Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Severe cerebellar malformations in mutant mice demonstrate a role for PDGF-C/PDGFRα signalling in cerebellar development

ABSTRACT Formation of the mouse cerebellum is initiated in the embryo and continues for a few weeks after birth. Double-mutant mice lacking platelet-derived growth factor C (PDGF-C) and that are heterozygous for platelet-derived growth factor receptor alpha (Pdgfc-/-; PdgfraGFP/+) develop cerebellar hypoplasia and malformation with loss of cerebellar lobes in the posterior vermis. This phenotype is similar to those observed in Foxc1 mutant mice and in a human neuroimaging pattern called Dandy Walker malformation. Pdgfc-Pdgfra mutant mice also display ependymal denudation in the fourth ventricle and gene expression changes in cerebellar meninges, which coincide with the first visible signs of cerebellar malformation. Here, we show that PDGF-C/PDGFRα signalling is a critical component in the network of molecular and cellular interactions that take place between the developing meninges and neural tissues, and which are required to build a fully functioning cerebellum.
Charge effect of water-soluble porphyrin derivatives as a prototype to fight infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii by aPDT approaches

Abstract In the last decade, Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as a pathogen associated with infections in intensive care units worldwide, especially due to its ability to resist an extensive list of antibiotics. In this context, porphyrins have emerged as an important strategy in photodynamic therapy, since they are a group of tetrapyrrolic compounds with important photochemical and photobiological activities. In this study, the antimicrobial photodynamic activity of meso-tetra(4-N-methyl-pyridyl)porphyrin (H2TMePyP+ ) and meso-tetra(4-sulfonatophenyl)porphyrin (H2TPPS‒ ) was evaluated against A. baumannii by minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), anti-biofilm activity, and the interaction with antibiotics after exposure to white-light LED irradiation. The cationic derivative H2TMePyP+ was more potent (MIC = 0.61 µM) than H2TPPS‒ , with anti-biofilm activity and increased the antimicrobial activity of ciprofloxacin and amikacin. Given these findings, the tetra-cationic porphyrins can be assumed as prototypes to optimize and develop new agents by promoting oxidative stress and inducing free radical production.
A propensity score-matched comparison of patient satisfaction following periacetabular osteotomy or total hip arthroplasty for developmental dysplasia of the hip in an Asian cohort

Background: No studies have compared patient satisfaction between periacetabular osteotomy (PAO) and total hip arthroplasty (THA) for osteoarthritis (OA) secondary to developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in Asian cohorts. Methods: Multivariate analyses were applied to determine whether patient demographics and postoperative patient-reported outcomes were correlated with postoperative patient satisfaction in 737 DDH patients (251 PAO and 486 THA patients). Additionally, postoperative patient satisfaction, Oxford Hip Score (OHS), University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) activity score, and sports participation were compared between propensity-matched PAO and THA patients for OA secondary to DDH (Kellgren-Lawrence grade II: 32 PAO and 16 THA patients, grade III: 20 PAO and 40 THA patients). Results: Of the 737 patients, 663 patients (90%) were postoperatively satisfied. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that THA was positively correlated with patient satisfaction. Furthermore, high postoperative OHS-pain, OHS-ADL, and UCLA scores were positively correlated with satisfaction. In propensity-matched PAO and THA patients, PAO elicited greater patient satisfaction than THA for KL grade II OA secondary to DDH, with comparable postoperative OHS (including the pain and ADL subscale), UCLA score, and sports participation rate. In contrast, THA resulted in better satisfaction and OHS-pain for KL grade III OA secondary to DDH, with comparable postoperative OHS-ADL, UCLA score, and sports participation rate in the 2 surgeries. Conclusions: Both PAO and THA procedures offer distinct patient satisfaction advantages based on preoperative OA severity. These findings can assist in the clinical decision-making process for the surgical treatment of middle-aged patients with symptomatic DDH.
Food security management in developing countries: Influence of economic factors on their food availability and access

The research presents an analysis of the food security policy effectiveness on the component of food availability and access in two developing countries, Colombia and Kyrgyzstan, during the period from 2000 to 2018. Determining the state of their food balance trade and the regression analysis for the Food Production Index of the countries, considering four economic indicators. Thus the study attempts to show that policies and strategies have not reached the expected results in terms of reduction of food imports dependency and strengthening of national production and export industry. Furthermore was found that among the economic indicators considered, food inflation, food imports, food exports, and extreme monetary poverty; the last one was the indicator that presented influence on the Food Production Index of both countries, during the period analyzed, showing that access was the main component that defines the food production. The results highlighted the need of integrating food security with the monetary and trade policies of these countries.
Predictors of Pain Reduction Among Fibromyalgia Patients Using Medical Cannabis: A Long‐Term Prospective Cohort Study

Many patients with fibromyalgia (FM) report using cannabis as a strategy to improve pain. Given that pain often co‐occurs with symptoms of anxiety and depression (i.e., negative affect) and sleep problems among patients with FM, improvements in these symptoms might indirectly contribute to reductions in pain intensity following cannabis use. The main objective of the study was to examine whether changes in pain intensity following initiation of medical cannabis among patients with FM could be attributed to concurrent changes (i.e., reductions) in negative affect and sleep problems.
Sharp Generalization of Transductive Learning: A Transductive Local Rademacher Complexity Approach

We introduce a new tool, Transductive Local Rademacher Complexity (TLRC), to analyze the generalization performance of transductive learning methods and motivate new transductive learning algorithms. Our work extends the idea of the popular Local Rademacher Complexity (LRC) to the transductive setting with considerable changes compared to the analysis of typical LRC methods in the inductive setting. We present a localized version of Rademacher complexity based tool wihch can be applied to various transductive learning problems and gain sharp bounds under proper conditions. Similar to the development of LRC, we build TLRC by starting from a sharp concentration inequality for independent variables with variance information. The prediction function class of a transductive learning model is then divided into pieces with a sub-root function being the upper bound for the Rademacher complexity of each piece, and the variance of all the functions in each piece is limited. A carefully designed variance operator is used to ensure that the bound for the test loss on unlabeled test data in the transductive setting enjoys a remarkable similarity to that of the classical LRC bound in the inductive setting. We use the new TLRC tool to analyze the Transductive Kernel Learning (TKL) model, where the labels of test data are generated by a kernel function. The result of TKL lays the foundation for generalization bounds for two types of transductive learning tasks, Graph Transductive Learning (GTL) and Transductive Nonparametric Kernel Regression (TNKR). When the target function is low-dimensional or approximately low-dimensional, we design low rank methods for both GTL and TNKR, which enjoy particularly sharper generalization bounds by TLRC which cannot be achieved by existing learning theory methods, to the best of our knowledge.
How do 3-year-olds do on the NIH Toolbox Cognitive Battery?

ABSTRACT The NIH Toolbox includes a cognitive battery that provides an Early Childhood Composite score for children age 3–7. However, very few studies have evaluated feasibility when it is used in the youngest segment of this age range—3-year-olds. The current study evaluated performance on the four cognitive subtests composing the early childhood composite, two of which assess executive function, in a large sample of 3-year-olds enrolled in a Vanguard pilot of the National Children’s Study. Results found that in a cohort of 609 3-year-olds (mean age = 39.6 months, SD = 1.6, 53% male, 64% White, 87% Non-Hispanic) who were administered four subtests included in the Early Childhood Composite, up to approximately 30% were unable to pass practice items on the Flanker, Dimensional Change Card Sort, and Picture Sequence Memory, whereas only approximately 3% were unable to pass practice items on the Picture Vocabulary Test. Furthermore, of those that did pass practice and achieve scores on the subtests, approximately 70% and 80% performed at or below chance level on the executive function tasks (Flanker and Dimensional Change Card Sort) and Picture Sequence Memory, respectively. Ultimately, the average 3-year-old has difficulty with three of the four NIH Toolbox tasks composing the Early Childhood Composite and may not yet have developed the requisite skills. These findings indicate that changes compatible with the developmental level of preschoolers are recommended to increase the feasibility and effectiveness of the NIH Toolbox in measuring individual cognition differences in 3-year-old children.
Impact of age, sex and surgery type on engagement with an online patient education and support platform developed for total hip and knee replacement patients

Background Patients should be active participants in the management of their condition and provided with appropriate information throughout their care pathway. We piloted an online digital platform (ODP) to deliver patient education and support (PES) for patients undergoing total hip (THR) and knee replacements (TKR). The aim of this study is to analyse the demographics of patients using the ODP, determine how and when they accessed the ODP and how different sexes and age groups interacted with the ODP. Methods Demographics and program library logs for patients registered to the ODP between 21st September 2017 and 28th May 2020 was obtained. Associations between age, sex, type of surgery and engagement were assessed using statistical comparisons. Results 1195 patients were registered on the ODP of which 832 (69.6%) accessed their carepacs. Patients accessed the content within their carepacs a mean of 29.1 times, spending a mean total time of 83 minutes. There was greater engagement for patients with a THR carepac (75.5%) compared to TKR (63.8%) (p<0.001). There were no differences in the proportion of patients that accessed the ODP or the total time spent on the platform dependent upon age (p = 0.34). Females accessed the platform more than males (p = 0.03). The use of a computer to access the ODP increased as age increased, whereas the use of a phone was favoured by the younger age groups (p<0.001). Conclusion An ODP providing information to patients regarding their surgery is effective and demonstrates high levels of patient engagement. An online resource such as this does not discriminate against age or sex in terms of accessibility and can be useful for information provision.
PIRNet: Personality-Enhanced Iterative Refinement Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is important for enhancing user experience in human–computer interaction. Unlike vanilla emotion recognition in individual utterances, ERC aims to classify constituent utterances in a dialog into corresponding emotion labels, which makes contextual information crucial. In addition to contextual information, personality traits also affect emotional perception based on psychological findings. Although researchers have proposed several approaches and achieved promising results on ERC, current works in this domain rarely incorporate contextual information and personality influence. To this end, we propose a novel framework to integrate these factors seamlessly, called “Personality-enhanced Iterative Refinement Network (PIRNet). ” Specifically, PIRNet is a multistage iterative method. To capture personality influence, PIRNet leverages personality traits to mimic emotional transitions and generates personality-enhanced results. Then we exploit sequence models to capture contextual information in conversations. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets for ERC, that is, IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI. Experimental results demonstrate that our PIRNet succeeds over currently advanced approaches to emotion recognition.
SIMD-ified R-tree Query Processing and Optimization

The introduction of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions in mainstream CPUs has enabled modern database engines to leverage data parallelism by performing more computation with a single instruction, resulting in a reduced number of instructions required to execute a query as well as the elimination of conditional branches. Though SIMD in the context of traditional database engines has been studied extensively, it has been overlooked in the context of spatial databases. In this paper, we investigate how spatial database engines can benefit from SIMD vectorization in the context of an R-tree spatial index. We present vectorized versions of the spatial range select, and spatial join operations over a vectorized R-tree index. For each of the operations, we investigate two storage layouts for an R-tree node to leverage SIMD instructions. We design vectorized algorithms for each of the spatial operations given each of the two data layouts. We show that the introduction of SIMD can improve the latency of the spatial query operators up to 9×. We introduce several optimizations over the vectorized implementation of these query operators, and study their effectiveness in query performance and various hardware performance counters under different scenarios.
Graphia: A platform for the graph-based visualisation and analysis of high dimensional data

Graphia is an open-source platform created for the graph-based analysis of the huge amounts of quantitative and qualitative data currently being generated from the study of genomes, genes, proteins metabolites and cells. Core to Graphia’s functionality is support for the calculation of correlation matrices from any tabular matrix of continuous or discrete values, whereupon the software is designed to rapidly visualise the often very large graphs that result in 2D or 3D space. Following graph construction, an extensive range of measurement algorithms, routines for graph transformation, and options for the visualisation of node and edge attributes are available, for graph exploration and analysis. Combined, these provide a powerful solution for the interpretation of high-dimensional data from many sources, or data already in the form of a network or equivalent adjacency matrix. Several use cases of Graphia are described, to showcase its wide range of applications in the analysis biological data. Graphia runs on all major desktop operating systems, is extensible through the deployment of plugins and is freely available to download from https://graphia.app/.
Preparation and characterization of a new sustainable bio-based elastomer nanocomposites containing poly(glycerol sebacate citrate)/chitosan/n-hydroxyapatite for promising tissue engineering applications

Abstract Poly (glycerol sebacate citrate) (PGSC) has potential applications in tissue engineering due to its biodegradability and suitable elasticity. However, its applications are restricted owing to its acidity and high degradation rate. In this study, a new bio-nanocomposite based on PGSC has been synthesized by incorporating chitosan (CS) and various concentrations of hydroxyapatite nanoparticles (n-HA). It is assumed that the basicity of a CS and hydroxyl groups of n-HA will reduce the acidity of PGSC and control the rate of degradation. Also, the biocompatibility of n-HA and inherent hydrophilicity of CS can improve cell adhesion and proliferation of PGSC-based scaffolds. FTIR, XRD, FESEM, and EDX tests confirmed the synthesis of these nanocomposites and the interaction between each of the components. The results of the DMTA test also indicated the elastic behavior of the samples embedded with n-HA. The hydrophilicity assay demonstrated that the water contact angle of the scaffolds decreased as the concentration of n-HA augmented, and it reached the value of 44 ± 0.9° for nanocomposite containing 5 wt. % n-HA. The degradation rate of all PGSC nanocomposites was reduced due to the anionic groups of n-HA and CS. TGA assay indicated that the incorporation of n-HA led to the enhancement of scaffolds’ thermal stability. Furthermore, the synergistic effect of CS and n-HA on the enhancement of protein adsorption and cell proliferation was confirmed through protein adhesion and MTT assay, respectively. Consequently, the addition of n-HA and CS perform the new bio-nanocomposites scaffolds based on PGSC with sufficient hydrophilicity, flexibility, and thermal stability in tissue engineering applications. Graphical Abstract HIGHLIGHTS Potential applications of PGSC in tissue engineering due to its elasticity properties Suitable hydrophilicity of PGSC in the presence of CS and hydroxyapatite Synergistic effect of CS and n-HA on the control of degradation rate Significant impact of n-HA on cell proliferation and cell adhesion properties
Educational Needs of People Living with Atrial Fibrillation: A Qualitative Study

Background This study explored the educational and self‐management needs of adults living with atrial fibrillation (AF). Methods and Results This is a qualitative study of adults living with AF, clinicians, and expert key stakeholders. Interviews were conducted via a one‐to‐one semistructured videoconference or phone and transcribed verbatim for thematic analysis. A total of 34 participants were recruited and included in analyses (clinicians n=13; experts n=13, patients n=8). Interviews were on average 40 (range 20–70) minutes in duration. Three key themes were identified: (1) “Patient‐centered AF education”; (2) “Prioritizing AF education”; and (3) “Timing AF education. ” The availability of credible information was perceived as highly variable. Information primarily focused on anticoagulation, or procedural information, as opposed to other aspects of management, such as risk factor reduction. Factors to optimize learning, such as multimedia, apps, case studies, or the use of visuals were perceived as important. Continuity of care, including engagement of caregivers, was important to help develop relationships, and facilitate understanding, while concurrently creating opportunities for timely targeted education. Clinicians described acute care as a suboptimal setting to deliver education. Competing interests aligned with the time‐pressured context of acute care were prioritized over patient education. In contrast, patients valued continuity of care. AF education strategies need to pivot from a “one size fits all” approach and modernize to implement a range of approaches. Conclusions There remain many unmet needs in the provision of quality AF education to support self‐management. Multimodal offerings and the ability to tailor to individual patient needs are important design considerations for new education programs.
Context and priorities for health systems strengthening for pain and disability in low- and middle-income countries: a secondary qualitative study and content analysis of health policies

Abstract Musculoskeletal (MSK) health impairments contribute substantially to the pain and disability burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet health systems strengthening (HSS) responses are nascent in these settings. We aimed to explore the contemporary context, framed as challenges and opportunities, for improving population-level prevention and management of MSK health in LMICs using secondary qualitative data from a previous study exploring HSS priorities for MSK health globally and (2) to contextualize these findings through a primary analysis of health policies for integrated management of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in select LMICs. Part 1: 12 transcripts of interviews with LMIC-based key informants (KIs) were inductively analysed. Part 2: systematic content analysis of health policies for integrated care of NCDs where KIs were resident (Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Philippines and South Africa). A thematic framework of LMIC-relevant challenges and opportunities was empirically derived and organized around five meta-themes: (1) MSK health is a low priority; (2) social determinants adversely affect MSK health; (3) healthcare system issues de-prioritize MSK health; (4) economic constraints restrict system capacity to direct and mobilize resources to MSK health; and (5) build research capacity. Twelve policy documents were included, describing explicit foci on cardiovascular disease (100%), diabetes (100%), respiratory conditions (100%) and cancer (89%); none explicitly focused on MSK health. Policy strategies were coded into three categories: (1) general principles for people-centred NCD care, (2) service delivery and (3) system strengthening. Four policies described strategies to address MSK health in some way, mostly related to injury care. Priorities and opportunities for HSS for MSK health identified by KIs aligned with broader strategies targeting NCDs identified in the policies. MSK health is not currently prioritized in NCD health policies among selected LMICs. However, opportunities to address the MSK-attributed disability burden exist through integrating MSK-specific HSS initiatives with initiatives targeting NCDs generally and injury and trauma care.
The profunda artery perforator flap for upper limb reconstruction: A case report and literature review on the flap applications in reconstruction

The profunda femoris artery perforator (PAP) flap has been recently popularized as an alternative option for microsurgical reconstruction. The use of PAP flap has never been reported and described for reconstruction of the upper extremities, in particular the forearm. The purpose of this case report is to describe a case suggesting the PAP flap as a further reconstructive option in the upper limb. A 16‐year‐old girl who sustained a traumatic injury to her right dominant forearm resulting in subtotal circumferential tissue loss following a road traffic accident was referred to the authors' department 2 years post‐trauma. The disabling fibrotic sequelae on her volar forearm (15 × 10 cm) resulted in a nonfunctional hand. She was unable to perform any active movement of her wrist or digits. Passive movements in the finger joints were preserved. Following debridement and reconstruction of nerves and tendons, soft tissues were resurfaced with a PAP flap. The transverse skin paddle, 12 × 7 cm, was placed distally with the adipofascial portion positioned proximally above the muscle bellies and anastomoses site. A small raw area (4 × 3 cm) was covered with an acellular dermal matrix (ADM). The postoperative course was uneventful. At 9 months postoperatively, the patient demonstrated active flexion and extension of the fingers with independent function. The patient reported satisfaction with the flap donor site and forearm resurfacing. The PAP flap can be a further option for areas requiring soft tissue coverage in patients refusing visible scars. This flap had both the advantage of reducing the morbidity and visibility of the donor site, as well as the ability to resurface a large recipient site with soft and pliable tissue, covering exposed nerves and tendons.