Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Weekly Teriparatide Administration for Vertebral Stability and Bony Union in Patients with Acute Osteoporotic Vertebral Fractures

Study Design An open-label, non-randomized prospective study. Purpose Teriparatide (TPTD) is known to be an antiosteoporotic agent that may accelerate the healing of fractures. This study was designed to investigate the effect of once-weekly TPTD administration on vertebral stability and bony union after acute osteoporotic vertebral fracture (OVF). Overview of Literature Once-weekly TPTD administration can lead to early vertebral stability and promote bony union of fractured vertebrae in patients with severe osteoporosis. Methods Forty-eight subjects with acute OVF were assigned to receive activated vitamin D3 and calcium supplementation or onceweekly subcutaneous injection of TPTD (56.5 μg) in combination with activated vitamin D3 and calcium supplementation for 12 weeks. Vertebral stability was assessed using lateral plain radiography. Vertebral height at the anterior location (VHa) and the difference in VHa {ΔVHa=VHa (supine position)−VHa (weight-bearing position)} were measured at baseline and 12 weeks after starting treatment. Bony union was defined as the absence of a vertebral cleft or abnormal motion (ΔVHa >2 mm). Results Although not significant, ΔVHa, indicating vertebral stability, tended to be lower in the TPTD group at 12 weeks (p =0.17). As for subjects with severe osteoporosis, ΔVHa at 12 weeks was significantly lower in the TPTD group than in the control group (mean ΔVHa: control group, 3.1 mm (n=15); TPTD group, 1.4 mm (n=16); p =0.02). The rate of bony union was significantly higher in the TPTD group than in the control group (control group, 40%; TPTD group, 81%; p =0.03). Conclusions Once-weekly TPTD administration may facilitate early bony union after acute OVF accompanied by severe osteoporosis.
Products of Random Rectangular Matrices

We study the asymptotic behaviour of points under matrix cocyles generated by rectangular matrices. In particular we prove a random Perron-Frobenius and a Multiplicative Ergodic Theorem. We also provide an example where such products of random rectangular matrices arise in the theory of random walks in random environments and where the Multiplicative Ergodic Theorem can be used to investigate recurrence problems.
BMP-6 promotes type 2 immune response during enhancement of rat mandibular bone defect healing

Introduction Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are used as key therapeutic agents for the treatment of difficult fractures. While their effects on osteoprogenitors are known, little is known about their effects on the immune system. Methods We used permutations of BMP-6 (B), vascular endothelial growth factor (V), and Hedgehog signaling pathway activator smoothened agonist (S), to treat a rat mandibular defect and investigated healing outcomes at week 8, in correlation with the cellular landscape of the immune cells in the fracture callus at week 2. Results Maximum recruitment of immune cells to the fracture callus is known to occur at week 2. While the control, S, V, and VS groups remained as nonunions at week 8; all BMP-6 containing groups - B, BV, BS and BVS, showed near-complete to complete healing. This healing pattern was strongly associated with significantly higher ratios of CD4 T (CD45+CD3+CD4+) to putative CD8 T cells (CD45+CD3+CD4-), in groups treated with any permutation of BMP-6. Although, the numbers of putative M1 macrophages (CD45+CD3-CD11b/c+CD38high) were significantly lower in BMP-6 containing groups in comparison with S and VS groups, percentages of putative - Th1 cells or M1 macrophages (CD45+CD4+IFN-γ+) and putative – NK, NKT or cytotoxic CD8T cells (CD45+CD4-IFN-γ+) were similar in control and all treatment groups. Further interrogation revealed that the BMP-6 treatment promoted type 2 immune response by significantly increasing the numbers of CD45+CD3-CD11b/c+CD38low putative M2 macrophages, putative - Th2 cells or M2 macrophages (CD45+CD4+IL-4+) cells and putative – mast cells, eosinophils or basophils (CD45+CD4-IL-4+ cells). CD45- non-haematopoietic fractions of cells which encompass all known osteoprogenitor stem cells populations, were similar in control and treatment groups. Discussion This study uncovers previously unidentified regulatory functions of BMP-6 and shows that BMP-6 enhances fracture healing by not only acting on osteoprogenitor stem cells but also by promoting type 2 immune response.
Physical and electrochemical characteristics of NiFe_2O_4 thin films as functions of precursor solution concentration

The effects of the precursor solution concentration on the physical and electrochemical characteristics of NiFe_2O_4 films were studied. XRD patterns confirmed the formation of a spinel cubic crystal structure. FE-SEM images showed a mesoporous morphology. EDAX analysis confirmed a nearly stoichiometric deposition. Optical absorption studies confirmed the direct bandgap energies in the range 2.00–2.27 eV. The films deposited with a 0.25 M solution concentration had the minimum room-temperature electrical resistivity (3.39 × 10^3 Ωcm). Films deposited with a 0.15 M solution had the maximum specific capacitance values, 591 F g^−1 at a scan rate of 5 mV s^−1 (CV) and 632 F g^−1 at a current density of 0.5 A g^−1 (GCD). NiFe_2O_4 films exhibited specific energy and specific power values of 15.22 W h kg^−1 and 225 W kg^−1, respectively, at a current density of 1 A g^−1. Further, these films retained 92.97% of their specific capacitance after 1000 continuous cycles. Graphical abstract
What are the best practices for online student engagement among Hispanic-Serving Institutions? A narrative review

The recent coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic has led many post-secondary education institutions to transition their in-person courses to a completely virtual format. Concerns have been raised about these institutions’ readiness to create a student-centered online learning environment. Historically, rates of student attrition and lack of student engagement within the online environment are higher among courses delivered virtually when compared with those delivered in-person. This adds to the concern that graduation rates among first-time, full- time Hispanic undergraduate students are lower than their White and Asian counterparts. Faculty and students often differ in their views regarding which pedagogical strategies improve student success in online environments. Theories addressing student engagement exist, but do not adequately address students of color or faculty teaching at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The purpose of this review is to explore how post-secondary education instructors within HSIs, specifically, can increase learner engagement and improve course retention rates particularly at a time when many courses within post-secondary institutions are being delivered online. Recommendations based on available data will also be provided.
Networks of queues and the method of stages

In a recent article, Kelly [4] has been able to exhibit interesting equilibrium properties for a wide class of ‘quasi-reversible’ queue networks. The assumption of quasi-reversibility puts restrictions on queue discipline, but not on the distributions of the service requirements of customers: however, because of the method of proof he employed, Kelly was forced to impose the condition that the service requirements were finite mixtures of gamma distributions. The form of the results he obtained led him to conjecture that this condition was in fact unnecessary, as is shown to be the case in this paper. The method used to prove the conjecture is of potentially wide application, in problems where the ‘method of stages' leads to useful simplification.
Tumor microenvironment-mediated immune evasion in hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver malignancy and is the third leading cause of tumor-related mortality worldwide. In recent years, the emergency of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) has revolutionized the management of HCC. Especially, the combination of atezolizumab (anti-PD1) and bevacizumab (anti-VEGF) has been approved by the FDA as the first-line treatment for advanced HCC. Despite great breakthrough in systemic therapy, HCC continues to portend a poor prognosis owing to drug resistance and frequent recurrence. The tumor microenvironment (TME) of HCC is a complex and structured mixture characterized by abnormal angiogenesis, chronic inflammation, and dysregulated extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling, collectively contributing to the immunosuppressive milieu that in turn prompts HCC proliferation, invasion, and metastasis. The tumor microenvironment coexists and interacts with various immune cells to maintain the development of HCC. It is widely accepted that a dysfunctional tumor-immune ecosystem can lead to the failure of immune surveillance. The immunosuppressive TME is an external cause for immune evasion in HCC consisting of 1) immunosuppressive cells; 2) co-inhibitory signals; 3) soluble cytokines and signaling cascades; 4) metabolically hostile tumor microenvironment; 5) the gut microbiota that affects the immune microenvironment. Importantly, the effectiveness of immunotherapy largely depends on the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME). Also, the gut microbiota and metabolism profoundly affect the immune microenvironment. Understanding how TME affects HCC development and progression will contribute to better preventing HCC-specific immune evasion and overcoming resistance to already developed therapies. In this review, we mainly introduce immune evasion of HCC underlying the role of immune microenvironment, describe the dynamic interaction of immune microenvironment with dysfunctional metabolism and the gut microbiome, and propose therapeutic strategies to manipulate the TME in favor of more effective immunotherapy.
Tropical Cyclone Morphology from Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar

In 2008, the Canadian Space Agency sponsored the Radarsat Hurricane Applications Project (RHAP), for researching new developments in the application of Radarsat-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and innovative mapping approaches to better understand the dynamics of tropical cyclone genesis, morphology, and movement. Although tropical cyclones can be detected by many remote sensors, SAR can yield high-resolution (subkilometer) and low-level storm information that cannot be seen below the clouds by other sensors. In addition to the wind field and tropical cyclone eye information, structures associated with atmospheric processes can also be detected by SAR. We have acquired 161 Radarsat-1 SAR images through RHAP between 2001 and 2007. Among these, 73 images show clear tropical cyclone eye structure. In addition, we also acquired 10 images from the European Space Agency's Envisat SAR between 2004 and 2010. Both Atlantic hurricanes and Pacific typhoons are included. In this study, we analyze these 83 (73 R.
Market-Based Probability of Stock Returns

Markets possess all available information on stock returns. The randomness of market trade determines the statistics of stock returns. This paper describes the dependence of the first four market-based statistical moments of stock returns on statistical moments and correlations of current and past trade values. The mean return of trades during the averaging period coincides with Markowitz's definition of portfolio value weighted return. We derive the market-based volatility of return and return-value correlations. We present approximations of the characteristic functions and probability measures of stock return by a finite number of market-based statistical moments. To forecast market-based average return or volatility of return, one should predict the statistical moments and correlations of current and past market trade values at the same time horizon.
LSNet: Lightweight Spatial Boosting Network for Detecting Salient Objects in RGB-Thermal Images

Most recent methods for RGB (red–green–blue)-thermal salient object detection (SOD) involve several floating-point operations and have numerous parameters, resulting in slow inference, especially on common processors, and impeding their deployment on mobile devices for practical applications. To address these problems, we propose a lightweight spatial boosting network (LSNet) for efficient RGB-thermal SOD with a lightweight MobileNetV2 backbone to replace a conventional backbone (e.g., VGG, ResNet). To improve feature extraction using a lightweight backbone, we propose a boundary boosting algorithm that optimizes the predicted saliency maps and reduces information collapse in low-dimensional features. The algorithm generates boundary maps based on predicted saliency maps without incurring additional calculations or complexity. As multimodality processing is essential for high-performance SOD, we adopt attentive feature distillation and selection and propose semantic and geometric transfer learning to enhance the backbone without increasing the complexity during testing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with 14 RGB-thermal SOD methods on three datasets while improving the numbers of floating-point operations (1.025G) and parameters (5.39M), model size (22.1 MB), and inference speed (9.95 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 1, and Intel i5-7500 processor; 93.53 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 1, and NVIDIA TITAN V graphics processor; 936.68 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 20, and graphics processor; 538.01 fps for TensorRT and batch size of 1; and 903.01 fps for TensorRT/FP16 and batch size of 1). The code and results can be found from the link of https://github.com/zyrant/LSNet.
Past events never come back

Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with its quantum mechanical prolongation. Experimental evidence, involving rejection of the traditional isolation paradigm, points to a solution of this paradox. No system may be thought of as isolated. Irreversibility is imported from ``elsewhere''. The popular objection of the followers of determinism, consisting in extrapolating local behaviour to the scale of the universe and stressing alleged contradictions generated by the non-isolation hypothesis, is intellectually unacceptable. It is unjustifiable to draw conclusions by extrapolating beyond the domain of scientific observation.
An approximate solution for describing a fundamental soliton in nonlocal nonlinear media

In this paper, an approximate analytic solution is presented for describing a fundamental soliton in a nonlocal medium with exponential response nonlinearity, by employing a variational approach. By comparing it with the exact solution obtained under special conditions and a numerical solution, it is shown that this approximate analytic solution can provide a good description of the behavior of a fundamental soliton for a wide range of parameters, and in particular for a small energy flow.
Spontaneous and electric field induced quadratic optical nonlinearity in ferroelectric crystals AgNa(NO2)2

We demonstrate the second harmonic generation (SHG) in ferroelectric AgNa(NO2)2 crystals resulting from the spontaneous and electric field induced polarizations. Relatively high effective nonlinear optic (NLO) susceptibility is combined in this crystals with the existing several phase matching geometries of NLO interaction. Anomalously large response of SHG with respect to an applied electric field has been found in the vicinity of the paraelectric-to-ferroelectric phase transition. The behavior of NLO properties in the ferroelectric phase and especially in the region of the Curie point is discussed within the phenomenological theory.
Application of the multiband kp ?> -models to quantum transport in quasi-periodic crystals

We consider the quantum transport of a particle in a crystal where the global three-dimensional translation symmetry is removed. Our analysis concerns solid state structures where the microscopic potential of the ions is no longer periodic. This includes materials with variable chemical composition, intergrowth compounds and abrupt junctions. The application of the kp multiband envelope function models to the description of the quantum mechanical motion in such a quasi-periodic structure is investigated. By using a spectral decomposition technique, we show that when the interatomic distance is asymptotically small, the particle probability density can be obtained by the envelope kp model with variable coefficients.
Complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness and the impact on cost of debt: A cross-country study

Managers can take advantage of the flexibility of accounting choices to act opportunistically through financial aggressiveness and/or tax aggressiveness. The higher the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness, the higher the risk arising from the levels of error or fraudulent reporting carried out by such firms (fraud risk). This study aims to examine the impacts of the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness on the cost of debt. We estimate these relationships with a two-stage estimator method using 7 200 firm-year samples from East Asia and Europe for the period 2014 to 2016. In the first stage, a binary logistics model is used to examine the factors that influence the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness. Then in the second stage, we use a regression model to examine the effect of the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness on the cost of debt. We find that the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness has a positive and significant effect on the cost of debt, meaning that the higher the complementary level of financial and tax aggressiveness, the higher the cost of debt faced by firms. Creditors perceive the practice of financial and tax aggressiveness as a significant firm risk, thus tending to increase the cost of the debt they provide.
Stability of planar switched systems: the linear single, input case

We study the stability of the origin for the dynamical system, x/spl dot/(t)=u(t)Ax(t)+(1-u(t))Bx(t), where A and B are two 2/spl times/2 real matrices with eigenvalues having strictly negative real part, x/spl isin/R/sup 2/ and u(.):[0, /spl infin/[/spl rarr/ [0, 1] is a completely random measurable function. More precisely, we find a (coordinates invariant) necessary and sufficient condition on A and B for the origin to be asymptotically stable for each function u(.). This bidimensional problem assumes particular interest since linear systems of higher dimensions can be reduced to our situation. Two unpublished examples in the (more difficult) case in which both matrices have real eigenvalues are analyzed in details.
Rotated target classification of sonar images via classification after alignment

Rotated target classification is a key problem in the automatic target recognition of sonar images. We propose herein a novel rotated target classification method of sonar images featured by classification after alignment. The proposed method first aligns the orientation of the rotated targets to normal orientation, and then uses the aligned images to train and test Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) to predict target categories. On the basis of rotated target detection of Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) images, the proposed method was applied to classify the detected rotated targets and compared with the widely used data augmentation method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the classification accuracy, accelerates both the training and inference of CNN, and decreases the number of parameters of CNN.
Genetic Predisposition to a Higher Whole Body Water Mass May Increase the Risk of Atrial Fibrillation: A Mendelian Randomization Study

Background: Observational studies have found an association between increased whole body water mass (BWM) and atrial fibrillation (AF). However, the causality has yet to be confirmed. To provide feasible protective measures on disease development, we performed Mendelian randomization (MR) design to estimate the potential causal relationship between increased BWM and AF. Methods: We implemented a two-sample MR study to assess whether increased BWM causally influences AF incidence. For exposure, 61 well-powered genetic instruments extracted from UK Biobank (N = 331,315) were used as the proxies of BWM. Summary genetic data of AF were obtained from FinnGen (Ncase = 22,068; Ncontrol = 116,926). Inverse-variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger and weighted median methods were selected to infer causality, complemented with a series of sensitivity analyses. MR-Pleiotropy Residual Sum and Outlier (MR-PRESSO) and Radial MR were employed to identify outliers. Furthermore, risk factor analyses were performed to investigate the potential mechanisms between increased BWM and AF. Results: Genetic predisposition to increased BWM was demonstrated to be significantly associated with AF in the IVW model (OR = 2.23; 95% CI = 1.47–3.09; p = 1.60 × 10−7), and the result was consistent in other MR approaches. There was no heterogeneity or pleiotropy detected in sensitivity analysis. MR-PRESSO identified no outliers with potential pleiotropy after excluding outliers by Radial MR. Furthermore, our risk factor analyses supported a positive causal effect of genetic predicted increased BWM on edematous diseases. Conclusions: MR estimates showed that a higher BWM could increase the risk of AF. Pathological edema is an important intermediate link mediating this causal relationship.
Positive Linear Relationship between Nucleophosmin Protein Expression and the Viral Load in HPV-Associated Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Possible Tool for Stratification of Patients

Most oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas (OPSCCs) are human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated, high-risk (HR) cancers that show a better response to chemoradiotherapy and are associated with improved survival. Nucleophosmin (NPM, also called NPM1/B23) is a nucleolar phosphoprotein that plays different roles within the cell, such as ribosomal synthesis, cell cycle regulation, DNA damage repair and centrosome duplication. NPM is also known as an activator of inflammatory pathways. An increase in NPM expression has been observed in vitro in E6/E7 overexpressing cells and is involved in HPV assembly. In this retrospective study, we investigated the relationship between the immunohistochemical (IHC) expression of NPM and HR-HPV viral load, assayed by RNAScope in situ hybridization (ISH), in ten patients with histologically confirmed p16-positive OPSCC. Our findings show that there is a positive correlation between NPM expression and HR-HPV mRNA (Rs = 0.70, p = 0.03), and a linear regression (r2 = 0.55; p = 0.01). These data support the hypothesis that NPM IHC, together with HPV RNAScope, could be used as a predictor of transcriptionally active HPV presence and tumor progression, which is useful for therapy decisions. This study includes a small cohort of patients and, cannot report conclusive findings. Further studies with large series of patients are needed to support our hypothesis.