Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preoperative Endoscopic Ultrasound-Guided Hepaticogastrostomy Facilitates Decompression and Diagnosis in Patients With Suspected Malignant Biliary Obstruction: A Case Series

Endoscopic ultrasound-guided hepaticogastrostomy (EUS-HG) is increasingly being used as an alternative to percutaneous transhepatic biliary drainage (PTBD) after unsuccessful endoscopic retrograde pancreatography (ERCP). This technique has also been utilized for diagnosis of malignant biliary obstruction by providing biliary access for antegrade cholangioscopy with biopsies and brushings for cytology and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). However, the potential impact of EUS-HG on surgical candidacy in cases with resectable disease remains unknown. We present three patients who underwent pancreaticoduodenectomy (Whipple procedure) for suspected distal malignant biliary obstruction following EUS-HG. Biliary drainage was achieved in all three patients preoperatively and a diagnosis of malignancy could be established in two of the three cases using this technique. There were no procedure-related complications. The HG metal stent was removed eight weeks post-operatively with cholangiogram showing a patent hepaticojejunostomy in all three patients. Mean length of follow-up after EUS-HG was 298 +/- 96 days. Our case series demonstrates that EUS-HG is an effective method to achieve biliary decompression in patients with an inaccessible papilla. The mature HG tract can subsequently be used to obtain a tissue diagnosis. Lastly, EUS-HG does not preclude patients from undergoing a curative Whipple procedure.
Peak-tracking scanning capacitance force microscopy with multibias modulation technique

Scanning capacitance force microscopy (SCFM) is a good method for capacitance measurements using electrostatic force detection. However, to obtain an entire capacitance–voltage (C–V) curve by SCFM, a sweep of a direct current (DC) bias voltage is required at a certain fixed point on a sample surface during scan suspension, and thus the measurements become very time-consuming when we want to observe some types of image related with C–V characteristics. In this paper, we propose peak-tracking scanning capacitance force microscopy (PTSCFM) for the purpose of extracting the main feature of the C–V curve without DC voltage sweep. In PT-SCFM, alternating current voltages at three different angular frequencies, ω 1, ω 2, and ωm , are applied together with DC voltage, VDC , to generate an electrostatic force, and high-order components at the angular frequencies of ω2−2ω1 and ω2−2ω1−ωm , which represent a voltage derivative of a capacitance ( ∂C/∂V ) and a second-order derivative of the capacitance ( ∂2C/∂V2 ), respectively, are extracted from the electrostatic force. Then, a DC voltage, Vp , giving the peak of ∂C/∂V is determined from VDC to be adjusted to nullify the ω2−2ω1−ωm component using a feedback controller. From the obtained values of Vp and ∂C/∂V at Vp , the C–V curve can be outlined. In PT-SCFM, the distributions of those values are simultaneously imaged together with a topography without VDC sweep, and when we operate PT-SCFM under various modulation frequency conditions, analyses similar to those based on the frequency dependence of the C–V property are realized. We have applied the PT-SCFM to a microcrystalline Cu(In,Ga)Se2 material to discuss the effects of surface depletion and deep-level states, from which the validity of PT-SCFM has been examined.
Brand Extension untuk Produk Baru

Abstrak Brand merupakan masalah utama dalam strategi produk. Perusahaan harus memilih strategi brand yang tepat bagi perusahaan. Ada dua strategi yaitu line extension dan brand extension . Dalam artikel ini hanya akan dibahas tentang brand extension . Selain itu, ada dua pandangan yang berla-wanan dari para peneliti tentang efek brand extension . Pertama, ada efek positif dari brand exten-sion . Kedua, efek negatif dari brand extension . Tujuan artikel ini adalah melihat konsep brand ex-tension yang didapat dari literature penelitian-penelitian yang sudah ada. Kata Kunci: Brand, Brand Extension, Strategi Produk
The Art of Managing Innovation Problems and Opportunities

Innovation has long been a central concept in all areas of life and spheres of the economy, from manufacturing to services, and from commerce to education. Despite the fact that there is much talk about innovation, many organisations in both the private and public sector would rather avoid innovation than accept it with open arms. One reason for this is undoubtedly inadequate knowledge and a lack of skill in the management of the innovation process and the changes it may engender. Like most other skills, those pertaining to the processes of innovation may also be learned by organisations. The right approach, supported by knowledge and insight, and, in particular, the will and support of management in effecting change, are essential in this. This Book is intended both for those who wish to include elements of innovation in their academic work processes as well as practical person who would like to structure and improve their existing processes of innovation. It focuses primarily on the management of the initial phase of the innovation process, i.e. the identification of problems and innovation opportunities. It consists of four parts, each of which represents a chapter, that together represent a new approach to the introduction of innovative methodology. It is a “bottom to top” approach that works from the identification of an actual problem to the implementation of a solution. The Book brings together a selection of some well and lesser known methods, together with a number of newly deliberated approaches and techniques especially prepared for this purpose. It should be noted that some of the methods are original. The authors of each of these are marked accordingly.
PLA2G7, caloric restriction and cardiovascular aging

© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Divergent Metabolic Effects of Metformin Merge to Enhance Eicosapentaenoic Acid Metabolism and Inhibit Ovarian Cancer In Vivo

Simple Summary Although the anticancer effects of metformin are well studied, its effect on energy metabolism of cancer cells remains elusive. Metformin can alter the metabolism of cells either by activating AMPK or inhibiting the mitochondrial respiratory chain complex. The aim of the study was to explore the distinct metabolic profiles of ovarian cancer cell lines post-metformin treatment and to understand metformin’s metabolism-based anti-growth effect on ovarian cancer cell lines. In this study, using the untargeted metabolomics approach, we found that metformin treatment promoted omega-3 fatty acid metabolism in three different ovarian cancer cell lines, and treating ovarian xenografts with specific omega-3 fatty acids, especially EPA, reduced ovarian tumor growth. Thus, our study adds an additional potential therapeutic mechanism to the multi-potent anticancer effects of metformin. Abstract Metformin is being actively repurposed for the treatment of gynecologic malignancies including ovarian cancer. We investigated if metformin induces analogous metabolic changes across ovarian cancer cells. Functional metabolic analysis showed metformin caused an immediate and sustained decrease in oxygen consumption while increasing glycolysis across A2780, C200, and SKOV3ip cell lines. Untargeted metabolomics showed metformin to have differential effects on glycolysis and TCA cycle metabolites, while consistent increased fatty acid oxidation intermediates were observed across the three cell lines. Metabolite set enrichment analysis showed alpha-linolenic/linoleic acid metabolism as being most upregulated. Downstream mediators of the alpha-linolenic/linoleic acid metabolism, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), were abundant in all three cell lines. EPA was more effective in inhibiting SKOV3 and CaOV3 xenografts, which correlated with inhibition of inflammatory markers and indicated a role for EPA-derived specialized pro-resolving mediators such as Resolvin E1. Thus, modulation of the metabolism of omega-3 fatty acids and their anti-inflammatory signaling molecules appears to be one of the common mechanisms of metformin’s antitumor activity. The distinct metabolic signature of the tumors may indicate metformin response and aid the preclinical and clinical interpretation of metformin therapy in ovarian and other cancers.
CAPACIDADES EMPREENDEDORAS DA GESTORA DA MEDEOR MEDTECH, STARTUP SEDIADA NA ARATEC - INCUBADORA E ACELERADORA DE NEGÓCIOS INOVADORES DE ARARANGUÁ/SC

Em um mercado cada vez mais competitivo, empresas inovadoras de grande potencial de crescimento, as startups, recebem destaque. Uma vez que tais empresas são compostas por uma equipe reduzida, mas com profissionais com notório conhecimento, um estudo destinado a conhecer as capacidades empreendedoras dos gestores se mostra de grande relevância. Neste sentido, o presente trabalho descreve o perfil do gestor, bem como o contexto em que se encontra a startup MedEOR Medtech, sediada na Incubadora e Aceleradora de Negócios Inovadores de Araranguá/SC. Juntamente com tal pesquisa, há uma abordagem de como a pandemia de COVID-19 interfere no negócio, fato que corrobora com a magnitude do presente estudo.
Engineering of Viscosupplement Biomaterials for Treatment of Osteoarthritis: A Comprehensive Review

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a progressive degenerative disease that causes severe pain and functional limitation, especially during locomotion. It is the most common arthritis type that damages the surface of articular cartilage until the underlying bone. In the past decade, the scientific community has made a considerable effort to improve or discover therapeutical products used as a form of conservative treatment capable of restoring the damaged articular tissue, avoiding, as far as possible, the use of surgical practices. The most common and direct nonoperative application available for OA treatment is the viscosupplementation (VS) procedure that demonstrates a safe, effective method and is less painful for the patients. The most recent works dealing with the design, development, and validation of viscosupplement products in preclinical and clinical trials for OA treatment are overviewed herein. In general, despite the development of new products, hyaluronic acid continues to be among the most reported intra‐articular viscosupplement products used in clinical trials, typically used as an isolated product or conjugated with other biologicals or drugs, such as platelet‐rich plasma and corticosteroids (CS). However, this issue is still demanding innovation. Approaches comprising new biomaterials as VS products, with intrinsic bioactivity, economical, and environmental friendliness, are required.
SwinSUNet: Pure Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Convolutional neural network (CNN) can extract effective semantic features, so it was widely used for remote sensing image change detection (CD) in the latest years. CNN has acquired great achievements in the field of CD, but due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operation, it could not capture global information in space-time. The Transformer was proposed in recent years and it can effectively extract global information, so it was used to solve computer vision (CV) tasks and achieved amazing success. In this paper, we design a pure Transformer network with siamese U-shaped structure to solve CD problems, and name it SwinSUNet. SwinSUNet contains encoder, fusion and decoder, and all of them use Swin Transformer blocks as basic units. Encoder has a siamese structure based on hierarchical Swin Transformer, so encoder can process bi-temporal images in parallel and extract their multi-scale features. Fusion is mainly responsible for the merge operation of the bi-temporal features generated by encoder. Like encoder, decoder also based on hierarchical Swin Transformer. Different from encoder, decoder uses up-sampling and merging (UM) block and Swin Transformer blocks to recover the details of the change information. The encoder uses patch merging and Swin Transformer blocks to generate effective semantic features. After the sequential process of these three modules, SwinSUNet will output the change maps. We did expensive experiments on four CD datasets, in these experiments SwinSUNet achieved better results than other related methods.
Combination Therapy with TCM Preparation Kumu Injection and Azithromycin against Bacterial Infection and Inflammation: In Vitro and In Vivo

Background Azithromycin (AZM) is one of the most common broad-spectrum antibiotics. However, drug resistance is increasing and combination therapy has attracted great attention. AZM is usually combined with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) preparations with heat-clearing and detoxifying effects, including Kumu injection (KM) made from Picrasma quassioides (D. Don) Benn. Purpose The present study aimed to investigate synergistic antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activities of KM plus AZM with the aim of understanding the mechanism of clinical efficacy of combination regimens. Methods Seven common bacterial clinical isolates and LPS-induced RAW 264.7 cells were used for assay of in vitro potency. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) was determined for each drug, followed by synergy testing through the checkerboard method and fractional inhibitory concentration index (FICI) for quantifying combined antibacterial effects. The rat model of Klebsiella pneumoniae-induced pneumonia was developed and subjected to various drug treatments, namely, AZM, KM, or AZM plus KM, intravenously administered at 75 mg/kg once a day for one week. The combination effects then were evaluated according to pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetic assessments. Results KM-AZM combination synergistically inhibits in vitro growth of all the test standard strains except Pseudomonas aeruginosa and also the drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Shigella dysenteriae, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Escherichia coli. Despite an additive effect against NO, KM plus AZM at an equal dose could synergistically suppress overrelease of the inflammatory cytokines TNF-α and IL-6 by LPS-induced RAW 264.7 cells. The combination significantly inhibited the proliferation of K. pneumoniae in the rat lungs, mainly by inactivating MAPKs and NF-κB signaling pathways. KM-AZM combination caused a onefold increase in apparent distribution volume of AZM, along with a significant decrease of AZM level in the livers and heart for pharmacokinetics. Conclusion KM-AZM combination displayed synergistic antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects beneficial to the therapeutic potential against bacterial infection.
Adipose Dysfunction in Adulthood Insulin Resistance of Low-Birth Weight Mice: A Proteomics Study

Purpose To investigate changes in the protein expression profile of white adipose tissue in low-birth weight (LBW) mice with high-fat diets using tandem mass tag (TMT) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and parallel reaction monitoring (PRM). Methods Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) mice were used to establish an LBW model using malnutrition during pregnancy. Male pups were randomly selected from LBW and normal-birth weight (NBW) offspring, then all given a high-fat diet. Blood glucose, serum insulin, total cholesterol (TC) and triglyceride (TG) levels were measured. The weight ratio of liver, muscle, and adiposity index were calculated. Hematoxylin and eosin staining was used to visualize adipose tissue morphology. Oil red O staining of liver and TG content of muscle were used to determine ectopic lipid deposition. TMT combined with LC-MS/MS was used to analyze protein expression in white adipose tissue. PRM and Western blot were used to verify the expression of CD36, SCD1, PCK1 and PPARγ. Results Compared with NBW mice, fasting blood glucose, insulin and HOMA-IR significantly increased in LBW mice, indicating insulin resistance and impaired glucose regulation; TC, TG, adipocyte size, and adiposity index were increased in LBW mice, suggesting obesity and disorder of lipid metabolism. We observed ectopic lipid deposition in liver and muscle. There were 996 differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) in the LBW/NBW groups. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) was a relatively important signaling pathway regulating metabolic process in functional enrichment analysis of DEPs. Up-regulated expression of CD36, SCD1, and PCK1 in the adipose tissue of LBW mice was observed through PPAR pathways cluster analysis. And PRM and Western blot assay validated the proteomics findings. Conclusion When exposed to high-fat diets, LBW mice exhibited insulin resistance and disorder of lipid metabolism compared with NBW mice. The expression of PPARγ was elevated, as well as upstream CD36, downstream SCD1 and PCK1 of the PPARγ in the adipose tissue of LBW mice. It was suggested that the activation in CD36/PPARγ/SCD1 and CD36/PPARγ/PCK1 pathways may induce adipose dysfunction, thereby increasing susceptibility to insulin resistance.
Influence of physical load of maximum aerobic power on hemodynamics and morpho-biochemical changes in erythrocytes in female volleyball players

Purpose: to study the types of cardiohemodynamic response of the organism and morpho-biochemical changes of erythrocytes of peripheral blood of volleyball players to physical activity of maximum aerobic capacity. Material and methods In 18 highly qualified volleyball players aged 22.0±0.60 years, cardiohemodynamics (by functional methods), functional changes (by biochemical methods) and the structure of erythrocytes (using scanning electron microscopy) were studied before and after the maximum (3.5 W/kg of body weight) of physical activity. Results. It was found that maximal physical activity causes significant changes in cardiohemodynamics, which result in morphological rearrangement of peripheral blood erythrocytes (increase in erythrocyte deformation index) and closely correlate with biochemical changes (decrease in ATP concentration and increase in magnesium concentration in erythrocytes). Possible mechanisms of realization of features of reaction of an organism of volleyball players to physical activity of the maximum aerobic power depending on type of regulation of blood circulation and morpho-biochemical changes of erythrocytes of peripheral blood are discussed. Conclusions. Physical activity of maximum aerobic power in highly qualified female volleyball players reveals the typological features of the cardiohemodynamic response of the body of volleyball players, which is expressed by conformational changes in peripheral blood erythrocytes and depends on the concentration of individual macroelements in these cells and on the type of cardiohemodynamics.
Use of a Wearable Biosensor to Study Heart Rate Variability in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Its Relationship to Disease Severity

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between heart rate variability (HRV) and various phenotypic measures that relate to health and functional status in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and secondly, to demonstrate the feasibility of ascertaining HRV via a chest-worn wearable biosensor in COPD patients. HRV analysis was performed using SDNN (standard deviation of the mean of all normal R-R intervals), low frequency (LF), high frequency (HF), and LF/HF ratio. We evaluated the associations between HRV and COPD severity, class of bronchodilator therapy prescribed, and patient reported outcomes. Seventy-nine participants with COPD were enrolled. There were no differences in SDNN, HF, and LF/HF ratio according to COPD severity. The SDNN in participants treated with concurrent beta-agonists and muscarinic antagonists was lower than that in other participants after adjusting heart rate (beta coefficient −3.980, p = 0.019). The SDNN was positively correlated with Veterans Specific Activity Questionnaire (VSAQ) score (r = 0.308, p = 0.006) and handgrip strength (r = 0.285, p = 0.011), and negatively correlated with dyspnea by modified Medical Research Council (mMRC) questionnaire (r = −0.234, p = 0.039), health status by Saint George’s Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) (r = −0.298, p = 0.008), symptoms by COPD Assessment Test (CAT) (r = −0.280, p = 0.012), and BODE index (r = −0.269, p = 0.020). When measured by a chest-worn wearable device, reduced HRV was observed in COPD participants receiving inhaled beta-sympathomimetic agonist and muscarinic antagonists. HRV was also correlated with various health status and performance measures.
Simulating multiple urban land use changes by integrating transportation accessibility and a vector-based cellular automata: a case study on city of Toronto

ABSTRACT The accessibility provided by the transportation system plays an essential role in driving urban growth and urban functional land use changes. Conventional studies on land use simulation usually simplified the accessibility as proximities and adopted the grid-based simulation strategy, leading to the insufficiencies of characterizing spatial geometry of land parcels and simulating subtle land use changes among urban functional types. To overcome these limitations, an Accessibility-interacted Vector-based Cellular Automata (A-VCA) model was proposed for the better simulation of realistic land use change among different urban functional types. The accessibility at both local and zonal scales derived from actual travel time data was considered as a key driver of fine-scale urban land use changes and was integrated into the vector-based CA simulation process. The proposed A-VCA model was tested through the simulation of urban land use changes in the City of Toronto, Canada, during 2012–2016. A vector-based CA without considering the driving factor of accessibility (VCA) and a popular grid-based CA model (Future Land Use Simulation, FLUS) were also implemented for comparisons. The simulation results reveal that the proposed A-VCA model is capable of simulating fine-scale urban land use changes with satisfactory accuracy and good morphological feature (kappa = 0.907, figure of merit = 0.283, and cumulative producer’s accuracy = 72.83% ± 1.535%). The comparison also shows significant outperformance of the A-VCA model against the VCA and FLUS models, suggesting the effectiveness of the accessibility-interactive mechanism and vector-based simulation strategy. The proposed model provides new tools for a better simulation of fine-scale land use changes and can be used in assisting the formulation of urban and transportation planning.