Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of sarcopenia on long-term survival after cardiac surgery for end-stage renal disease patients

Background The long-term mortality of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients is still unsatisfactory. Therefore, long-term risk assessments in ESRD patients undergoing cardiac surgery are needed. Recently, sarcopenia is major concern in cardiac surgery because of its association with poor long-term survival. However, the impact of sarcopenia on the long-term survival of ESRD patients undergoing cardiac surgery is not well understood. Methods Eighty-two ESRD patients who underwent elective cardiac surgery were enrolled. Sarcopenia was identified based on noncontrast abdominal computed tomography. The impact of preoperative and intraoperative factors on long-term survival was investigated. Results Forty-three patients (52%) were diagnosed with sarcopenia. The in-hospital mortality rate was 4.9%. The 5-year overall survival rate was 48%. The multivariate analyses revealed that STS score ≥ 4 (odds ratio, 6.0; confidence interval, 2.5–14.7; p < 0.01) and presence of sarcopenia (odds ratio, 2.4; confidence interval, 1.3–4.5; p = 0.03) were independent risk factors for overall survival. The 5-year survival rates of low-risk (Society of Thoracic Surgeons score of < 4) patients without sarcopenia, low-risk with sarcopenia, more than intermediate-risk (Society of Thoracic Surgeons score of ≥ 4) without sarcopenia, and more than intermediate-risk with sarcopenia groups were 80%, 51%, 50%, and 26%, respectively. Conclusions Among the ESRD patients, the low risk without sarcopenia group showed an excellent long-term survival, in contrast to more than intermediate-risk patients with sarcopenia, who can expect poor long-term survival. Preoperative assessment of sarcopenia in addition to the surgical risk score can be useful in developing a therapeutic strategy.
Post-operative rebleeding in patients with spontaneous supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage: factors and clinical outcomes.

OBJECTIVE To explore factors affecting postoperative rebleeding in patients with spontaneous supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage (SSICH). METHODS We retrospectively analyzed data from 724 patients with SSICH treated at Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University from December 2018 to October 2021. Finally, 294 people were eligible to be included in this study. Hematoma locations were classified as basal ganglia, thalamus, subcortex, or intraventricular. Surgery was categorized as neuroendoscopic surgery, burr hole (stereotactic drilling and drainage), or open craniotomy. Postoperative rebleeding was recorded. The incidence, risk factors, and prognosis of postoperative rebleeding were evaluated. RESULTS All procedures were successfully completed. Postoperative rebleeding occurred in 57 patients (19.83%, 57/294). Univariate logistic regression analysis identified these risk factors for rebleeding: admission Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score, irregular hematoma morphology by preoperative Computed Tomography (CT), postoperative hypertension, hematoma location, surgical method (P<0.05), and preoperative hematoma volume (P<0.1). Multivariate logistic regression analysis confirmed admission GCS score, irregular hematoma morphology by preoperative CT, postoperative hypertension, hematoma location, and surgical method as significant risk factors (P<0.05). Burr hole surgery and basal ganglia hematomas were associated with increased odds of rebleeding, and the mortality rates in patients with rebleeding versus no rebleeding were 7.02% versus 0.84%. CONCLUSIONS Neuroendoscopic surgery, craniotomy, and burr hole are all effective for treating SSICH, but burr hole surgery was an important risk factor for rebleeding and an adverse outcome. Admission GCS score, irregular hematoma morphology, blood pressure control, hematoma location, and surgical method are affected the risk of postoperative rebleeding. 3D Slicer-assisted neuroendoscopic surgery may be the most effective treatment for many patients with SSICH.
Predicting pediatric healthcare provider use of virtual reality using a technology acceptance model

Abstract Objective The primary aim of this study was to apply a novel technology acceptance model (TAM) for virtual reality (VR) in healthcare. The secondary aim was to assess reliability of this model to evaluate factors that predict the intentions of pediatric health providers’ use of VR as an anxiolytic for hospitalized pediatric patients. Materials and Methods Healthcare providers that interacted with pediatric patients participated in a VR experience available as anxiolysis for minor procedures and then completed a survey evaluating attitudes, behaviors, and technology factors that influence adoption of new technologies. Results Reliability for all domain measurements were good, and all confirmatory factor analysis models demonstrated good fit. Usefulness, ease of use, curiosity, and enjoyment of the VR experience all strongly predict intention to use and purchase VR technologies. Age of providers, past use, and cost of technology did not influence future purchase or use, suggesting that VR technologies may be broadly adopted in the pediatric healthcare setting. Discussion Previous VR-TAM models in non-healthcare consumers formulated that age, past use, price willing to pay, and curiosity impacted perceived ease of use. This study established that age, past use, and cost may not influence use in healthcare. Future studies should be directed at evaluating the social influences and facilitating conditions within healthcare that play a larger influence on technology adoption. Conclusion The VR-TAM model demonstrated validity and reliability for predicting intent to use VR in a pediatric hospital.
Acceleration region dynamics in a magnetically shielded Hall thruster

The influence of the cathode flow fraction and facility background pressure on the acceleration region of a magnetically shielded Hall thruster is experimentally characterized. The location of the acceleration region is measured using laser-induced fluorescence on H9, a 9-kW class Hall thruster, for six different facility background pressures and four different cathode flow fractions. The results show that when the facility pressure is increased from 7.1 × 10– 6 to 3.0 × 10– 5 Torr-Xe, the acceleration region shifts inward 1.6 ± 0.5 mm. Similarly, when the cathode flow fraction is increased from 7% to 15%, the acceleration region shifts inward 0.9 ± 0.5 mm. This experiment leads to two conclusions. First, introducing neutrals in the cathode region can directly impact the acceleration mechanism in the thruster. Second, changing the cathode flow fraction affects the acceleration region of the thruster in a similar manner as the background pressure. This result is discussed in the context of the neutral dens.
Muscle forces acting on the greater trochanter lead to a dorsal warping of the apophyseal growth plate

The apophyseal growth plate of the greater trochanter, unlike most other growth plates of the human body, exhibits a curved morphology that results in a divergent pattern resembling an open crocodile mouth on plain antero‐posterior radiographs. To quantify the angular alignment of the growth plate and to draw conclusions about the function of the muscles surrounding it, we analyzed 57 MRI images of 51 children and adolescents aged 3–17 years and of six adults aged 18–52 years. We measured the angulation of the plate relative to the horizontal plane (AY angle) and the trajectories of the muscles attaching to the greater trochanter of the proximal femur. From anterior to posterior, the AY angle shows a decrease of 33.44°. In the anterior third, the cartilage is angled at a mean of 51.64°, and in the posterior third, the mean angulation is 18.6°. This indicates that the cartilage in the anterior region of the greater trochanteric apophysis is subject to more vertically oriented force vectors compared to the posterior region, as the growth plates align perpendicular to the force vectors acting on them. Combining the measured muscle trajectories with the physiological cross‐sectional areas (PCSA) available from the literature revealed that, in addition to the known internal and external lateral traction ligament systems, a third, dorsally located traction ligament system exists that may be responsible for the dorsal deformation of the AY angle.
Amnesia in healthy people via hippocampal inhibition: A new forgetting mechanism

Structural damage to the hippocampus gives rise to a severe memory deficit for personal experiences known as organic amnesia. Remarkably, such structural damage may not be the only way of creating amnesia; windows of amnesia can also arise when people deliberately disengage from memory via a process known as retrieval suppression. In this review, we discuss how retrieval suppression induces systemic inhibition of the hippocampus, creating “amnesic shadow” intervals in people’s memory for their personal experiences. When new memories are encoded or older memories are reactivated during this amnesic shadow, these memories are disrupted, and such disruption even arises when older memories are subliminally cued. Evidence suggests that the systemic inhibition of the hippocampus during retrieval suppression that gives rise to the amnesic shadow may be mediated by engagement of hippocampal GABAergic inhibitory interneurons. Similar amnesic shadow effects are observed during working memory tasks like the n-back, which also induce notable hippocampal downregulation. We discuss our recent proposal that cognitive operations that require the disengagement of memory retrieval, such as retrieval suppression, are capable of mnemonic process inhibition (the inhibition of mnemonic processes such as encoding, consolidation, and retrieval and not simply individual memories). We suggest that people engage mnemonic process inhibition whenever they shift attention from internal processes to demanding perceptual-motor tasks that may otherwise be disrupted by distraction from our inner world. This hitherto unstudied model of inhibition is a missing step in understanding what happens when attentional shifts occur between internally and externally oriented processes to facilitate goal-directed behaviour. This process constitutes an important novel mechanism underlying the forgetting of life events.
Connecting higher order interactions 1 with ecological stability in experimental 2 aquatic food webs 3

13 Community ecology is built on theory that represents the strength of 14 interactions between species as pairwise links. Higher order interactions occur when 15 the presence of a third (or more) species changes the pairwise interaction between a 16 focal pair. Recent theoretical work has highlighted the stabilizing role of higher order 17 interactions for communities, yet it remains unclear how important higher order 18 effects are in real communities. Here we used experimental communities of aquatic 19 protists to examine the relationship between higher-order interactions and 20 community stability (i.e., the persistence of species in a community). We cultured a 21 focal pair of consumers in the presence of additional competitors and a predator and 22 collected time series data of their abundances. We then fitted competition models 23 with and without HOIs to measure interaction strength between the focal pair across 24 different community compositions. We used survival analysis to measure the 25 persistence of individual species. We found evidence that additional species 26 positively affected persistence of the focal species and that HOIs were present in 27 most of our communities. However, persistence was only linked to HOIs for one of 28 the focal species. Our results vindicate community ecology theory positing that 29 species interactions may deviate from assumptions of pairwise interactions, opening 30 avenues to consider possible consequences for coexistence and community stability. 31
The hidden microbiome of hospital infection surveillance testing: biomarkers of health outcomes in MRSA and VRE colonization

Abstract Background Hospital-acquired infections present a major concern for healthcare systems in the U.S. and worldwide. Drug-resistant infections result in increased costs and prolonged hospital stays. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) are responsible for many drug-resistant infections in the U.S. We undertook two parallel studies aimed to investigate the differences in the microbial communities of individuals colonized with MRSA (or VRE) as compared to their respective non-colonized counterparts matched for age, sex, race, ethnicity, unit of admission, and diagnostic-related group, when available. Results The VRE study showed considerably more Enterococcus genus communities in the VRE colonized samples. Our findings for both MRSA and VRE studies suggest a strong association between 16S rRNA gene alpha diversity, beta diversity, and colonization status. When we assessed the colonized microbial communities in isolation, the differences disappeared, suggesting that the colonized microbial communities drove the change. Isolating Staphylococcus , we saw significant differences expressed across colonization in specific sequence variants. Conclusions The differences seen in the microbial communities from MRSA (or VRE) colonized samples as compared to non-colonized match-pairs are driven by the isolated communities of the Staphylococcus (or Enterococcus ) genus, the removal of which results in the disappearance of any differences in the diversity observed across the match-pairs.
Association between PD-L1 and Ki-67 expression and clinicopathologic features in NSCLC patients.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between PD-L1, Ki-67 and the association between PD-L1, Ki-67, and clinicopathologic features and laboratory parameters in the peripheral blood of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. METHODS The clinical records of 213 NSCLC patients were retrospectively reviewed. The patients were divided into high or low expression groups by cut-off values of Ki-67 and PD-L1. Correlation of PD-L1 and Ki-67 expression were analyzed by linear regression analysis. The data were tested by Mann-Whitney test. Relationship of PD-L1 and Ki-67 was tested by chi-square test. RESULTS Linear regression analysis revealed a positive association between the expression of PD-L1 and Ki-67 (R2=0.26, P<0.001). The clinicopathologic features and laboratory parameters such as gender, smoking history, histological types, TNM stage, tumor size, ALB, and FIB were all significantly associated with PD-L1 and Ki-67 expression (all P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS The expression of PD-L1 and Ki-67 is related to some clinicopathologic features and inflammatory factors, which brings new sight for exploiting combination biomarkers and therapeutic strategies.
Evidence‐based consensus guidelines for ALS genetic testing and counseling

Advances in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) gene discovery, ongoing gene therapy trials, and patient demand have driven increased use of ALS genetic testing. Despite this progress, the offer of genetic testing to persons with ALS is not yet “standard of care. ” Our primary goal is to develop clinical ALS genetic counseling and testing guidelines to improve and standardize genetic counseling and testing practice among neurologists, genetic counselors or any provider caring for persons with ALS.
Replacing red and processed meat with lean or fatty fish and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in Norwegian women. The Norwegian Women and Cancer Study (NOWAC): a prospective cohort study

Abstract Nordic Nutrition Recommendations recommend reducing red and processed meat and increasing fish consumption, but the impact of this replacement on mortality is understudied. This study investigated the replacement of red and processed meat with fish in relation to mortality. Of 83 304 women in the Norwegian Women and Cancer Study (NOWAC) study, 9420 died during a median of 21·0 years of follow-up. The hazard ratios (HR) for mortality were estimated using Cox proportional hazards regression with analyses stratified on red and processed meat intake due to non-linearity. Higher processed meat (> 30 g/d), red and processed meat (> 50 g/d), and fatty fish consumption were associated with higher mortality, while red meat and lean fish consumption were neutral or beneficial. Among women with higher processed meat intake (> 30 g/d), replacing 20 g/d with lean fish was associated with lower all-cause (HR 0·92, 95 % CI 0·89, 0·96), cancer (HR 0·92, 95 % CI 0·88, 0·97) and CVD mortality (HR 0·82, 95 % CI 0·74, 0·90), while replacing with fatty fish was associated with lower CVD mortality (HR 0·87, 95 % CI 0·77, 0·97), but not with all-cause or cancer mortality. Replacing processed meat with fish among women with lower processed meat intake (≤ 30 g/d) or replacing red meat with fish was not associated with mortality. Replacing processed meat with lean or fatty fish may lower the risk of premature deaths in Norwegian women, but only in women with high intake of processed meat. These findings suggest that interventions to reduce processed meat intake should target high consumers.
Multi‐omic analyses and network biology in cardiovascular disease

Heart disease remains a leading cause of death in North America and worldwide. Despite advances in therapies, the chronic nature of cardiovascular diseases ultimately results in frequent hospitalizations and steady rates of mortality. Systems biology approaches have provided a new frontier toward unraveling the underlying mechanisms of cell, tissue, and organ dysfunction in disease. Mapping the complex networks of molecular functions across the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome has enormous potential to advance our understanding of cardiovascular disease, discover new disease biomarkers, and develop novel therapies. Computational workflows to interpret these data‐intensive analyses as well as integration between different levels of interrogation remain important challenges in the advancement and application of systems biology‐based analyses in cardiovascular research. This review will focus on summarizing the recent developments in network biology‐level profiling in the heart, with particular emphasis on modeling of human heart failure. We will provide new perspectives on integration between different levels of large “omics” datasets, including integration of gene regulatory networks, protein–protein interactions, signaling networks, and metabolic networks in the heart.
Neural Koopman prior for data assimilation

With the increasing availability of large scale datasets, computational power and tools like automatic differentiation and expressive neural network architectures, sequential data are now often treated in a data-driven way, with a dynamical model trained from the observation data. While neural networks are often seen as uninterpretable black-box architectures, they can still benefit from physical priors on the data and from mathematical knowledge. In this paper, we use a neural network architecture which leverages the long-known Koopman operator theory to embed dynamical systems in latent spaces where their dynamics can be described linearly, enabling a number of appealing features. We introduce methods that enable to train such a model for long-term continuous reconstruction, even in difficult contexts where the data comes in irregularly-sampled time series. The potential for self-supervised learning is also demonstrated, as we show the promising use of trained dynamical models as priors for variational data assimilation techniques, with applications to e.g. time series interpolation and forecasting.
Crystal Structure Prediction by Joint Equivariant Diffusion

Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) is crucial in various scientific disciplines. While CSP can be addressed by employing currently-prevailing generative models (e.g. diffusion models), this task encounters unique challenges owing to the symmetric geometry of crystal structures -- the invariance of translation, rotation, and periodicity. To incorporate the above symmetries, this paper proposes DiffCSP, a novel diffusion model to learn the structure distribution from stable crystals. To be specific, DiffCSP jointly generates the lattice and atom coordinates for each crystal by employing a periodic-E(3)-equivariant denoising model, to better model the crystal geometry. Notably, different from related equivariant generative approaches, DiffCSP leverages fractional coordinates other than Cartesian coordinates to represent crystals, remarkably promoting the diffusion and the generation process of atom positions. Extensive experiments verify that our DiffCSP significantly outperforms existing CSP methods, with a much lower computation cost in contrast to DFT-based methods. Moreover, the superiority of DiffCSP is also observed when it is extended for ab initio crystal generation.
Towards Better Data Exploitation in Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Depth estimation plays an important role in robotic perception systems. The self-supervised monocular paradigm has gained significant attention since it can free training from the reliance on depth annotations. Despite recent advancements, existing self-supervised methods still underutilize the available training data, limiting their generalization ability. In this letter, we take two data augmentation techniques, namely Resizing-Cropping and Splitting-Permuting, to fully exploit the potential of training datasets. Specifically, the original image and the generated two augmented images are fed into the training pipeline simultaneously and we leverage them to conduct self-distillation. Additionally, we introduce the detail-enhanced DepthNet with an extra full-scale branch in the encoder and a grid decoder to enhance the restoration of fine details in depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets. Moreover, our KITTI models also show superior generalization performance when transferring to Make3D, NYUv2 and Cityscapes datasets.
Stochastic Differential Mean-Field Games in a Weak Formulation

We study a Mean Field Game system in a weak formulation through its associated McKean-Vlasov Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equation (FBSDE). Our main goal is to obtain existence and regularity results of this FBSDE using the techniques of Malliavin calculus, in particular, classical and Malliavin differentiability. Using these results, we characterize the decoupling (master) field.
Electronic heat tunneling between two metals beyond the WKB approximation

Two metals at different temperatures separated by large gaps exchange heat under the form of electromagnetic radiation. When the separation distance is reduced and they approach contact (nanometer and sub-nanometer gaps), electrons and phonons can tunnel between the bodies, competing and eventually going beyond the flux mediated by thermal photons. In this transition regime the accurate modeling of electronic current and heat flux is of major importance. Here we show that, in order to quantitatively model this transfer, a careful description of the tunneling barrier between two metals is needed and going beyond the traditional WKB approximation is also essential. We employ analytical and numerical approaches to model the electronic potential between two semi-infinite jellium planar substrates separated by a vacuum gap in order to calculate the electronic heat flow and compare it with its radiative counterpart described by near-field radiative heat transfer. We demonstrate that the results for heat flux and electronic current density are extremely sensitive to both the shape and height of the barrier, as well as the calculation scheme for the tunneling probability, with variations up to several orders of magnitude. Using the proximity force approximation, we also provide estimates for tip-plane geometries. The present work provides realistic models to describe the electronic heat flux, in the scanning-thermal-microscopy experiments.