Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spiral spin textures of a bosonic Mott insulator with SU(3) spin-orbit coupling

We study the Mott phase of three-component bosons, with one particle per site, in an optical lattice by mapping it onto an SU(3) spin model. In the simplest case of full SU(3) symmetry, one obtains a ferromagnetic Heisenberg model. Introducing an SU(3) analog of spin-orbit coupling, additional spin-spin interactions are generated. We first consider the scenario of spin-dependent hopping phases, leading to Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya-type interactions. They result in the formation of spiral spin textures, which in one dimension can be understood by a local unitary transformation. Applying classical Monte Carlo simulations, we extend our study to two-dimensional systems, and systems with "true" spin-orbit coupling, involving spin-changing hoppings.
Psychometric validity of the Montgomery and Åsberg Depression Rating Scale for Youths (MADRS-Y)

Abstract Background Because of all the serious consequences of major depressive disorder (MDD), it is important to screen for MDD in adolescents. The aim of this study was to test the psychometric properties of the newly developed self-report depression scale MADRS-Y for adolescents in a normative Swedish sample. Methods The study included 620 adolescents in the age range of 12–20 years old. The normative sample was randomly split into two equal parts, to perform principal component analysis (PCA) on sample one and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on sample two. We investigated the psychometrics. Results The result from the PCA suggested that all 12 potential items should be used, and the items loaded on the same construct of depression. The CFA supported the one-factor structure with good fit indices. Measurement invariance was confirmed, allowing interpretation regardless of gender or age differences. Reliability was good, α . 89, for both samples separately. Test-retest reliability was good to excellent (intraclass correlation coefficients = .87 and .91). Evidence of convergent and discriminant validity was shown. Conclusions The results in the current study suggest that the MADRS-Y is a brief, reliable, and valid self-report questionnaire of depressive symptoms for adolescents in the general population.
A General Framework for Inferring Bayesian Ideal Observer Models from Psychophysical Data

Abstract A central question in neuroscience is how sensory inputs are transformed into percepts. At this point, it is clear that this process is strongly influenced by prior knowledge of the sensory environment. Bayesian ideal observer models provide a useful link between data and theory that can help researchers evaluate how prior knowledge is represented and integrated with incoming sensory information. However, the statistical prior employed by a Bayesian observer cannot be measured directly, and must instead be inferred from behavioral measurements. Here, we review the general problem of inferring priors from psychophysical data, and the simple solution that follows from assuming a prior that is a Gaussian probability distribution. As our understanding of sensory processing advances, however, there is an increasing need for methods to flexibly recover the shape of Bayesian priors that are not well approximated by elementary functions. To address this issue, we describe a novel approach that applies to arbitrary prior shapes, which we parameterize using mixtures of Gaussian distributions. After incorporating a simple approximation, this method produces an analytical solution for psychophysical quantities that can be numerically optimized to recover the shapes of Bayesian priors. This approach offers advantages in flexibility, while still providing an analytical framework for many scenarios. We provide a MATLAB toolbox implementing key computations described herein.
Rhabdomyosarcoma xenotransplants in zebrafish embryos

Rhabdomyosarcomas (RMS) are the most common pediatric soft tissue sarcomas. High‐risk and metastatic disease continues to be associated with very poor prognosis. RMS model systems that faithfully recapitulate the human disease and provide rapid, cost‐efficient estimates of antitumor efficacy of candidate drugs are needed to facilitate drug development and personalized medicine approaches. Here, we present a new zebrafish‐based xenotransplant model allowing for rapid and easily accessible drug screening using low numbers of viable tumor cells and relatively small amounts of water‐soluble chemicals. Under optimized temperature conditions, embryonal RMS xenografts were established in zebrafish embryos at 3 h postfertilization (hpf). In proof‐of‐principle experiments, chemotherapy drugs with established clinical anti‐RMS efficacy (vincristine, dactinomycin) and the mitogen‐activated protein kinase kinase inhibitor trametinib were shown to significantly reduce the cross‐sectional area of the tumors by 120 hpf. RMS xenograft models in zebrafish embryos henceforth could serve as a valuable addition to cell culture and mammalian models of RMS and represent a rapid and cost‐effective solution for preclinical candidate drug testing.
Editorial: Recent Approval of Sotorasib as the First Targeted Therapy for KRAS G12C-Mutated Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC)

In the past two decades, there have been rapid advances in the number and range of regulatory approvals of targeted therapy for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other cancers. The Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog (KRAS) gene has a high mutation rate in human cancers and is associated with some of the most aggressive types of cancer, including NSCLC, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), and colorectal cancer (CRC). Until recently, several common and highly aggressive cancers with KRAS mutations expressing the ‘death star’ KRAS proteins were considered ‘undruggable’ and not amenable to targeted therapy. The main KRAS mutations are single-base missense mutations, with 98% occurring at codon 12 (G12C). KRAS G12C is the most common KRAS mutation in NSCLC. Sotorasib is a first-in-class specific small molecule that irreversibly inhibits KRAS G12C. Based on the results from the phase 1/2 CodeBreaK 100 safety and tolerability study, on May 28, 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval for sotorasib for adults with advanced NSCLC and KRAS G12C mutation. This Editorial aims to present the current status of regulatory approval and the supporting clinical trial data for sotorasib, the first targeted therapy for patients with advanced NSCLC with the KRAS G12C mutation.
The number of cases, mortality and treatments of viral hemorrhagic fevers: A systematic review

Background Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are a group of diseases, which can be endemo-epidemic in some areas of the world. Most of them are characterized by outbreaks, which occur irregularly and are hard to predict. Innovative medical countermeasures are to be evaluated but due to the field specificities of emerging VHF, challenges arise when implementing clinical studies. To assess the state of the art around VHFs, we conducted a systematic review for all reports and clinical studies that included specific results on number of cases, mortality and treatment of VHFs. Methods The search was conducted in January 2020 based on PRISMA guidelines (PROSPERO CRD42020167306). We searched reports on the WHO and CDC websites, and publications in three international databases (MEDLINE, Embase and CENTRAL). Following the study selection process, qualitative and quantitative data were extracted from each included study. A narrative synthesis approach by each VHF was used. Descriptive statistics were conducted including world maps of cases number and case fatality rates (CFR); summary tables by VHF, country, time period and treatment studies. Results We identified 141 WHO/CDC reports and 126 articles meeting the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies were published after 2010 (n = 97 for WHO/CDC reports and n = 93 for publications) and reported number of cases and/or CFRs (n = 141 WHO/CDC reports and n = 88 publications). Results varied greatly depending on the outbreak or cluster and across countries within each VHF. A total of 90 studies focused on Ebola virus disease (EVD). EVD outbreaks were reported in Africa, where Sierra Leone (14,124 cases; CFR = 28%) and Liberia (10,678 cases; CFR = 45%) reported the highest cases numbers, mainly due to the 2014–2016 western Africa outbreak. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) outbreaks were reported from 31 studies in Africa, Asia and Europe, where Turkey reported the highest cases number (6,538 cases; CFR = 5%) and Afghanistan the last outbreak in 2016/18 (293 cases; CFR = 43%). Regarding the 38 studies reporting results on treatments, most of them were non-randomized studies (mainly retrospective or non-randomized comparative studies), and only 10 studies were randomized controlled trials. For several VHFs, no specific investigational therapeutic option with strong proof of effectiveness on mortality was identified. Conclusion We observed that number of cases and CFR varied greatly across VHFs as well as across countries within each VHF. The number of studies on VHF treatments was very limited with very few randomized trials and no strong proof of effectiveness of treatment against most of the VHFs. Therefore, there is a high need of methodologically strong clinical trials conducted in the context of VHF.
Self-Supervised Learning for Non-Rigid Registration Between Near-Isometric 3D Surfaces in Medical Imaging

Non-rigid registration between 3D surfaces is an important but notorious problem in medical imaging, because finding correspondences between non-isometric instances is mathematically non-trivial. We propose a novel self-supervised method to learn shape correspondences directly from a group of bone surfaces segmented from CT scans, without any supervision from time-consuming and error-prone manual annotations. Relying on a Siamese architecture, DiffusionNet as the feature extractor is jointly trained with a pair of randomly rotated and scaled copies of the same shape. The learned embeddings are aligned in spectral domain using eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator. Additional normalization and regularization losses are incorporated to guide the learned embeddings towards a similar uniform representation over spectrum, which promotes the embeddings to encode multiscale features and advocates sparsity and diagonality of the inferred functional maps. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results among the unsupervised methods on several benchmarks, and presents greater robustness and efficacy in registering moderately deformed shapes. A hybrid refinement strategy is proposed to retrieve smooth and close-to-conformal point-to-point correspondences from the inferred functional map. Our method is orientation and discretization-invariant. Given a pair of near-isometric surfaces, our method automatically computes registration in high accuracy, and outputs anatomically meaningful correspondences. In this study, we show that it is possible to use neural networks to learn general embeddings from 3D shapes in a self-supervised way. The learned features are multiscale, informative, and discriminative, which might potentially benefit almost all types of morphology-related downstream tasks, such as diagnostics, data screening and statistical shape analysis in future.
TCR CDR3‐antigen chemical complementarity associated with poor ovarian cancer outcomes: A vestigial immune response to early cancer antigens?

Ovarian cancer continues to present significant challenges for early detection and treatment, indicating a need for novel approaches to improve disease outcomes. In this report, we applied a previously described algorithm for detecting chemical complementarity between candidate cancer antigens and complementarity determining region‐3 (CDR3) amino acid sequences from tumor resident T‐cell receptors. Current literature indicates an association between high CDR3‐cancer antigen complementarity and improved survival outcomes. For example, high CDR3‐BRAF electrostatic complementarity is associated with a better melanoma outcome. However, such CDR3‐cancer antigen chemical complementarity in ovarian cancer was largely associated with worse outcomes. Specifically, high CDR3‐MAGEB4 and CDR3‐TDRD1 electrostatic complementarity was associated with lower ovarian cancer disease free survival (DFS). Additionally, high CDR3‐MAGEB4 and CDR3‐TDRD1 electrostatic complementarity was associated with decreased MAGEB4/TDRD1 gene expression and gene copy numbers, consistent with a selection against ovarian cancer cells expressing these antigens. However, when TDRD1 was split into fragments, high CDR3‐TDRD1 hydrophobicity complementarity, for a specific TDRD1 fragment, was associated with increased DFS and higher immune marker expression levels. This dichotomy highlights the myriad of opportunities to establish risk stratifications and to identify potential, actionable cancer antigens using immunogenomic parameters.
Attention as a multi‐level system of weights and balances

Abstract This opinion piece is part of a collection on the topic: “What is attention? ” Despite the word's place in the common vernacular, a satisfying definition for “attention” remains elusive. Part of the challenge is there exist many different types of attention, which may or may not share common mechanisms. Here we review this literature and offer an intuitive definition that draws from aspects of prior theories and models of attention but is broad enough to recognize the various types of attention and modalities it acts upon: attention as a multi‐level system of weights and balances. While the specific mechanism(s) governing the weighting/balancing may vary across levels, the fundamental role of attention is to dynamically weigh and balance all signals—both externally‐generated and internally‐generated—such that the highest weighted signals are selected and enhanced. Top‐down, bottom‐up, and experience‐driven factors dynamically impact this balancing, and competition occurs both within and across multiple levels of processing. This idea of a multi‐level system of weights and balances is intended to incorporate both external and internal attention and capture their myriad of constantly interacting processes. We review key findings and open questions related to external attention guidance, internal attention and working memory, and broader attentional control (e.g., ongoing competition between external stimuli and internal thoughts) within the framework of this analogy. We also speculate about the implications of failures of attention in terms of weights and balances, ranging from momentary one‐off errors to clinical disorders, as well as attentional development and degradation across the lifespan. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Neuroscience > Cognition
A comprehensive review of platelet-rich plasma for the treatment of dermatologic disorders

Abstract Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) offers anti-inflammatory and regenerative properties through angiogenesis, cell differentiation, and proliferation. Although studied in many dermatologic conditions, its efficacy is not well-understood. Our objective is to review the use and effectiveness of PRP for dermatologic conditions. A literature search was performed through PubMed and yielded 54 articles published between January 2000 and November 2021; articles written in English were reviewed. Intradermal injections were associated with increased hair density in androgenic alopecia. Successful treatment of inflammatory nail diseases with PRP has been reported. Improvement in psoriasis was described, but only two studies were available. PRP was associated with higher patient self-assessment scores of photoaging and fine lines. Treatment with PRP in melasma has been associated with improved subjective satisfaction, but not with objective measures of disease improvement. PRP can serve as a safe and potentially effective adjunct for hair loss, vitiligo, nonhealing wounds, photoaging, and acne scars. An important barrier to interpreting PRP research is lack of standardization of PRP preparation protocols, inconsistent clinical endpoints, and frequent combination treatments. However, PRP is relatively noninvasive, has a well-established safety profile, and patient satisfaction is often high as patients perceive great benefit from treatment with PRP.
A hybrid LBM-DEM numerical approach with an improved immersed moving boundary method for complex particle-liquid flows involving adhesive particles

This paper presents a hybrid numerical framework for modelling solid-liquid flow with particle adhesion based on a coupled single-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and a discrete element method (DEM) for adhesive particles. The LBM is implemented with an improved immersed moving boundary (IMB) method for solving complex fluid-particle interactions using a fast linear approximation of partially intersected volume between a particle and a lattice cell. It is shown that the linear approximation of the solid fraction is very efficient with good accuracy. In order to model particle adhesion, the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) adhesive contact mechanics is adopted with a novel implicit solution to obtain the particle-particle normal force in the DEM. The developed hybrid IMB-LBM-DEM numerical framework is verified with several benchmark tests. The results confirm that the hybrid numerical approach is capable of deriving more detailed flow field between dense particles with relatively low grid resolution, as well as effectively capturing the adhesive mechanics between microspheres.
Topological phase transition from nodal to nodeless d-wave superconductivity in electron-doped cuprate superconductors

Unlike the hole-doped cuprates, both nodal and nodeless superconductivity (SC) are observed in the electron-doped cuprates. To understand these two types of SC states, we propose a unified theory by considering the two-dimensional model in proximity to an antiferromagnetic (AF) long-range ordering state. Within the slave-boson mean-field approximation, the d-wave pairing symmetry is still the most energetically favorable even in the presence of the external AF field. In the nodal phase, it is found that the nodes carry vorticity and are protected by the adjoint symmetry of time-reversal and one unit lattice translation. Robust edge modes are obtained, suggesting the nodal d-wave SC being a topological weak-pairing phase. As decreasing the doping concentration or increasing the AF field, the nodes with opposite vorticity annihilate and the nodeless strong-pairing phase emerges. The topological phase transition is characterized by a critical point with anisotropic Bogoliubov quasiparticles, and a universal understanding is thus established for all electron-doped cuprates.
Identifying the culprit artery via 12‐lead electrocardiogram in inferior wall ST‐segment elevation myocardial infarction: A meta‐analysis

Inferior wall ST‐segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is mostly caused by acute occlusion of right coronary artery (RCA) and left circumflex artery (LCX). Several methods and algorithms using 12‐lead ECG were developed to localize the lesion in inferior wall STEMI. However, the diagnostic properties of these methods remain under‐recognized.
Broad diversity in monoterpene-sesquiterpene balance across wild sunflowers: implications of leaf and floral volatiles for biotic interactions.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY As plant lineages diversify across environmental gradients, species are predicted to encounter divergent biotic pressures. This study investigates the evolution of volatile secondary metabolism across Helianthus genus. METHODS Leaves and petals of 40 species of wild Helianthus were analyzed via gas chromatography-mass-spectrometry to describe volatile secondary metabolite profiles. KEY RESULTS Across all species, 500 compounds were identified including 40% sesquiterpenes, 18% monoterpenes, 3% diterpenes, 4% fatty acid derivatives, and 35% other compounds such as phenolics and small organic molecules. Qualitatively, annuals and species from more arid western climates had leaf compositions with a higher proportion of total monoterpenes, while erect perennials and species from more mesic eastern habitats contained a higher proportion of total sesquiterpenes. Among species, mass-based leaf monoterpene and sesquiterpene abundance were identified as largely orthogonal axes of variation by principal components analysis. Leaf and petal profiles were not strongly correlated. CONCLUSIONS Wide diversity in volatile metabolism was observed among wild Helianthus, indicating the value of this genus as both a model system, and a rich genetic resource. The independence of leaf and petal volatile profiles indicates a low level of phenotypic integration between vegetative and reproductive structures, implying vegetative defense and reproductive defense or pollinator attraction functions mediated by terpene profiles in these two organs can evolve without major tradeoffs. The major biosynthetic pathways that manufacture the major terpenes identified in wild Helianthus have been well described to date, providing a road map to deeper inquiry into the drivers of this diversity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Influential factors of spousal relationship quality in couples living with dementia – A narrative synthesis systematic review

Aim The aim of this systematic review is to identify factors that influence relationship quality in couples living with dementia. Previous research has shown how maintaining a positive spousal relationship quality is important for quality of life and coping for both the caregiver and the person with dementia. Knowledge of influential factors could contribute to a deeper understanding of the value of a couple-centred clinical practice and research, within the field of dementia. Research design and methods Systematic procedures to database search, screening, data extraction and synthesis were followed. Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods studies were included. A narrative synthesis was conducted through narrative summaries of included studies, thematic analysis and narrative descriptions of factors influencing relationship quality. Results 39 studies were included in the study: 28 qualitative, 8 quantitative and 3 mixed methods. Through the narrative synthesis, 20 factors were identified. The factors were grouped into two overarching themes: The world of us and The world outside of us, and further to six influencing factor categories: (1) Attitudes and strategies, (2) Behaviour and activities, (3) Emotional connectedness, (4) Activities and experiences outside of the home, (5) Social behaviour and roles, and (6) Belonging and safety. Discussion and conclusion The identified factors influence relationship quality in couples living with dementia on various levels. The findings of this review study should inform clinical, couple-centred dementia care practise and intervention studies, and further research should seek to gain deeper understandings of the individual factors and broader understandings of the correlations between factors.