bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mesenchymal stem cells promote pancreatic β-cell regeneration through downregulation of FoxO1 pathway
Authors: Khatri Rahul , Mazurek Sybille , Petry Sebastian Friedrich , Linn Thomas 
Published: November 2020

AbstractBackgroundMesenchymal stem cells (MSC) are non-haematopoietic, fibroblast-like multipotent stromal cells. In the injured pancreas, these cells are assumed to secrete growth factors and immunomodulatory molecules, which facilitate the regeneration of pre-existing β-cells. However, when MSC are delivered intravenously, their majority is entrapped in the lungs and does not reach the pancreas. Therefore, the aim of this investigation was to compare the regenerative support of hTERT-MSC (human telomerase reverse transcriptase mesenchymal stem cells) via intrapancreatic (IPR) and intravenous route (IVR).MethodshTERT-MSC were administered by IPR and IVR to 50% pancreatectomized NMRI nude mice. After eight days, blood glucose level, body weight, and residual pancreatic weight were measured. Proliferating pancreatic β-cells were labelled and identified with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) in vivo. The number of residual islets and the frequency of proliferating β-cells were compared in different groups with sequential pancreatic sections. The pancreatic insulin content was evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and the presence of hTERT-MSC with human Alu sequence. Murine gene expression of growth factors, β-cell specific molecules and proinflammatory cytokines were inspected by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blot.ResultsThis study evaluated the regenerative potential of the murine pancreas post-hTERT-MSC administration through the intrapancreatic (IPR) and intravenous route (IVR). Both routes of hTERT-MSC transplantation (IVR and IPR) increased the incorporation of BrdU by pancreatic β-cells compared to control. MSC induced epidermal growth factor (EGF) expression and inhibited proinflammatory cytokines (IFN-γ and TNF-α). FOXA2 and PDX-1 characteristics for pancreatic progenitor cells were activated via AKT/ PDX-1/ FoxO1 signalling pathway.ConclusionThe infusion of hTERT-MSC after partial pancreatectomy (Px) through the IVR and IPR facilitated the proliferation of autochthonous pancreatic β-cells and provided evidence for a regenerative influence of MSC on the endocrine pancreas. Moderate benefit of IPR over IVR was observed which could be a new treatment option for preventing diabetes mellitus after pancreas surgery.
Mapping current research and identifying hotspots on mesenchymal stem cells in cardiovascular disease
Authors: Chen Chan , Lou Yang , Li Xin-Yi , Lv Zheng-Tian , Zhang Lu-Qiu , Mao Wei 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Background
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have important research value and broad application prospects in the cardiovascular disease. This study provides information on the latest progress, evolutionary path, frontier research hotspots, and future research developmental trends in this field.

Methods
A knowledge map was generated by CiteSpace and VOSviewer analysis software based on data obtained from the literature on MSCs in the cardiovascular field.

Results
The USA and China ranked at the top in terms of the percentage of articles, accounting for 34.306% and 28.550%, respectively. The institution with the highest number of research publications in this field was the University of Miami, followed by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Harvard University. The research institution with the highest ACI value was Harvard University, followed by the Mayo Clinic and the University of Cincinnati.
The top three subjects in terms of the number of published articles were cell biology, cardiovascular system cardiology, and research experimental medicine. The journal with the most publications in this field was Circulation Research, followed by Scientific Reports and Biomaterials. The direction of research on MSCs in the cardiovascular system was divided into four parts: (1) tissue engineering, scaffolds, and extracellular matrix research; (2) cell transplantation, differentiation, proliferation, and signal transduction pathway research; (3) assessment of the efficacy of stem cells from different sources and administration methods in the treatment of acute myocardial infarction, myocardial hypertrophy, and heart failure; and (4) exosomes and extracellular vesicles research. Tissue research is the hotspot and frontier in this field.

Conclusion
MSC research has presented a gradual upward trend in the cardiovascular field. Multidisciplinary intersection is a characteristic of this field. Engineering and materials disciplines are particularly valued and have received attention from researchers. The progress in multidisciplinary research will provide motivation and technical support for the development of this field.
18F-Fluciclovine PET metabolic imaging reveals prostate cancer tumour heterogeneity associated with disease resistance to androgen deprivation therapy
Authors: Malviya Gaurav , Patel Rachana , Salji Mark , Martinez Rafael S. , Repiscak Peter , Mui Ernest , Champion Susan , Mrowinska Agata , Johnson Emma , AlRasheedi Maha , Pimlott Sally , Lewis David , Leung Hing Y. 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Background
Prostate cancer is highly prevalent worldwide. Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) remains the treatment of choice for incurable prostate cancer, but majority of patients develop disease recurrence following ADT. There is therefore an urgent need for early detection of treatment resistance.

Methods
Isogenic androgen-responsive (CWR22Res) and castration-resistant (22Rv1) human prostate cancer cells were implanted into the anterior lobes of the prostate in CD-1 Nu mice to generate prostate orthografts. Castrated mice bearing CWR22Res and 22Rv1 orthografts mimic clinical prostate cancer following acute and chronic ADT, respectively. 18F-Fluciclovine (1-amino-3-fluorocyclobutane-1-carboxylic acid) with a radiochemical purity of > 99% was produced on a FASTlab synthesiser. Ki67 staining in endpoint orthografts was studied. Western blot, quantitative RT-PCR and next-generation sequencing transcriptomic analyses were performed to assess the expression levels of amino acid transporters (including LAT1 and ASCT2, which have been implicated for Fluciclovine uptake). Longitudinal metabolic imaging with 18F-Fluciclovine-based positron emission tomography (PET) was performed to study tumour response following acute and chronic ADT.

Results
Both immunohistochemistry analysis of endpoint prostate tumours and longitudinal 18F-Fluciclovine imaging revealed tumour heterogeneity, particularly following ADT, with in vivo 18F-Fluciclovine uptake correlating to viable cancer cells in both androgen-proficient and castrated environment. Highlighting tumour subpopulation following ADT, both SUVpeak and coefficient of variation (CoV) values of 18F-Fluciclovine uptake are consistent with tumour heterogeneity revealed by immunohistochemistry. We studied the expression of amino acid transporters (AATs) for 18F-Fluciclovine, namely LAT1 (SLC7A5 and SLC3A2) and ASCT2 (SLC1A5). SLC7A5 and SLC3A2 were expressed at relatively high levels in 22Rv1 castration-resistant orthografts following chronic ADT (modelling clinical castration-resistant disease), while SLC1A5 was preferentially expression in CWR22Res tumours following acute ADT. Additional AATs such as SLC43A2 (LAT4) were shown to be upregulated following chronic ADT by transcriptomic analysis; their role in Fluciclovine uptake warrants investigation.

Conclusion
We studied in vivo 18F-Fluciclovine uptake in human prostate cancer orthograft models following acute and chronic ADT. 18F-Fluciclovine uptakes highlight tumour heterogeneity that may explain castration resistance and can be exploited as a clinical biomarker.
Utilization of a recombinant defensin from Maize (Zea mays L.) as a potential antimicrobial peptide
Authors: Al Kashgry Najla Amin T. , Abulreesh Hussein H. , El-Sheikh Iman A. , Almaroai Yaser A. , Salem Reda , Mohamed Ismail , Waly Fatma R. , Osman Gamal , Mohamed Mahmoud S. M. 
Published: November 2020

AbstractThe search for effective and bioactive antimicrobial molecules to encounter the medical need for new antibiotics is an encouraging area of research. Plant defensins are small cationic, cysteine-rich peptides with a stabilized tertiary structure by disulfide-bridges and characterized by a wide range of biological functions. The heterologous expression of Egyptian maize defensin (MzDef) in Escherichia coli and subsequent purification by glutathione affinity chromatography yielded 2 mg/L of recombinant defensin peptide. The glutathione-S-transferase (GST)-tagged MzDef of approximately 30 kDa in size (26 KDa GST +  ~ 4 KDa MzDef peptide) was immunodetected with anti-GST antibodies. The GST-tag was successfully cleaved from the MzDef peptide by thrombin, and the removal was validated by the Tris-Tricine gel electrophoresis. The MzDef induced strong growth inhibition of Rhizoctonia solani, Fusarium verticillioides, and Aspergillus niger by 94.23%, 93.34%, and 86.25%, respectively, whereas relatively weak growth inhibitory activity of 35.42% against Fusarium solani was recorded. Moreover, strong antibacterial activities were demonstrated against E. coli and Bacillus cereus and the moderate activities against Salmonella enterica and Staphylococcus aureus at all tested concentrations (0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.6, and 3.2 µM). Furthermore, the in vitro MTT assay exhibited promising anticancer activity against all tested cell lines (hepatocellular carcinoma, mammary gland breast cancer, and colorectal carcinoma colon cancer) with IC50 values ranging from 14.85 to 29.85 µg/mL. These results suggest that the recombinant peptide MzDef may serve as a potential alternative antimicrobial and anticancer agent to be used in medicinal application.
A simulation study on optimal scores for speaker recognition
Authors: Wang Dong 
Published: November 2020

AbstractIn this article, we conduct a comprehensive simulation study for the optimal scores of speaker recognition systems that are based on speaker embedding. For that purpose, we first revisit the optimal scores for the speaker identification (SI) task and the speaker verification (SV) task in the sense of minimum Bayes risk (MBR) and show that the optimal scores for the two tasks can be formulated as a single form of normalized likelihood (NL). We show that when the underlying model is linear Gaussian, the NL score is mathematically equivalent to the PLDA likelihood ratio (LR), and the empirical scores based on cosine distance and Euclidean distance can be seen as approximations of this linear Gaussian NL score under some conditions.Based on the unified NL score, we conducted a comprehensive simulation study to investigate the behavior of the scoring component on both the SI task and SV task, in the case where the distribution of the speaker vectors perfectly matches the assumption of the NL model, as well as the case where some mismatch is involved. Importantly, our simulation is based on the statistics of speaker vectors derived from a practical speaker recognition system, hence reflecting the behavior of the NL scoring in real-life scenarios that are full of imperfection, including non-Gaussianality, non-homogeneity, and domain/condition mismatch.
Flexible computation offloading in a fuzzy-based mobile edge orchestrator for IoT applications
Authors: Nguyen VanDung , Khanh Tran Trong , Nguyen Tri D. T. , Hong Choong Seon , Huh Eui-Nam 
Published: November 2020

AbstractIn the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the capacity-limited Internet and uncontrollable service delays for various new applications, such as video streaming analysis and augmented reality, are challenges. Cloud computing systems, also known as a solution that offloads energy-consuming computation of IoT applications to a cloud server, cannot meet the delay-sensitive and context-aware service requirements. To address this issue, an edge computing system provides timely and context-aware services by bringing the computations and storage closer to the user. The dynamic flow of requests that can be efficiently processed is a significant challenge for edge and cloud computing systems. To improve the performance of IoT systems, the mobile edge orchestrator (MEO), which is an application placement controller, was designed by integrating end mobile devices with edge and cloud computing systems. In this paper, we propose a flexible computation offloading method in a fuzzy-based MEO for IoT applications in order to improve the efficiency in computational resource management. Considering the network, computation resources, and task requirements, a fuzzy-based MEO allows edge workload orchestration actions to decide whether to offload a mobile user to local edge, neighboring edge, or cloud servers. Additionally, increasing packet sizes will affect the failed-task ratio when the number of mobile devices increases. To reduce failed tasks because of transmission collisions and to improve service times for time-critical tasks, we define a new input crisp value, and a new output decision for a fuzzy-based MEO. Using the EdgeCloudSim simulator, we evaluate our proposal with four benchmark algorithms in augmented reality, healthcare, compute-intensive, and infotainment applications. Simulation results show that our proposal provides better results in terms of WLAN delay, service times, the number of failed tasks, and VM utilization.
Bibliometric analysis of peer-reviewed literature on food security in the context of climate change from 1980 to 2019
Authors: Sweileh Waleed M. 
Published: November 2020

AbstractBackgroundClimate change poses a threat to global food security. Assessing research activity on food security in the presence of climate change is important for policymakers and funding sponsors to make future decisions. The current study aimed to give an overview of research activity on food security in the context of food security.MethodologyA bibliometric methodology was implemented using the Scopus database for the period from 1980 to 2019. The search strategy utilized the title/abstract search of keywords related to food security and climate change with certain constraints. Bibliometric indicators, frequent author keywords, research themes, and international research collaboration were presented.ResultsThe search query retrieved 5960 documents. The last decade of the study period witnessed an increasing trend in both the number of publications and the number of cumulative citations. The top five author keywords were climate change, food security, drought, adaptation, agriculture, and water scarcity. Mapping the retrieved documents showed four general research themes: water security, crop yield, food availability, and health. TheSustainabilityjournal ranked first in terms of productivity while documents published in theGlobal Change Biologyjournal received the highest number of citations per document. At the country level, the USA ranked first in terms of numbers, India ranked first in terms of research productivity per GDP/capita, and the UK ranked first in terms of the number of citations per document. France and the Netherlands had the highest percentage of documents with international authors while India and China had the least. At the regional level, the European region had the highest contribution and the Eastern Mediterranean region had the least contribution. Half of the top-cited documents in the field were review articles and appeared in prestigious journals. At the institutional level, the active list included three Chinese and two American institutions.ConclusionFood security under the umbrella of climate change is an emerging global challenge. Research on new technologies to mitigate the impact of climate change on food security is a top priority. Research contribution and collaboration from world regions with limited resources should be encouraged.
Performance Analysis of Intrusion Detection Systems Using a Feature Selection Method on the UNSW-NB15 Dataset
Authors: Kasongo Sydney M. , Sun Yanxia 
Published: November 2020

AbstractComputer networks intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) are critical aspects that contribute to the success of an organization. Over the past years, IDSs and IPSs using different approaches have been developed and implemented to ensure that computer networks within enterprises are secure, reliable and available. In this paper, we focus on IDSs that are built using machine learning (ML) techniques. IDSs based on ML methods are effective and accurate in detecting networks attacks. However, the performance of these systems decreases for high dimensional data spaces. Therefore, it is crucial to implement an appropriate feature extraction method that can prune some of the features that do not possess a great impact in the classification process. Moreover, many of the ML based IDSs suffer from an increase in false positive rate and a low detection accuracy when the models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we present an analysis the UNSW-NB15 intrusion detection dataset that will be used for training and testing our models. Moreover, we apply a filter-based feature reduction technique using the XGBoost algorithm. We then implement the following ML approaches using the reduced feature space: Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest-Neighbour (kNN), Logistic Regression (LR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Decision Tree (DT). In our experiments, we considered both the binary and multiclass classification configurations. The results demonstrated that the XGBoost-based feature selection method allows for methods such as the DT to increase its test accuracy from 88.13 to 90.85% for the binary classification scheme.
Successful laparoscopic approach for idiopathic adult colo-colonic intussusception: a case report
Authors: Tatsuta Kyota , Sakata Mayu , Sugiyama Kosuke , Akai Toshiya , Suzuki Katsunori , Suzuki Yuhi , Kawamura Takafumi , Morita Yoshifumi , Kikuchi Hirotoshi , Hiramatsu Yoshihiro , Kurachi Kiyotaka , Takeuchi Hiroya 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Background
Adult intussusception is recognized as an abdominal emergency. More than 90% of adult patients with intussusception have distinct causes that are related to benign or malignant tumors. In contrast, idiopathic intussusceptions, which are observed in children, are rare conditions in adult. Especially, colo-colonic idiopathic intussusceptions are rare among them. Surgery is traditionally considered the primary treatment option. Recently, laparoscopic surgery has been reported to be safe and feasible. However, laparoscopic surgical reduction, which is a common procedure in pediatric surgery, is not common in adult intussusception.

Case presentation
We report a 34-year-old man who presented with sudden abdominal pain. Computed tomography revealed the target sign in the transverse colon. There was no evidence of bowel obstruction, bowel wall edema, or tumor. We diagnosed idiopathic intussusception and selected laparoscopic procedure because of the strong abdominal pain experienced by the patient. There were no signs of perforation, bowel wall ischemia, or tumor in abdominal cavity. We confirmed idiopathic colo-colonic anterograde intussusception. Laparoscopic surgical reduction was achieved by a combination of delicate direct pressure on the anal side of the transverse colon and gentle pulling on the oral side. The patient’s postoperative course was uneventful.

Conclusions
We achieved successful surgical reduction laparoscopically because of an accurate preoperative diagnosis based on characteristic computed tomography features and appropriate surgical technique. Laparoscopic procedure and surgical reduction is considered to be an effective treatment strategy for adult idiopathic intussusceptions with severe symptoms.
Critical appraisal and external validation of a prognostic model for survival of people living with HIV/AIDS who underwent antiretroviral therapy
Authors: Wang Junfeng , Yuan Tanwei , Ling Xuemei , Li Quanmin , Tang Xiaoping , Cai Weiping , Zou Huachun , Li Linghua 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Background
HIV/AIDS remains a leading cause of death worldwide. Recently, a model has been developed in Wenzhou, China, to predict the survival of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) who underwent antiretroviral therapy (ART). We aimed to evaluate the methodological quality and validate the model in an external population-based cohort.

Methods
Prediction Model Risk of Bias Assessment Tool (PROBAST) was used to assess the risk of bias of the Wenzhou model. Data were from the National Free Antiretroviral Treatment Program database. We included PLWHA treated between February 2004 and December 2019 in a tertiary hospital in Guangzhou city, China. The endpoint was all-cause deaths and assessed until January 2020. We assessed the discrimination performance of the model by Harrell’s overall C-statistics and time-dependent C-statistics and calibration by comparing observed survival probabilities estimated with the Kaplan–Meier method versus predicted survival probabilities. To assess the potential prediction value of age and gender which were precluded in developing the Wenzhou model, we compared the discriminative ability of the original model with an extended model added with age and gender.

Results
Based on PROBAST, the Wenzhou model was rated as high risk of bias in three out of the four domains (selection of participants, definition of outcome, and methods for statistical analysis) mainly because of the misuse of nested case–control design and propensity score matching. In the external validation analysis, 16758 patients were included, among whom 743 patients died (mortality rate 11.41 per 1000 person-years) during follow-up (median 3.41 years, interquartile range 1.64–5.62). The predictor of HIV viral load was missing in 14361 patients (85.7%). The discriminative ability of the Wenzhou model decreased in the external dataset, with the Harrell’s overall C-statistics being 0.76, and time-dependent C-statistics dropping from 0.81 at 6 months to 0.48 at 10 years after ART initiation. The model consistently underestimated the survival, and the level was 6.23%, 10.02%, and 14.82% at 1, 2, and 3 years after ART initiation, respectively. The overall and time-dependent discriminative ability of the model improved after adding age and gender to the original model.

Conclusion
The Wenzhou prognostic model is at high risk of bias in model development, with inadequate model performance in external validation. Thereby, we could not confirm the validity and extended utility of the Wenzhou model. Future prediction model development and validation studies need to comply with the methodological standards and guidelines specifically developed for prediction models.