bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A new angle on an old problem: helicity approach to neutron beta decay in the Standard Model
Authors: Groote Stefan , Körner Jürgen G. , Melić Blaženka 
Published: November 2019

AbstractWe elaborate on the dichotomy between the description of the semileptonic decays of heavy hadrons on the one hand and the semileptonic decays of light hadrons such as neutron $$\beta $$β decays on the other hand. For example, almost without exception the semileptonic decays of heavy baryons are described in cascade fashion as a sequence of two two-body decays $$B_1 \rightarrow B_2 + W_\mathrm{off-shell}$$B1→B2+Woff-shell and $$W_{\mathrm{off-shell}} \rightarrow \ell + \nu _\ell $$Woff-shell→ℓ+νℓ whereas neutron $$\beta $$β decays are analyzed as true three-body decays $$n \rightarrow p + e^- +{\bar{\nu }}_e$$n→p+e-+ν¯e. Within the cascade approach it is possible to define a set of seven angular observables for polarized neutron $$\beta $$β decays as well as the longitudinal, transverse and normal polarization of the decay electron. We determine the dependence of the observables on the usual vector and axial vector form factors. In order to be able to assess the importance of recoil corrections we expand the rate and the $$q^2$$q2 averages of the observables up to NLO and NNLO in the recoil parameter $$\delta =(M_n-M_p)/(M_n+M_p)= 0.689\cdot 10^{-3}$$δ=(Mn-Mp)/(Mn+Mp)=0.689·10-3. Remarkably, we find that the rate and three of the four parity conserving polarization observables that we analyze are protected from NLO recoil corrections when the second class current contributions are set to zero.
Acceleration in Friedmann cosmology with torsion
Authors: Pereira S. H. , Lima R. de C. , Jesus J. F. , Holanda R. F. L. 
Published: November 2019

AbstractA Friedmann like cosmological model in Einstein–Cartan framework is studied when the torsion function is assumed to be proportional to a single $$\phi (t)$$ϕ(t) function coming just from the spin vector contribution of ordinary matter. By analysing four different types of torsion function written in terms of one, two and three free parameters, we found that a model with $$\phi (t)=- \alpha H(t) \big ({\rho _{m}(t)}/{\rho _{0c}}\big )^n$$ϕ(t)=-αH(t)(ρm(t)/ρ0c)n is totally compatible with recent cosmological data, where $$\alpha $$α and n are free parameters to be constrained from observations, $$\rho _m$$ρm is the matter energy density and $$\rho _{0c}$$ρ0c the critical density. The recent accelerated phase of expansion of the universe is correctly reproduced by the contribution coming from torsion function, with a deceleration parameter indicating a transition redshift of about 0.65.
Froid
Authors: Ramachandra Karthik , Park Kwanghyun , Emani K. Venkatesh , Halverson Alan , Galindo-Legaria César , Cunningham Conor 
Published: November 2019

For decades, RDBMSs have supported declarative SQL as well as imperative functions and procedures as ways for users to express data processing tasks. While the evaluation of declarative SQL has received a lot of attention resulting in highly sophisticated techniques, the evaluation of imperative programs has remained naïve and highly inefficient. Imperative programs offer several benefits over SQL and hence are often preferred and widely used. But unfortunately, their abysmal performance discourages, and even prohibits their use in many situations. We address this important problem that has hitherto received little attention.
We present Froid, an extensible framework for optimizing imperative programs in relational databases. Froid's novel approach automatically transforms entire User Defined Functions (UDFs) into relational algebraic expressions, and embeds them into the calling SQL query. This form is now amenable to cost-based optimization and results in efficient, set-oriented, parallel plans as opposed to inefficient, iterative, serial execution of UDFs. Froid's approach additionally brings the benefits of many compiler optimizations to UDFs with no additional implementation effort. We describe the design of Froid and present our experimental evaluation that demonstrates performance improvements of up to multiple orders of magnitude on real workloads.
An experimental study on hub labeling based shortest path algorithms
Authors: Li Ye , U Leong Hou , Yiu Man Lung , Kou Ngai Meng 
Published: November 2019

Shortest path distance retrieval is a core component in many important applications. For a decade, hub labeling (HL) techniques have been considered as a practical solution with fast query response time (e.g., 1--3 orders of magnitude faster), competitive indexing time, and slightly larger storage overhead (e.g., several times larger). These techniques enhance query throughput up to hundred thousands queries per second, which is particularly helpful in large user environment. Despite the importance of HL techniques, we are not aware of any comprehensive experimental study on HL techniques. Thus it is difficult for a practitioner to adopt HL techniques for her applications.
To address the above issues, we provide a comprehensive experimental study on the state-of-the-art HL technique with analysis of their efficiency, effectiveness and applicability. From insightful summary of different HL techniques, we further develop a simple yet effective HL techniques called Significant path based Hub Pushing (SHP) which greatly improves indexing time of previous techniques while retains good query performance. We also complement extensive comparisons between HL techniques and other shortest path solutions to demonstrate robustness and efficiency of HL techniques.
Concurrent log-structured memory for many-core key-value stores
Authors: Merritt Alexander , Gavrilovska Ada , Chen Yuan , Milojicic Dejan 
Published: November 2019

Key-value stores are an important tool in managing and accessing large in-memory data sets. As many applications benefit from having as much of their working state fit into main memory, an important design of the memory management of modern key-value stores is the use of log-structured approaches, enabling efficient use of the memory capacity, by compacting objects to avoid fragmented states.
However, with the emergence of thousand-core and peta-byte memory platforms (DRAM or future storage-class memories) log-structured designs struggle to scale, preventing parallel applications from exploiting the full capabilities of the hardware: careful coordination is required for background activities (compacting and organizing memory) to remain asynchronous with respect to the use of the interface, and for insertion operations to avoid contending for centralized resources such as the log head and memory pools.

In this work, we present the design of a log-structured key-value store called Nibble that incorporates a
multi-head log
for supporting concurrent writes, a novel
distributed epoch
mechanism for scalable memory reclamation, and an optimistic concurrency index. We implement Nibble in the Rust language in ca. 4000 lines of code, and evaluate it across a variety of data-serving workloads on a 240-core cache-coherent server. Our measurements show Nibble scales linearly in uniform YCSB workloads, matching competitive non-log-structured key-value stores for write- dominated traces at 50 million operations per second on 1 TiB-sized working sets. Our memory analysis shows Nibble is efficient, requiring less than 10% additional capacity, whereas memory use by non-log-structured key-value store designs may be as high as 2x.
Cardinality estimation
Authors: Harmouch Hazar , Naumann Felix 
Published: November 2019

Data preparation and data profiling comprise many both basic and complex tasks to analyze a dataset at hand and extract metadata, such as data distributions, key candidates, and functional dependencies. Among the most important types of metadata is the number of distinct values in a column, also known as the zeroth-frequency moment. Cardinality estimation itself has been an active research topic in the past decades due to its many applications. The aim of this paper is to review the literature of cardinality estimation and to present a detailed experimental study of twelve algorithms, scaling far beyond the original experiments.
First, we outline and classify approaches to solve the problem of cardinality estimation - we describe their main idea, error-guarantees, advantages, and disadvantages. Our experimental survey then compares the performance all twelve cardinality estimation algorithms. We evaluate the algorithms' accuracy, runtime, and memory consumption using synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that different algorithms excel in different in categories, and we highlight their trade-offs.
Transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation of the cervical cord modulates lumbar networks
Authors: Barss Trevor S. , Parhizi Behdad , Mushahwar Vivian K. 
Published: November 2019

It has been established that coordinated arm and leg (A&L) cycling facilitates corticospinal drive and modulation of cervico-lumbar connectivity and ultimately improves overground walking in people with incomplete spinal cord injury or stroke. This study examined the effect of noninvasive transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) on the modulation of cervico-lumbar connectivity. Thirteen neurologically intact adults participated in the study. The excitability of the Hoffmann (H) reflex elicited in the soleus muscle was examined under multiple conditions involving either the arms held in a static position or rhythmic arm cycling while tSCS was applied to either the cervical or lumbar cord. As expected, soleus H-reflex amplitude was significantly suppressed by 19.2% during arm cycling (without tSCS) relative to arms static (without tSCS). Interestingly, tSCS of the cervical cord with arms static significantly suppressed the soleus H-reflex (−22.9%), whereas tSCS over the lumbar cord did not suppress the soleus H-reflex (−3.8%). The combination of arm cycling with cervical or lumbar tSCS did not yield additional suppression of the soleus H-reflex beyond that obtained with arm cycling alone or cervical tSCS alone. The results demonstrate that activation of the cervical spinal cord through both rhythmic arm cycling and tonic tSCS significantly modulates the activity of lumbar networks. This highlights the potential for engaging cervical spinal cord networks through tSCS during rehabilitation interventions to enhance cervico-lumbar connectivity. This connectivity is influential in facilitating improvements in walking function after neurological impairment. NEW & NOTEWORTHY This is the first study to investigate the modulatory effects of transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) on cervico-lumbar connectivity. We report that both rhythmic activation of the cervical spinal cord through arm cycling and tonic activation of the cervical cord through tSCS significantly modulate the activity of lumbar networks. This suggests that engaging cervical spinal cord networks through tSCS during locomotor retraining interventions may not only enhance cervico-lumbar connectivity but also further improve walking capacity.
Binocular 3D otolith-ocular reflexes: responses of normal chinchillas to tilt and translation
Authors: Hageman Kristin N. , Chow Margaret R. , Roberts Dale , Della Santina Charles C. 
Published: November 2019

Head rotation, translation, and tilt with respect to a gravitational field elicit reflexive eye movements that partially stabilize images of Earth-fixed objects on the retinas of humans and other vertebrates. Compared with the angular vestibulo-ocular reflex, responses to translation and tilt, collectively called the otolith-ocular reflex (OOR), are less completely characterized, typically smaller, generally disconjugate (different for the 2 eyes) and more complicated in their relationship to the natural stimuli that elicit them. We measured binocular 3-dimensional OOR responses of 6 alert normal chinchillas in darkness during whole body tilts around 16 Earth-horizontal axes and translations along 21 axes in horizontal, coronal, and sagittal planes. Ocular countertilt responses to 40-s whole body tilts about Earth-horizontal axes grew linearly with head tilt amplitude, but responses were disconjugate, with each eye’s response greatest for whole body tilts about axes near the other eye’s resting line of sight. OOR response magnitude during 1-Hz sinusoidal whole body translations along Earth-horizontal axes also grew with stimulus amplitude. Translational OOR responses were similarly disconjugate, with each eye’s response greatest for whole body translations along its resting line of sight. Responses to Earth-horizontal translation were similar to those that would be expected for tilts that would cause a similar peak deviation of the gravitoinertial acceleration (GIA) vector with respect to the head, consistent with the “perceived tilt” model of the OOR. However, that model poorly fit responses to translations along non-Earth-horizontal axes and was insufficient to explain why responses are larger for the eye toward which the GIA vector deviates. NEW & NOTEWORTHY As the first in a pair of papers on Binocular 3D Otolith-Ocular Reflexes, this paper characterizes binocular 3D eye movements in normal chinchillas during tilts and translations. The eye movement responses were used to create a data set to fully define the normal otolith-ocular reflexes in chinchillas. This data set provides the foundation to use otolith-ocular reflexes to back-project direction and magnitude of eye movement to predict tilt axis as discussed in the companion paper.
Cost-Effectiveness of Personalized Screening for Colorectal Cancer Based on Polygenic Risk and Family History
Authors: Cenin Dayna R. , Naber Steffie K. , de Weerdt Anne C. , Jenkins Mark A. , Preen David B. , Ee Hooi C. , O'Leary Peter C. , Lansdorp-Vogelaar Iris 
Published: November 2019

Abstract

Background:
There is growing evidence for personalizing colorectal cancer screening based on risk factors. We compared the cost-effectiveness of personalized colorectal cancer screening based on polygenic risk and family history to uniform screening.

Methods:
Using the MISCAN-Colon model, we simulated a cohort of 100 million 40-year-olds, offering them uniform or personalized screening. Individuals were categorized based on polygenic risk and family history of colorectal cancer. We varied screening strategies by start age, interval and test and estimated costs, and quality-adjusted life years (QALY). In our analysis, we (i) assessed the cost-effectiveness of uniform screening; (ii) developed personalized screening scenarios based on optimal screening strategies by risk group; and (iii) compared the cost-effectiveness of both.

Results:
At a willingness-to-pay threshold of $50,000/QALY, the optimal uniform screening scenario was annual fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) from ages 50 to 74 years, whereas for personalized screening the optimal screening scenario consisted of annual and biennial FIT screening except for those at highest risk who were offered 5-yearly colonoscopy from age 50 years. Although these scenarios gained the same number of QALYs (17,887), personalized screening was not cost-effective, costing an additional $428,953 due to costs associated with determining risk (assumed to be $240 per person). Personalized screening was cost-effective when these costs were less than ∼$48.

Conclusions:
Uniform colorectal cancer screening currently appears more cost-effective than personalized screening based on polygenic risk and family history. However, cost-effectiveness is highly dependent on the cost of determining risk.

Impact:
Personalized screening could become increasingly viable as costs for determining risk decrease.
Genetic Association of Plasma Homocysteine Levels with Gastric Cancer Risk: A Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Study
Authors: Wang Tianpei , Ren Chuanli , Ni Jing , Ding Hui , Qi Qi , Yan Caiwang , Deng Bin , Dai Juncheng , Li Gang , Ding Yanbing , Jin Guangfu 
Published: November 2019

Abstract

Background:
The association of plasma homocysteine level (PHL) with gastric cancer risk was reported in observational studies. However, the causality is challenging due to confounding factors and the lack of evidence from well-designed cohort studies. Herein, we performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to investigate whether PHL is causally related to gastric cancer risk.

Methods:
We performed the MR analysis based on the results from genome-wide association studies consisting of 2,631 patients with gastric cancer and 4,373 controls. An externally weighted genetic risk score (wGRS) was constructed with 15 SNPs with well-established associations with PHL. We utilized logistic regression model to estimate associations of PHL-related SNPs and wGRS with gastric cancer risk in total population and in strata by sex, age, and study site, in addition to a series of sensitivity analyses.

Results:
High genetically predicted PHL was associated with an increased gastric cancer risk (per SD increase in the wGRS: OR = 1.07; 95% confidence interval, 1.01–1.12; P = 0.011), which was consistent in sensitivity analyses. Subgroup analyses provided evidence of a stronger association with gastric cancer risk in women than in men. MR-Egger and weighted median regression suggested that potentially unknown pleiotropic effects were not biasing the association between PHL and gastric cancer risk.

Conclusions:
These results revealed that genetically predicted high PHL was associated with an increased gastric cancer risk, suggesting that high PHL may have a causal role in the etiology of gastric cancer.

Impact:
These findings provide causal inference for PHL on gastric cancer risk, suggesting a causal role of high PHL in the etiology of gastric cancer.
Using Digital Pathology to Understand Epithelial Characteristics of Benign Breast Disease among Women Undergoing Diagnostic Image-Guided Breast Biopsy
Authors: Mullooly Maeve , Puvanesarajah Samantha , Fan Shaoqi , Pfeiffer Ruth M. , Olsson Linnea T. , Hada Manila , Kirk Erin L. , Vacek Pamela M. , Weaver Donald L. , Shepherd John , Mahmoudzadeh Amir , Wang Jeff , Malkov Serghei , Johnson Jason M. , Hewitt Stephen M. , Herschorn Sally D. , Sherman Mark E. , Troester Melissa A. , Gierach Gretchen L. 
Published: November 2019

Abstract
Delayed terminal duct lobular unit (TDLU) involution is associated with elevated mammographic breast density (MD). Both are independent breast cancer risk factors among women with benign breast disease (BBD). Prior digital analyses of normal breast tissues revealed that epithelial nuclear density (END) and TDLU involution are inversely correlated. Accordingly, we examined associations of END, TDLU involution, and MD in BBD clinical biopsies. This study included digitized images of 262 representative image-guided hematoxylin and eosin–stained biopsies from 224 women diagnosed with BBD, enrolled within the cross-sectional BREAST-Stamp project that were visually assessed for TDLU involution (TDLU count/100 mm2, median TDLU span and median acini count per TDLU). A digital algorithm estimated nuclei count per unit epithelial area, or END. Single X-ray absorptiometry of prebiopsy ipsilateral craniocaudal digital mammograms measured global and localized MD surrounding the biopsy region. Adjusted ordinal logistic regression models assessed relationships between tertiles of TDLU and END measures. Analysis of covariance examined mean differences in MD across END tertiles. TDLU measures were positively associated with increasing END tertiles [TDLU count/100 mm2, ORT3vsT1: 3.42, 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.87–6.28; acini count/TDLUT3vsT1, OR: 2.40, 95% CI, 1.39–4.15]. END was significantly associated with localized, but not, global MD. Relationships were most apparent among patients with nonproliferative BBD. These findings suggest that quantitative END reflects different but complementary information to the histologic information captured by visual TDLU and radiologic MD measures and merits continued evaluation in assessing cellularity of breast parenchyma to understand the etiology of BBD.
Methyl Donor Deficiency Blocks Colorectal Cancer Development by Affecting Key Metabolic Pathways
Authors: Hanley Matthew P. , Aladelokun Oladimeji , Kadaveru Krishna , Rosenberg Daniel W. 
Published: November 2019

Abstract

Our understanding of the role of folate one-carbon metabolism in colon carcinogenesis remains incomplete. Previous studies indicate that a methyl donor–deficient (MDD) diet lacking folic acid, choline, methionine, and vitamin B12 is associated with long-lasting changes to the intestinal epithelium and sustained tumor protection in Apc-mutant mice. However, the metabolic pathways by which the MDD diet affects these changes are unknown. Colon samples harvested from ApcΔ14/+ mice fed the MDD diet for 18 weeks were profiled using a GC-MS and LC-MS/MS metabolomics platform. Random forest and pathway analyses were used to identify altered metabolic pathways, and associated gene expression changes were analyzed by RT-PCR. Approximately 100 metabolites affected by the MDD diet were identified. As expected, metabolites within the methionine cycle, including methionine (−2.9-fold, P &lt; 0.001) and betaine (−3.3-fold, P &lt; 0.001), were reduced. Elevated homocysteine (110-fold, P &lt; 0.001) was associated with increased flux through the transsulfuration pathway. Unexpectedly, levels of deoxycholic acid (−4.5-fold, P &lt; 0.05) and several other secondary bile acids were reduced. There were also unexpected reductions in the levels of carnitine (−2.0-fold, P &lt; 0.01) and a panel of acylcarnitines involved in fatty acid β-oxidation. Finally, metabolites involved in redox balance, including ascorbate and hypotaurine, were found to be persistently elevated. These findings provide clues to the molecular changes underlying MDD-mediated tumor protection and identify regulatable metabolic pathways that may provide new targets for colon cancer prevention and treatment.

Implications:
Metabolomic profiling reveals molecular changes underlying MDD-induced tumor protection and may provide new targets for colorectal cancer prevention and treatment.