (8 lung cancer cases and 226 controls). The areas under the curves (AUCs) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to compare the prediction models. Results: At the cut-off of category 3, the Lung-RADS had a sensitivity of 12.5%, speci�city of 96.0%, positive predictive value of 10.0%, and negative predictive value of 96.9%. At its optimal cut-off value, the ANN had a sensitivity of 75.0%, speci�city of 85.0%, positive predictive value of 15.0%, and negative predictive value of 99.0%. The area under the ROC curve was 0.764 for the Lung-RADS and 0.873 for the ANN ( P =0.01). The two most important predictors used by the ANN for predicting lung cancer were the documented sizes of partially solid nodules and ground-glass nodules. Conclusions: Compared to the Lung-RADS,
Factors influencing ethical climate in a nonprofit organisation: an empirical investigation

Drawing from Victor and Cullen's[Victor, B. and Cullen, J. B. (1987) ‘A theory and measure of ethical climate in organizations’, Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy, Vol. 9, pp. 51–71. ],[Victor, B. and Cullen, J. B. (1988) ‘The organizational bases of ethical work climates’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 33, pp. 101–125. ] theoretical framework a recent study by Agarwal and Malloy[Agarwal, J. and Malloy, D. C. (1999) ‘Ethical work climate dimensions in a not-for-profit organization: An empirical study’, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 20, pp. 1–14. ] examined ethical work climate dimensions in the context of a nonprofit organisation. This paper reviews the framework and extends the study further by investigating several factors that influence the perception of ethical work climate in a nonprofit organisation. The multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) procedure is employed to test nine hypotheses. Results demonstrate somewhat unique findings regarding factors that influence ethical climate perception in a nonprofit context. Specifically, the findings of this study point to the level of education, decision style and the influence that superiors and volunteers have upon ethical perception. Results also demonstrate that factors that have been employed traditionally by forprofit management, such as length of service, codes of ethics, size of the organisation and peer pressure, do not effectively influence ethical perception in the nonprofit context. Finally implications of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications
A Note on the Ghanaian Elections

IN THE CONCLUSION of their article on the Ghanaian elections Jeffries and Thomas posed the questions 'why then, finally did the Opposition leaders refuse to accept the Presidential elections? , and, 'why did they boycott the subsequent parliamentary election in which their parties' candidates may well have won many seats? ' (p. 364) They are indeed correct in contending that the opposition leaders had after all known about the inaccuracy of the voters' register, that they should have anticipated a degree of attempted electoral malpractice, that they must have realized that more resources would be employed to assist the NDC's and Rawlings' campaign, and they must have realized that the incumbency advantage would apply. We concede all that. Indeed we expected not just attempted but actual electoral malpractices. Nevertheless, as they correctly pointed out, we did decide to go ahead and compete on that basis. It is also true that I did promise that 'once the Presidential Election on the 3 November 1992 is adjudged to be fair by INEC and all international observers and the Ghanaian public, I will cooperate fully with whoever is declared the winner and help in the transition from the PNDC administration to multi-party constitutional rule'. It is equally highly magnanimous on the part of the authors to concede that even if reneging on my promise was basically unjustified and politically highly regrettable, it 'does not seem appropriate to characterize the opposition leaders as simply bad losers motivated by sour grapes' (p. 365). Equally so is their rejection of Rawlings' naive assertion that the Opposition refused to contest again 'for fear of a more humiliating defeat at the parliamentary elections'. But despite their magnamity, their speculations as to why we decided not to accept the result of the presidential elections, why we boycotted the parliamentary elections and why I reneged on the assurance are wide of the mark. First, the Opposition refused to accept the results of the presidential election because we believe and still do that the presidential election was (and not must have been) rigged . Secondly, in spite of all the adverse conditions mentioned, we did indeed decide to participate in the presidential election for two main reasons. The first reason, which I have stated already, was that from the experience of the Opposition in both the Cameroon and Burkina Faso only a year or so earlier, we became convinced that even if we boycotted the elections the international community would accept the results. The second reason was that despite the
Antigenic properties of human parechovirus 1 Pa $

IP: 54.70. 40.11 On: Tue, 30 Apr 2019 21:35:57 Journal of General Virology (2000), 81, 1709–1718. Printed in Great Britain .
Disclosing verifiable partial information of signed CDA documents using generalized redactable signatures

Digital signatures are an invaluable tool to provide a means for verifying the integrity and authenticity of digital medical documents. Since these documents may be used by several parties in medical treatment processes, the aforementioned properties are essential. However, the general principle of digital signatures is all or nothing. This means, that given a digital signature it is only possible to verify whether it is valid for the entire document or not. Nevertheless, often there is a necessity that only a part of a already signed medical document is relevant in a subsequent process, e.g. in case of second opinions. Another scenario is the anonymization of medical documents for clinical studies, where the holder of a document solely wants to disclose parts of the document, i.e. for privacy reasons. Consequently, the original signature cannot be used to verify the integrity and authenticity of the “redacted” document anymore. Hence, the receiver of this redacted document needs to fully trust the content of the document. In this paper we propose a novel concept to solve the aforementioned problem. It is based on so called redactable signatures, which were recently introduced, and allow parties to remove certain parts of a document while preserving the property of verifiability. However, when dealing with documents based on the clinical document architecture (CDA), all existing redactable signatures fail to be really practical. To overcome the problems and shortcomings of existing redactable signatures we propose a novel concept of generalized redactable signatures which is especially applicable for structured documents, e.g. XML documents. Additionally, we will show that our solution can be used to sign partial information of CDA documents, which cannot be realized efficiently with existing solutions (e.g. XML signatures), when the redacted information can be chosen arbitrarily. Finally, the proposed concept provides a solution to an unsolved problem in context of secure eHealth architectures that are based on anonymization.
A flexible structure for fully scalable motion-compensated 3-D DWT with emphasis on the impact of spatial scalability

We investigate the implications of the conventional "t+2-D" motion-compensated (MC) three-dimensional (3-D) discrete wavelet/subband transform structure for spatial scalability and propose a novel flexible structure for fully scalable video compression. In this structure, any number of levels of "pretemporal" spatial wavelet decomposition are performed on the original full resolution frames, followed by MC temporal decomposition of the subbands within each spatial resolution level. Further levels of "posttemporal" spatial decomposition may be performed on the spatiotemporal subbands to provide additional levels of spatial scalability and energy compaction. This structure allows us to trade energy compaction against the potential for artifacts at reduced spatial resolutions. More importantly, the structure permits extensive study of the interaction between spatial aliasing, scalability and energy compaction. We show that where the motion model fails, the "t+2-D" structure inevitably produces misaligned spatial aliasing artifacts in reduced resolution sequences. These artifacts can be removed by using pretemporal spatial decomposition. On the other hand, we also show that the "t+2-D" structure necessarily maximizes compression efficiency. We propose different schemes to minimize the loss of compression efficiency associated with pretemporal spatial decomposition.
Nurse Expectations as Compared to Perceived Reality

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv DEDICATION . v LIST OF TABLES . x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . xi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION . 1 Problem Statement . 2 Theoretical Framework . 3 Significant and Justification . 5 Assumptions . 6 Limitations . 6 Delimitations . 6 Purpose Statement . 7 Objectives . 7 Research Questions . 7 Operational Definitions . 8 Summary . 9 CHAPTER II – REVIEW OF LITERATURE . 10 Introduction . 10 vii Nurse Turnover Rates and Cost . 10 Nurse Perceptions and Experiences . 12 Intention to Leave and Rationale . 14 Perception Mismatch and Turnover in Similar Professions . 15 Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory . 17 Summary . 18 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY . 20 Introduction . 20 Pilot Study . 20 Design . 21 Role of the Researcher . 21 Ethical Considerations . 22 Sampling . 22 Data Collection . 23 Data Analysis . 24 Qualitative Rigor . 24 Summary . 25 CHAPTER IV – PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF DAYA . 26 Introduction . 26 Description of Sample. 26 viii Findings. 27 Misalignment . 28 Frustration . 29 Patient Care. 29 Supervisors. 31 Responsibilities . 31 Patient Satisfaction. 32 Disappointment . 33 Supervisor. 33 Patient Care. 34 Responsibilities. 35 Teamwork. 36 Unappreciated . 38 Happiness . 41 Supervisors and Teamwork. 41 Responsibilities. 42 Patient Care. 43 Summary . 44 CHAPTER V – DISCUSSION, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS . 45 Introduction . 45 ix Interpretation of Findings . 45 Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory . 48 Hygiene Factors. 48 Motivation Factors. 51 Recommendations for Action . 53 Recommendations for Future Research . 56 Reflection . 57 Conclusion . 58 APPENDIX A – Interview Questions . 60 APPENDIX B – IRB Approval Letter . 62 REFERENCES . 63
Is patient travel distance associated with survival on phase II clinical trials in oncology?

BACKGROUND Prior research has suggested that patients who travel out of their neighborhood for elective care from specialized medical centers may have better outcomes than local patients with the same illnesses who are treated at the same centers. We hypothesized that this phenomenon, often called "referral bias" or "distance bias," may also be evident in curative-intent cancer trials at specialized cancer centers. METHODS We evaluated associations between overall survival and progression-free survival and the distance from the patient residence to the treating institution for 110 patients treated on one of four phase II curative-intent chemoradiotherapy protocols for locoregionally advanced squamous cell cancer of the head and neck conducted at the University of Chicago over 7 years. RESULTS Using Cox regression that adjusted for standard patient-level disease and demographic factors and neighborhood-level economic factors, we found a positive association between the distance patients traveled from their residence to the treatment center and survival. Patients who lived more than 15 miles from the treating institution had only one-third the hazard of death of those living closer (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.32, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.12 to 0.84). Moreover, with every 10 miles that a patient traveled for care, the hazard of death decreased by 3.2% (HR = 0.97, 95% CI = 0.94 to 0.99). Similar results were obtained for progression-free survival. CONCLUSION Results of phase II curative-intent clinical trials in oncology that are conducted at specialized cancer centers may be confounded by patient travel distance, which captures prognostic significance beyond cancer stage, performance status, and wealth. More work is needed to determine what unmeasured factors travel distance is mediating.
The Roles of Pink and Red Muscle in Powering Steady Swimming in Scup, Stenotomus chrysops

Synopsis. Fishes power steady, undulatory swimming using both red and pink muscle. In this study we examined the roles of the two fiber types in generating power for swimming by using a two-step technique. First, in vivo data is collected from swimming fish, and second, the electrical activity and muscle length change conditions recorded in vivo are recreated in vitro with isolated muscle bundles. Force production and power generation by muscle during swimming can then be estimated. In scup, both red and pink muscle are recruited to power swimming at the maximum sustained swimming speed. For both fiber types, the duration of electrical activity decreases from anterior to posterior. However, the amplitude of muscle length change increases anterior to posterior. Massspecific power production increases posteriorly for both muscle types. The faster contraction kinetics of pink muscle translate to higher power pro? duction by pink muscle relative to red muscle for all longitudinal positions of the fish. Determination of absolute power production, based on massspecific power and muscle mass, shows that the posterior regions of the fish generate the most power for swimming. At 20? C, red muscle generates more absolute power than pink due to its higher muscle mass. However, at 10? C, pink muscle generates more absolute power than red, because red muscle produces little or no positive power for all longitu? dinal positions.