ahmedabdelwahed/Medical_papers_title_and_abstract_NLP_dataset huggingface dataset:
Effects of metal salt addition on odor and process stability during the anaerobic digestion of municipal waste sludge

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is an effective way to recover energy and nutrients from organic waste; however, several issues including the solubilization of bound nutrients and the production of corrosive, highly odorous and toxic volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) in AD biogas can limit its wider adoption. This study explored the effects of adding two different doses of ferric chloride, aluminum sulfate and magnesium hydroxide directly to the feed of complete mix semi-continuously fed mesophilic ADs on eight of the most odorous VSCs in AD biogas at three different organic loading rates (OLR). Ferric chloride was shown to be extremely effective in reducing VSCs by up to 87%, aluminum sulfate had the opposite effect and increased VSC levels by up to 920%, while magnesium hydroxide was not shown to have any significant impact. Ferric chloride, aluminum sulfate and magnesium hydroxide were effective in reducing the concentration of orthophosphate in AD effluent although both levels of alum addition caused digester failure at elevated OLRs. Extensive foaming was observed within the magnesium hydroxide dosed digesters, particularly at higher doses and high OLRs. Certain metal salt additions may be a valuable tool in overcoming barriers to AD and to meet regulatory targets.
Quercetin Fatty Acid Monoesters (C2:0-C18:0): Enzymatic Preparation and Antioxidant Activity

Quercetin monoesters were prepared via a one-step enzymatic transesterification. The main acylation products were eight quercetin ester derivatives, respectively, consisting of varying acyl groups ranging from 2 to 18 carbon atoms (acetate, butyrate, caproate, caprylate, caprate, laurate, myristate, and stearate). The purified quercetin esters were structurally characterized by LC-ESI-ToF and NMR HSQC. Meanwhile, several classical chemical (DPPH, ABTS, FRAP, and Fe2+ chelation assays), food (β-carotene bleaching assay), and biological (LDL and DNA oxidation assays) models were constructed to evaluate and systematically compare their antioxidant efficacy. O-Acylation increased the lipophilicity of quercetin derivatives, and lipophilicity increased with the increasing chain length of the acyl group. The dual effect of the acyl chain length on biasing quercetin monoesters' antioxidant efficacies has been summarized and verified. Overall, the results imply that the acylated quercetin have great potential as functional/health-beneficial ingredients for use in lipid-based matrices of cosmetics, supplements, and nutraceuticals.
Decreased Interleukin-1 Family Cytokine Production in Patients with Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Lung Disease

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) cause pulmonary disease in individuals without obvious immunodeficiency. This study was initiated to gain insight into the immunological factors that predispose persons to NTM pulmonary disease (NTMPD). Blood was obtained from 15 pairs of NTMPD patients and their healthy household contacts. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were stimulated with the Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC). A total of 34 cytokines and chemokines were evaluated in plasma and PBMC culture supernatants using multiplex immunoassays, and gene expression in the PBMCs was determined using real-time PCR. PBMCs from NTMPD patients produced significantly less interleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-18, IL-1α, and IL-10 than PBMCs from their healthy household contacts in response to MAC. Although plasma RANTES levels were high in NTMPD patients, they had no effect on IL-1β production by macrophages infected with MAC. Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) and TWIK2 (a two-pore domain K+ channel) were impaired in response to MAC in PBMCs of NTMPD patients. A TLR2 inhibitor decreased all four cytokines, whereas a two-pore domain K+ channel inhibitor decreased the production of IL-1β, IL-18, and IL-1α, but not IL-10, by MAC-stimulated PBMCs and monocytes. The ratio of monocytes was reduced in whole blood of NTMPD patients compared with that of healthy household contacts. A reduced monocyte ratio might contribute to the attenuated production of IL-1 family cytokines by PBMCs of NTMPD patients in response to MAC stimulations. Collectively, our findings suggest that the attenuated IL-1 response may increase susceptibility to NTM pulmonary infection through multiple factors, including impaired expression of the TLR2 and TWIK2 and reduced monocyte ratio. IMPORTANCE Upon MAC stimulation, the production of IL-1 family cytokines and IL-10 by PBMCs of NTMPD patients was attenuated compared with that of healthy household contacts. Upon MAC stimulation, the expression of TLR2 and TWIK2 (one of the two-pore domain K+ channels) was attenuated in PBMCs of NTMPD patients compared with that of healthy household contacts. The production of IL-1 family cytokines by MAC-stimulated PBMCs and MAC-infected monocytes of healthy donors was reduced by a TLR2 inhibitor and two-pore domain K+ channel inhibitor. The ratio of monocytes was reduced in whole blood of NTMPD patients compared with that of healthy household contacts. Collectively, our data suggest that defects in the expression of TLR2 and TWIK2 in human PBMCs or monocytes and reduced monocyte ratio are involved in the reduced production of IL-1 family cytokines, and it may increase susceptibility to NTM pulmonary infection.
Ultrasonic Electric Scalpels Based on a Sliding-Mode Controller With an Auxiliary PLL Frequency Discriminator

The first monolithic state-of-the-art controller was proposed and implemented for an electric scalpel system. A piezoelectric transducer (PT) is driven in ultrasonic resonant frequency to generate electromechanical power for thermal sealing and cold dissection operations. The band-pass filter based oscillator was developed to automatically track the PT's optimal longitudinal resonance. However, under heavy loading conditions, the PT will lock to other unwanted transverse resonant modes and deliver no usable power to the surgical tip. To prevent this abnormal operation, a phase-locked loop based frequency discriminator with intervention and release logic was developed to ensure that the PT always operates at the proper frequency of 55.5 kHz. Another crucial challenge is that the changing of loading conditions induces a motional current sensing mismatch and a pole-zero pair, consequently causing instability and poor response time. Therefore, a sliding mode control method with reduced-order sensing was proposed to handle the extreme load changes and provide a fast power build-up time of 9.2 ms, which is 8% faster than previously reported designs and 49% faster than the best commercial product. Sealing and dissection surgical operations are realized with 17.5 W maximum power.
XEDAR activates the non-canonical NF-κB pathway

Members of the tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR) superfamily are involved in a number of physiological and pathological responses by activating a wide variety of intracellular signaling pathways. The X-linked ectodermal dysplasia receptor (XEDAR; also known as EDA2R or TNFRSF27) is a member of the TNFR superfamily that is highly expressed in ectodermal derivatives during embryonic development and binds to ectodysplasin-A2 (EDA-A2), a member of the TNF family that is encoded by the anhidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (EDA) gene. Although XEDAR was first described in the year 2000, its function and molecular mechanism of action is still largely unclear. XEDAR has been reported to activate canonical nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) signaling and mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases. Here we report that XEDAR is also able to trigger the non-canonical NF-κB pathway, characterized by the processing of p100 (NF-κB2) into p52, followed by nuclear translocation of p52 and RelB. We provide evidence that XEDAR-induced p100 processing relies on the binding of XEDAR to TRAF3 and TRAF6, and requires the kinase activity of NIK and IKKα. We also show that XEDAR stimulation results in NIK accumulation and that p100 processing is negatively regulated by TRAF3, cIAP1 and A20.
Applications of Transcriptomics in the Research of Antibody-Mediated Rejection in Kidney Transplantation: Progress and Perspectives

Antibody-mediated rejection (ABMR) is the major cause of chronic allograft dysfunction and loss in kidney transplantation. The immunological mechanisms of ABMR that have been featured in the latest studies indicate a highly complex interplay between various immune and nonimmune cell types. Clinical diagnostic standards have long been criticized for being arbitrary and the lack of accuracy. Transcriptomic approaches, including microarray and RNA sequencing of allograft biopsies, enable the identification of differential gene expression and the continuous improvement of diagnostics. Given that conventional bulk transcriptomic approaches only reflect the average gene expression but not the status at the single-cell level, thereby ignoring the heterogeneity of the transcriptome across individual cells, single-cell RNA sequencing is rising as a powerful tool to provide a high-resolution transcriptome map of immune cells, which allows the elucidation of the pathogenesis and may facilitate the development of novel strategies for clinical treatment of ABMR.
Transcending the cube: translating GIScience time and space perspectives in a humanities GIS

This paper discusses a Humanities Geographical Information Systems timespace modeling project, which does not reject the space-time' cube model but rather incorporates, translates and metonymically focuses GIScience methodologies through the epistemological prisms of the arts and humanities. The arts and humanities may offer insights which GIScience can consider in order to conceptualise and model timespaces. Employing the Euclidian framing of conventional GIS approaches, it attempts to artistically, metaphorically and metonymically engage the space-time' cube concept as a means to suggest a non-linear and fragmented perspective of space and time. The case study presented in this paper triangulates in GIS soft' data from a modernist novel depicting postmodern perspectives, empirical data sourced from fieldwork guided by the urban mapping strategies of Guy Debord and the Situationists Internationale and Giambattista Vico's cyclical view of history with Mikhail M. Bakhtin's literary motif of the chronotope as techniques to model contiguous perspectives of linear and cyclical timespace. The paper hopes to encourage ways to reflect upon a rapprochement between humanistic and scientific approaches to modelling space and time with GIS.
A Benchmark for Studying Diabetic Retinopathy: Segmentation, Grading, and Transferability

People with diabetes are at risk of developing an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy (DR). This disease occurs when high blood glucose levels cause damage to blood vessels in the retina. Computer-aided DR diagnosis has become a promising tool for the early detection and severity grading of DR, due to the great success of deep learning. However, most current DR diagnosis systems do not achieve satisfactory performance or interpretability for ophthalmologists, due to the lack of training data with consistent and fine-grained annotations. To address this problem, we construct a large fine-grained annotated DR dataset containing 2,842 images (FGADR). Specifically, this dataset has 1,842 images with pixel-level DR-related lesion annotations, and 1,000 images with image-level labels graded by six board-certified ophthalmologists with intra-rater consistency. The proposed dataset will enable extensive studies on DR diagnosis. Further, we establish three benchmark tasks for evaluation: 1. DR lesion segmentation; 2. DR grading by joint classification and segmentation; 3. Transfer learning for ocular multi-disease identification. Moreover, a novel inductive transfer learning method is introduced for the third task. Extensive experiments using different state-of-the-art methods are conducted on our FGADR dataset, which can serve as baselines for future research. Our dataset will be released in https://csyizhou.github.io/FGADR/.
Smart Substation: State of the Art and Future Development

The smart substation, revolutionarily changing every aspect of the modern substation, is developing fast in the world and being massively deployed in China quickly. A smart substation is typically implemented with a sophisticated combination of smart primary high-voltage equipment and hierarchically networked secondary devices. Based on the IEC61850 communication protocol, the functionalities, such as the information sharing and interoperability among smart electric equipment, are realized in smart substations. It is regarded as the basis for the development of smart grid and represents the future development trend of substation technologies. This paper reviews the fundamental vision of the smart substation. The state of the art and the challenges encountered in the practice of engineering implementation are presented. Future developments to solve the present challenges and promote the development of smart substations are also described.
Hyperacetylation of the C-terminal domain of p53 inhibits the formation of the p53/p21 complex

Given our previous finding that certain tumor-suppressing functions of p53 are exerted by the p53/p21 complex, rather than p53 alone, cells may have a system to regulate the p53/p21 interaction. As p53 binds to p21 via its C-terminal domain, which contains acetylable lysine residues, we investigated whether the C-terminal acetylation of p53 influences the p53/p21 interaction. Indeed, the p53/p21 interaction was reduced when various types of cells (HCT116 colon cancer, A549 lung cancer, and MCF7 breast cancer cells) were treated with MS-275, an inhibitor of SIRT1 (a p53 deacetylase), or with SIRT1-targeting small interfering RNAs. These treatments also increased the acetylation levels of the five lysine residues (K370, K372, K373, K381, K382) in the C-terminal domain of p53. The p53/p21 interaction was also reduced when these lysine residues were substituted with glutamine (an acetylation memetic), but not arginine (an unacetylable lysine analog). While the inhibitory effect of the lysine-to-glutamine substitution was evident upon the substitution of all the five lysine residues, the substitution of only two (K381, K382) or three residues (K370, K372, K373) was less effective. Consistently, the five substitutions reduced the ability of p53 to regulate cell invasion and death by liberating Bax from Bcl-w. Overall, our data suggest that the acetylation, especially the hyperacetylation, of the p53 C-terminal domain suppresses the p53/p21-complex-dependent functions of p53 by inhibiting the p53/p21 interaction. We propose that cellular components involved in the acetylation or deacetylation of the p53 C-terminus are critical regulators of the formation of p53/p21 complex.
A Survey of the State-of-the-Art Localization Techniques and Their Potentials for Autonomous Vehicle Applications

For an autonomous vehicle to operate safely and effectively, an accurate and robust localization system is essential. While there are a variety of vehicle localization techniques in literature, there is a lack of effort in comparing these techniques and identifying their potentials and limitations for autonomous vehicle applications. Hence, this paper evaluates the state-of-the-art vehicle localization techniques and investigates their applicability on autonomous vehicles. The analysis starts with discussing the techniques which merely use the information obtained from on-board vehicle sensors. It is shown that although some techniques can achieve the accuracy required for autonomous driving but suffer from the high cost of the sensors and also sensor performance limitations in different driving scenarios (e.g., cornering and intersections) and different environmental conditions (e.g., darkness and snow). This paper continues the analysis with considering the techniques which benefit from off-board information obtained from V2X communication channels, in addition to vehicle sensory information. The analysis shows that augmenting off-board information to sensory information has potential to design low-cost localization systems with high accuracy and robustness, however, their performance depends on penetration rate of nearby connected vehicles or infrastructure and the quality of network service.
Schemes for salt recovery from seawater and RO brines using chemical precipitation

Disposal of brines from seawater desalination plants affects marine ecology and significant financial burdens. Recovery of salts from brines improves both sides of the problem and avails opportunities for new state of the art desalination/salt production complex. Three important separation processes could be adopted to formulate the corner stones for state-of-the-art salt recovery production line, namely chemical treatment, nanofiltration (NF), and ion exchange. This paper explores the performance of selected precipitants on saline solutions presenting synthetic seawater, natural seawater, and two reverse osmosis (RO) brines obtained from desalination plants located on Mediterranean (B1) and Red Sea (B2) shores. Sodium carbonate enabled 95.5, 89, and 95% recovery of calcium (Ca) seawater, Mediterranean, and Red Sea RO brines, respectively. While, values of magnesium (Mg) recovery from chemically treated schemes lie between 85.6 and 91.3%. Also, phosphate precipitation enabled two-stage recovery of Ca and Mg range from 75 to 98% for Ca and 24 to 47% for Mg. Moreover, analysis of our experimental results and other reported data on chemical softening enabled identification of three integrated salt recovery schemes from seawater and RO desalination brines. The first scheme is basically applicable for new desalting plants or even as stand-alone solution for chemical recovery from seawater. The second scheme could be applied when retrofitting current desalination plants where state-of-the-art NF is introduced and the generated NF brine is subjected to two-stage chemical and ion exchange treatments. The third scheme targets currently operating plants where RO brines could be directed to chemical precipitation for maximum Ca removal and subsequently decalcified streams could be processed for Mg removal using ion exchange. Optimization of the developed schemes is currently underway to identify comparative capital outlays and other relevant financial indicators.
Inertial Sensor Arrays, Maximum Likelihood, and Cramer-Rao Bound

A maximum likelihood estimator for fusing the measurements in an inertial sensor array is presented. The maximum likelihood estimator is concentrated and an iterative solution method is presented for the resulting low-dimensional optimization problem. The Cramer-Rao bound for the corresponding measurement fusion problem is derived and used to assess the performance of the proposed method, as well as to analyze how the geometry of the array and sensor errors affect the accuracy of the measurement fusion. The angular velocity information gained from the accelerometers in the array is shown to be proportional to the square of the array dimension and to the square of the angular speed. In our simulations the proposed fusion method attains the Cramer-Rao bound and outperforms the current state-of-the-art method for measurement fusion in accelerometer arrays. Further, in contrast to the state-of-the-art method that requires a 3D array to work, the proposed method also works for 2D arrays. The theoretical findings are compared to results from real-world experiments with an in-house developed array that consists of 192 sensing elements.
A Fast and Accurate Feature-Matching Algorithm for Minimally-Invasive Endoscopic Images

The ability to find image similarities between two distinct endoscopic views is known as feature matching, and is essential in many robotic-assisted minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) applications. Differently from feature-tracking methods, feature matching does not make any restrictive assumption about the chronological order between the two images or about the organ motion, but first obtains a set of appearance-based image matches, and subsequently removes possible outliers based on geometric constraints. As a consequence, feature-matching algorithms can be used to recover the position of any image feature after unexpected camera events, such as complete occlusions, sudden endoscopic-camera retraction, or strong illumination changes. We introduce the hierarchical multi-affine (HMA) algorithm, which improves over existing feature-matching methods because of the larger number of image correspondences, the increased speed, and the higher accuracy and robustness. We tested HMA over a large (and annotated) dataset with more than 100 MIS image pairs obtained from real interventions, and containing many of the aforementioned sudden events. In all of these cases, HMA outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed, accuracy, and robustness. In addition, HMA and the image database are made freely available on the internet.
Case Reports of Heroin Injection Site Necrosis: A Novel Antecedent of Nicolau Syndrome

Heroin injection-site necrosis (HISN) is a novel and poorly understood complication of intravenous drug abuse (IVDA). We present three cases of HISN that were evaluated and treated in Charleston, West Virginia, in 2019 and 2020. The documented cases show similarities involving patient care, follow-up, clinical progression, patient demographic, and dermatologic sequelae. We discuss these similarities, provide clinical recommendations, review proposed etiologies of HISN, and introduce Nicolau syndrome as a potential mechanism.
Structure-Texture Consistent Painting Completion for Artworks

Image completion techniques have made rapid and impressive progress due to advancements in deep learning and traditional patch-based approaches. The surrounding regions of a hole played a crucial role in repairing missing areas during the restoration process. However, large holes could result in suboptimal restoration outcomes due to complex textures causing significant changes in color gradations. As a result, they led to errors such as color discrepancies, blurriness, artifacts, and unnatural colors. Additionally, recent image completion approaches focused mainly on scenery and face images with fewer textures. Given these observations, we present a structure-texture consistent completion approach for filling large holes with detailed textures. Our method focuses on improving image completion in the context of artworks, which are expressions of creativity and often have more diverse structures and textures from applying paint to a surface using brush strokes. To handle the unique challenges posed by artwork, we use Cohesive Laplacian Fusion that segments non-homogeneous areas based on structure diffusion and then applies texture synthesis to complete the remaining texture of the missing segmented area. This technique involves detecting changes in base structures and textures using multiple matched patches to achieve more consistent results. The experimental results show that our proposed method is competitive and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in missing regions and color gradations of art paintings.
Survey of Automotive Controller Area Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Editor's note: Control Area Network (CAN) is one of the most popular targets for malicious attacks and exploitations in modern automotive systems. The goal of intrusion detection systems (IDS) is to identify and mitigate security attacks; consequently, they are of paramount importance to automotive security. This article surveys the state of the art in IDS, with special emphasis on techniques for detecting attacks on CAN modules. -Sandip Ray, University of Florida