bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Increased Dkk‐1 plasma levels may discriminate disease subtypes in myeloproliferative neoplasms
Authors: Mambet Cristina , Necula Laura , Mihai Simona , Matei Lilia , Bleotu Coralia , Chivu‐Economescu Mihaela , Stanca Oana , Tatic Aurelia , Berbec Nicoleta , Tanase Cristiana , Diaconu Carmen C. 
Published: July 2018

AbstractAlterations in the bone marrow niche induced by abnormal production of cytokines and other soluble factors have been associated with disease progression in classical BCR‐ABL1 negative myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). Variations in circulating proteins might reflect local disease processes and plasma proteome profiling could serve to identify possible diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers. We employed a human cytokine array to screen for 105 distinct analytes in pooled plasma samples obtained from untreated young MPN patients (<35 years) with different clinical phenotypes and driver mutations, as well as from healthy individuals. Among molecules that exhibited significantly increased levels in MPN patients versus controls, the top of the list was represented by Dickkopf‐related protein 1 (Dkk‐1), which also showed the highest potential for discrimination between MPN subtypes. In the next step, a quantitative ELISA was used to measure plasma Dkk‐1 levels in 30 young‐onset MPN—10 essential thrombocythemia (ET), 10 polycythemia vera (PV), 10 pre‐fibrotic primary myelofibrosis (pre‐PMF)—and 10 controls. The results suggested that plasma Dkk‐1 levels could differentiate ET from pre‐PMF, in JAK2 V617F‐positive as well as in CALR‐positive patients, and also ET from PV in JAK2 V617F‐positive patients.
Intermittent aortic balloon occlusion combined with cesarean section for the treatment of patients with placenta previa complicated by placenta accreta: A retrospective study
Authors: Duan Xuhua , Chen Pengfei , Han Xinwei , Wang Yanli , Chen Zhimin , Zhang Xiaoli , Chu Qinjun , Liang Haomin 
Published: July 2018

AbstractAimTo compare the efficacy of cesarean section (CS) combined with intermittent aortic balloon occlusion with that of CS alone for treating patients with placenta previa complicated by placenta accreta.MethodsForty‐five patients with placenta previa complicated by placenta accreta who underwent CS were retrospectively studied. Twenty‐two patients had undergone CS combined with intermittent aortic balloon occlusion (combination group) and 23 patients received conventional hemostatic support only (control group). The postpartum hemorrhage, transfusion requirements, operation time and recovery time, and the ability to preserve the uterus and fertility were analyzed.ResultsIntermittent aortic balloon occlusion significantly decreased the volume of blood loss in the combination group relative to the control group (597 ± 359 mL vs 2687 ± 575 mL; P < 0.001), and transfusion requirements were also reduced (498 ±195 mL vs 2390 ±789 mL; P <0.001). We observed shorter operation time in the combination group relative to the control group (63.8 ± 12.3 min vs 118.8 ± 22.4 min; P < 0.001), and fewer patients required uterine cavity stuffing followed by uterine artery embolization (n = 2 vs n = 10; P <0.05), uterine artery ligation (n = 1 vs n = 9; P < 0.05), and hysterectomy (n = 0 vs n =7; P < 0.05).ConclusionIntermittent aortic balloon occlusion may control postpartum hemorrhage in pregnancies complicated by placenta accreta, and improve the postoperative conditions.
Meta‐analysis of the impact of successful chronic total occlusion percutaneous coronary intervention on left ventricular systolic function and reverse remodeling
Authors: Megaly Michael , Saad Marwan , Tajti Peter , Burke M. Nicholas , Chavez Ivan , Gössl Mario , Lips Daniel , Mooney Michael , Poulose Anil , Sorajja Paul , Traverse Jay , Wang Yale , Kohl Louis P. , Bradley Steven M. , Brilakis Emmanouil S. 
Published: July 2018

BackgroundWe sought to examine the impact of coronary chronic total occlusion (CTO) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on left ventricular (LV) function.MethodsWe performed a systematic review and meta‐analysis of studies published between January 1980 and November 2017 on the impact of successful CTO PCI on LV function.ResultsA total of 34 observational studies including 2735 patients were included in the meta‐analysis. Over a weighted mean follow‐up of 7.9 months, successful CTO PCI was associated with an increase in LV ejection fraction by 3.8% (95%CI 3.0‐4.7, P < 0.0001, I2 = 45%). In secondary analysis of 15 studies (1248 patients) that defined CTOs as occlusions of at least 3‐month duration and reported follow‐up of at least 3‐months after the procedure, successful CTO PCI was associated with improvement in LV ejection fraction by 4.3% (95%CI [3.1, 5.6], P < 0.0001). In the 10 studies (502 patients) that reported LV end‐systolic volume, successful CTO PCI was associated with a decrease in LV end‐systolic volume by 4 mL, (95%CI −6.0 to −2.1, P < 0.0001, I2 = 0%). LV end‐diastolic volume was reported in 9 studies with 403 patients and did not significantly change after successful CTO PCI (−2.3 mL, 95%CI −5.7 to 1.2 mL, P = 0.19, I2 = 0%).ConclusionsSuccessful CTO PCI is associated with a statistically significant improvement in LV ejection fraction and decrease in LV end‐systolic volume, that may reflect a beneficial effect of CTO recanalization on LV remodeling. The clinical implications of these findings warrant further investigation.
The Neolithic Plant Invasion Hypothesis: the role of preadaptation and disturbance in grassland invasion
Authors: MacDougall Andrew S. , McCune Jenny L. , Eriksson Ove , Cousins Sara A. O. , Pärtel Meelis , Firn Jennifer , Hierro Jose L. 
Published: July 2018

SummaryA long‐standing hypothesis is that many European plants invade temperate grasslands globally because they are introduced simultaneously with pastoralism and cultivation, to which they are ‘preadapted’ after millennia of exposure dating to the Neolithic era (‘Neolithic Plant Invasion Hypothesis’ (NPIH)). These ‘preadaptations’ are predicted to maximize their performance relative to native species lacking this adaptive history. Here, we discuss the explanatory relevance of the NPIH, clarifying the importance of evolutionary context vs other mechanisms driving invasion. The NPIH makes intuitive sense given established connections between invasion and agricultural‐based perturbation. However, tests are often incomplete given the need for performance contrasts between home and away ranges, while controlling for other mechanisms. We emphasize six NPIH‐based predictions, centring on trait similarity of invaders between home vs away populations, and differing perturbation responses by invading and native plants. Although no research has integrated all six predictions, we highlight studies suggesting preadaptation influences on invasion. Given that many European grasslands are creations of human activity from the past, current invasions by these flora may represent the continuation of processes dating to the Neolithic. Ironically, European Neolithic‐derived grasslands are becoming rarer, reflecting changes in management and illustrating the importance of human influences on these species.
Lost productivity among military personnel with cardiovascular disease
Authors: Gharasi-Manshadi Mahdi , Meskarpour-Amiri M , Mehdizadeh P 
Published: July 2018

ObjectiveCardiovascular disease (CVD) is associated with significant productivity loss among all occupational groups. However, the increased occupational requirements of military personnel pose physical and psychological demands that could lead to greater lost productivity of CVD. The aim of this study was to determine the economic cost of lost productivity of military patients with CVD.MethodsA prospective cross-sectional study was undertaken on all military patients attending a specialist CVD clinic in Tehran, Iran. All participants were interviewed using face-to-face questioning using a Valuation of Lost Productivity questionnaire. Data captured included paid and unpaid time lost due to CVD, military job characteristics and their work environment. Ordered logistic regression was used to examine the determinants of lost productivity.ResultsThe mean time of lost productivity was 118 hours over a 3-month period, of which 70 and 48 hours were paid and unpaid work, respectively. The average cost per patient of total lost productivity was estimated to be US$303 over a 3-month period.ConclusionsCVDs are associated with significant lost productivity among military personnel. There is a statistically significant relation between some military occupation characteristics and lost productivity from CVD. Level of income, teamwork and physical activity have the greatest effects on lost productivity. Military workers who were suffering from other chronic conditions (in addition to CVD) were four times more likely to lose productivity. A supportive work environment should be created for military personnel with emphasis on developing teamwork, improving worker’s attitudes towards disease and giving priority to workers with comorbidities.
A comparison of infectious agents between hatchery-enhanced and wild out-migrating juvenile chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) from Cowichan River, British Columbia
Authors: Thakur Krishna K. , Vanderstichel Raphaël , Li Shaorong , Laurin Emilie , Tucker Strahan , Neville Chrys , Tabata Amy , Miller Kristina M. 
Published: July 2018

Infectious diseases are likely contributing to large-scale declines in chinook salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest, but the specific agents and diseases involved, and the prevalences in migratory salmon, are mostly unknown. We applied a high-throughput microfluidics platform to screen for 45 infectious agents in 556 out-migrating juvenile chinook salmon, collected from freshwater (FW) and saltwater (SW) locations in the Cowichan River system on Vancouver Island, Canada, during 2014. Nineteen agents (5 bacterial, 2 viral, and 12 parasitic) were detected, with prevalences ranging from 0.2% to 57.6%. Co-infections between Candidatus Branchiomonas cysticola Toenshoff, Kvellestad, Mitchell, Steinum, Falk, Colquhoun & Horn, 2012, Paranucleospora theridion Nylund, Nylund, Watanabe, Arnesen & Kalrsbakk, 2010, and gill chlamydia, all associated with gill disease, were observed in SW samples. We detected agents known to cause large-scale mortalities in Pacific salmon ( Ceratonova shasta (Noble, 1950), Parvicapsula minibicornis Kent, Whitaker & Dawe, 1977), and agents only recently reported in Pacific salmon in BC ( Ca. B. cysticola, P. theridion, Facilispora margolisi Jones, Prosperi-Porta & Kim, 2012 and Parvicapsula pseudobranchicola Karlsbakk, Saether, Hostlund, Fjellsoy & Nylund, 2002). Wild and hatchery fish were most divergent in agent profiles in FW, with higher agent diversity in wild fish. Differences in prevalence largely dissipated once they converged in the marine environment, although hatchery fish may be infected by a greater diversity of agents sooner after ocean entry by virtue of their more rapid migration from nearshore to offshore environments.
Time Series Classification with HIVE-COTE
Authors: Lines Jason , Taylor Sarah , Bagnall Anthony 
Published: July 2018

A recent experimental evaluation assessed 19 time series classification (TSC) algorithms and found that one was significantly more accurate than all others: the Flat Collective of Transformation-based Ensembles (Flat-COTE). Flat-COTE is an ensemble that combines 35 classifiers over four data representations. However, while comprehensive, the evaluation did not consider deep learning approaches. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have seen a surge in popularity and are now state of the art in many fields and raises the question of whether CNNs could be equally transformative for TSC.
We implement a benchmark CNN for TSC using a common structure and use results from a TSC-specific CNN from the literature. We compare both to Flat-COTE and find that the collective is significantly more accurate than both CNNs. These results are impressive, but Flat-COTE is not without deficiencies. We significantly improve the collective by proposing a new hierarchical structure with probabilistic voting, defining and including two novel ensemble classifiers built in existing feature spaces, and adding further modules to represent two additional transformation domains. The resulting classifier, the Hierarchical Vote Collective of Transformation-based Ensembles (HIVE-COTE), encapsulates classifiers built on five data representations. We demonstrate that HIVE-COTE is significantly more accurate than Flat-COTE (and all other TSC algorithms that we are aware of) over 100 resamples of 85 TSC problems and is the new state of the art for TSC. Further analysis is included through the introduction and evaluation of 3 new case studies and extensive experimentation on 1,000 simulated datasets of 5 different types.
IDrone
Authors: Ruiz Carlos , Pan Shijia , Bannis Adeola , Chen Xinlei , Joe-Wong Carlee , Noh Hae Young , Zhang Pei 
Published: July 2018

Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) could provide great benefit when used for disaster response and indoor search and rescue scenarios. In these harsh environments where GPS availability cannot be ensured, prior work often relies on cameras for control and localization. This creates the challenge of identifying each drone, i.e., finding the association between each physical ID (such as their radio address) and their visual ID (such as an object tracker output). To address this problem, prior work relies on visual cues such as LEDs or colored markers to provide unique information for identification. However, these methods often increase deployment difficulty, are sensitive to environmental changes, not robust to distance and might require hardware changes.
In this paper, we present IDrone, a robust physical drone identification system through motion matching and actuation feedback. The intuition is to (1) identify each drone by matching the motion detected through their inertial sensors and from an external camera, and (2) control the drones so they move in unique patterns that allow for fast identification, while minimizing the risk of collision involved in controlling drones with uncertain identification. To validate our approach, we conduct both simulation and real experimentation with autonomous drones for the simplified case of a stationary Spotter (powerful drone equipped with the camera). Overall, our initial results show that our approach offers a great tradeoff between fast identification and small collision probability. In particular, IDrone achieves faster identification time than safety-based baseline actuation (one-at-a-time), and significantly higher survival rate compared to fast, non-safety-based baseline actuation (random motion).
Extracting Multi-Person Respiration from Entangled RF Signals
Authors: Yue Shichao , He Hao , Wang Hao , Rahul Hariharan , Katabi Dina 
Published: July 2018

Recent advances in wireless systems have demonstrated the possibility of tracking a person's respiration using the RF signals that bounce off her body. The resulting breathing signal can be used to infer the person's sleep quality and stages; it also allows for monitoring sleep apnea and other sleep disordered breathing (SDB); all without any body contact. Unfortunately however past work fails when people are close to each other, e.g., a couple sharing the same bed. In this case, the breathing signals of nearby individuals interfere with each other and super-impose in the received signal.
This paper presents DeepBreath, the first RF-based respiration monitoring system that can recover the breathing signals of multiple individuals even when they are separated by zero distance. To design DeepBreath, we model interference due to multiple reflected RF signals and demonstrate that the original breathing can be recovered via independent component analysis (ICA). We design a full system that eliminates interference and recovers the original breathing signals. We empirically evaluate DeepBreath using 21 nights of sleep and over 150 hours of data from 13 couples who share the bed. Our results show that DeepBreath is very accurate. Specifically, the differences between the breathing signals it recovers and the ground truth are on par with the difference between the same breathing signal measured at the person's chest and belly.
Coordination of hamstrings is individual specific and is related to motor performance
Authors: Avrillon Simon , Guilhem Gaël , Barthelemy Aude , Hug François 
Published: July 2018

The torque-sharing strategies between synergistic muscles may have important functional consequences. This study involved two experiments. The first experiment ( n = 22) aimed 1) to determine the relationship between the distribution of activation and the distribution of torque-generating capacity among the heads of the hamstring, and 2) to describe individual torque-sharing strategies and to determine whether these strategies are similar between legs. The second experiment ( n = 35) aimed to determine whether the distribution of activation between the muscle heads affects endurance performance during a sustained submaximal knee flexion task. Surface electromyography (EMG) was recorded from biceps femoris (BF), semimembranosus (SM), and semitendinosus (ST) during submaximal isometric knee flexions. Torque-generating capacity was estimated by measuring muscle volume, fascicle length, pennation angle, and moment arm. The product of the normalized EMG amplitude and the torque-generating capacity was used as an index of muscle torque. The distributions of muscle activation and of torque-generating capacity were not correlated significantly (all P > 0.18). Thus, there was a torque imbalance between the muscle heads (ST torque > BF and SM torque; P < 0.001), the magnitude of which varied greatly between participants. A significant negative correlation was observed between the imbalance of activation across the hamstring muscles and the time to exhaustion ( P < 0.001); i.e., the larger the imbalance of activation across muscles, the lower the muscle endurance performance. Torque-sharing strategies between the heads of the hamstrings are individual specific and related to muscle endurance performance. Whether these individual strategies play a role in hamstring injury remains to be determined.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The distribution of activation among the heads of the hamstring is not related to the distribution of torque-generating capacity. The torque-sharing strategies within hamstring muscles vary greatly between individuals but are similar between legs. Hamstring coordination affects endurance performance; i.e., the larger the imbalance of activation across the muscle heads, the lower the muscle endurance.
Acquisition of motor memory determines the interindividual variability of learning-induced plasticity in the primary motor cortex
Authors: Hirano Masato , Kubota Shinji , Koizume Yoshiki , Funase Kozo 
Published: July 2018

Acquisition of new motor skills induces plastic reorganization in the primary motor cortex (M1). Previous studies have demonstrated the increases in the M1 excitability through motor skill learning. However, this M1 reorganization is highly variable between individuals even though they improve their skill performance through the same training protocol. To reveal the source of this interindividual variability, we examined the relationship between an acquisition of memory-guided feedforward movements and the learning-induced increases in the M1 excitability. Twenty-eight subjects participated in experiment 1. We asked subjects to learn a visuomotor tracking task. The subjects controlled a cursor on a PC monitor to pursue a target line by performing ankle dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. In experiment 1, we removed the online visual feedback provided by the cursor movement once every six trials, which enabled us to assess whether the subjects could perform accurate memory-guided movements. Motor-evoked potentials (MEP) were elicited in the tibialis anterior muscle by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the relevant M1 before and after the learning of the visuomotor tracking task and after half the trials. We found that the MEP amplitude was increased along with the improvement in memory-guided movements. In experiment 2 ( n = 10), we confirmed this relationship by examining whether the improvement in memory-guided movements induces increases in MEP amplitude. The results of this study indicate that the plastic reorganization of the M1 induced by the learning of a visuomotor skill is associated with the acquisition of memory-guided movements. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Acquisition of novel motor skills increases excitability of the primary motor cortex (M1). We recently reported that the amount of increases in the M1 excitability is highly variable between individuals even though they learned the same skill to the similar extent, yet the sources of this interindividual variability still remain unclear. The present study revealed that this interindividual variability is associated with whether individuals acquire a motor memory, which enables them to produce accurate memory-guided movements.
Decrease in force steadiness with aging is associated with increased power of the common but not independent input to motor neurons
Authors: Castronovo Anna Margherita , Mrachacz-Kersting Natalie , Stevenson Andrew James Thomas , Holobar Ales , Enoka Roger Maro , Farina Dario 
Published: July 2018

Declines in motor function with advancing age have been attributed to changes occurring at all levels of the neuromuscular system. However, the impact of aging on the control of muscle force by spinal motor neurons is not yet understood. In this study on 20 individuals aged between 24 and 75 yr (13 men, 7 women), we investigated the common synaptic input to motor neurons of the tibialis anterior muscle and its impact on force control. Motor unit discharge times were identified from high-density surface EMG recordings during isometric contractions at forces of 20% of maximal voluntary effort. Coherence analysis between motor unit spike trains was used to characterize the input to motor neurons. The decrease in force steadiness with age ( R2 = 0.6, P < 0.01) was associated with an increase in the amplitude of low-frequency oscillations of functional common synaptic input to motor neurons ( R2 = 0.59; P < 0.01). The relative proportion of common input to independent noise at low frequencies increased with variability (power) in common synaptic input. Moreover, variability in interspike interval did not change and strength of the common input in the gamma band decreased with age ( R2 = 0.22; P < 0.01). The findings indicate that age-related reduction in the accuracy of force control is associated with increased common fluctuations to motor neurons at low frequencies and not with an increase in independent synaptic input.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The influence of aging on the role of spinal motor neurons in accurate force control is not yet understood. We demonstrate that aging is associated with increased oscillations in common input to motor neurons at low frequencies and with a decrease in the relative strength of gamma oscillations. These results demonstrate that the synaptic inputs to motor neurons change across the life span and contribute to a decline in force control.