bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Dynamic changes of QTc interval and prognostic significance in takotsubo (stress) cardiomyopathy
Authors: Santoro Francesco , Brunetti Natale Daniele , Tarantino Nicola , Romero Jorge , Guastafierro Francesca , Ferraretti Armando , Di Martino Luigi F. M. , Ieva Riccardo , Pellegrino Pier Luigi , Di Biase Matteo , Di Biase Luigi 
Published: September 2017

BackgroundProlonged QT corrected (QTc) intervals are associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes both in healthy and high‐risk populations. Our objective was to evaluate the QTc intervals during a takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TTC) episodes and their potential prognostic role.HypothesisDynamic changes of QTc interval during hospitalization for TTC could be associated with outcome at follow‐up.MethodsFifty‐two consecutive patients hospitalized for TTC were enrolled. Twelve‐lead electrocardiogram (ECG) was performed within 3 h after admission and repeated after 3, 5, and 7 days. Patients were classified in 2 groups: group 1 presented the maximal QTc interval length at admission and group 2 developed maximal QTc interval length after admission.ResultsMean admission QTc interval was 493 ± 71 ms and mean QTc peak interval was 550 ± 76 ms (P < 0.001). Seventeen (33%) patients were included in group 1 and 35 (67%) patients in group 2. There were no differences for cardiovascular risk factors and in terms of ECG findings such as ST elevation, ST depression, and inverted T waves. Rates of adverse events during hospitalization among patients of group 1 and 2 were different although not significantly (20% vs 6%, P = 0.22). After 647 days follow‐up, patients of group 1 presented higher risk of cardiovascular rehospitalization (31% vs 6%, P = 0.013; log‐rank, P < 0.01). At multivariate analysis, including age and gender, a prolonged QTc interval at admission was significantly associated with higher risk of rehospitalization at follow‐up (hazard ratio: 1.07 every 10 ms, 95% confidence interval: 1.003‐1.14, P = 0.04).ConclusionsProlonged QTc intervals at admission during a TTC episode could be associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular rehospitalization at follow‐up. Dynamic increase of QTc intervals after admission are characterized by a trend toward a better prognosis.
Historical time to disease progression and progression‐free survival in patients with recurrent/refractory neuroblastoma treated in the modern era on Children's Oncology Group early‐phase trials
Authors: London Wendy B. , Bagatell Rochelle , Weigel Brenda J. , Fox Elizabeth , Guo Dongjing , Van Ryn Collin , Naranjo Arlene , Park Julie R. 
Published: September 2017

BACKGROUNDEarly‐phase trials in patients with recurrent neuroblastoma historically used an objective “response” of measureable disease (Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors [RECIST], without bone/bone marrow assessment) to select agents for further study. Historical cohorts may be small and potentially biased; to the authors' knowledge, disease recurrence studies from international registries are outdated. Using a large recent cohort of patients with recurrent/refractory neuroblastoma from Children's Oncology Group (COG) modern‐era early‐phase trials, the authors determined outcome and quantified parameters for designing future studies.METHODSThe first early‐phase COG trial enrollment (sequential) of 383 distinct patients with recurrent/refractory neuroblastoma on 23 phase 1, 3 phase 1/2, and 9 phase 2 trials (August 2002 to January 2014) was analyzed for progression‐free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and time to disease progression (TTP). Planned frontline therapy for patients with high‐risk neuroblastoma included hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (approximately two‐thirds of patients underwent ≥1 hematopoietic stem cell transplantation); 13.2% of patients received dinutuximab.RESULTSFrom the time of the patient's first early‐phase trial enrollment (383 patients), the 1‐year and 4‐year PFS rates ( ± standard error) were 21% ± 2% and 6% ± 1%, respectively, whereas the 1‐year and 4‐year OS rates were 57% ± 3% and 20% ± 2%, respectively. The median TTP was 58 days (interquartile range, 31‐183 days [350 patients]); the median follow‐up was 25.3 months (33 patients were found to be without disease recurrence/progression). The median time from diagnosis to first disease recurrence/progression was 18.7 months (range, 1.4‐64.8 months) (176 patients). MYCN amplification and 11q loss of heterozygosity were prognostic of worse PFS and OS (P = .003 andP<.0001, respectively, andP = .02 andP = .03, respectively) after early‐phase trial enrollment.CONCLUSIONSThis recent COG cohort of patients with recurrent/refractory neuroblastoma is inclusive and representative. To the authors' knowledge, the current study is the first meta‐analysis of PFS, TTP, and OS within the context of modern therapy. These results will inform the design of future phase 2 studies by providing a) historical context during the search for more effective agents; and, b) factors prognostic of PFS and OS after disease recurrence to stratify randomization.Cancer2017;123:4914‐23. ©2017 American Cancer Society.
A critical period for the trophic actions of leptin on AgRP neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus
Authors: Kamitakahara Anna , Bouyer Karine , Wang Chien‐Hua , Simerly Richard 
Published: September 2017

AbstractIn the developing hypothalamus, the fat‐derived hormone leptin stimulates the growth of axons from the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus (ARH) to other regions that control energy balance. These projections are significantly reduced in leptin deficient (Lepob/ob) mice and this phenotype is largely rescued by neonatal leptin treatments. However, treatment of mature Lepob/ob mice is ineffective, suggesting that the trophic action of leptin is limited to a developmental critical period. To temporally delineate closure of this critical period for leptin‐stimulated growth, we treated Lepob/ob mice with exogenous leptin during a variety of discrete time periods, and measured the density of Agouti‐Related Peptide (AgRP) containing projections from the ARH to the ventral part of the dorsomedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (DMHv), and to the medial parvocellular part of the paraventricular nucleus (PVHmp). The results indicate that leptin loses its neurotrophic potential at or near postnatal day 28. The duration of leptin exposure appears to be important, with 9‐ or 11‐day treatments found to be more effective than shorter (5‐day) treatments. Furthermore, leptin treatment for 9 days or more was sufficient to restore AgRP innervation to both the PVHmp and DMHv in Lepob/ob females, but only to the DMHv in Lepob/ob males. Together, these findings reveal that the trophic actions of leptin are contingent upon timing and duration of leptin exposure, display both target and sex specificity, and that modulation of leptin‐dependent circuit formation by each of these factors may carry enduring consequences for feeding behavior, metabolism, and obesity risk.
A survey of value prediction techniques for leveraging value locality
Authors: Mittal Sparsh 
Published: September 2017

SummaryValue locality (VL) refers to recurrence of values in a memory structure, and value prediction (VP) refers to predicting VL and leveraging it for diverse optimizations. VP holds the promise of exceeding true‐data dependencies and provide performance and bandwidth advantages in both single‐ and multi‐threaded applications. Fully exploiting the potential of VL, however, requires addressing several challenges, such as achieving high accuracy and coverage, reducing hardware and latency overheads, etc. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for leveraging value locality. We categorize the research works based on key parameters to provide insights and highlight similarities and differences. This paper is expected to be useful for researchers, processor architects, and chip‐designers.
Automatic generation of related work through summarizing citations
Authors: Chen Jingqiang , Zhuge Hai 
Published: September 2017

SummaryRelated work is a component of a scientific paper, which introduces other researchers' relevant works and makes comparisons with the current author's work. Automatically generating the related work section of a writing paper provides a tool for researchers to accomplish the related work section efficiently without missing related works. This paper proposes an approach to automatically generating a related work section by comparing the main text of the paper being written with the citations of other papers that cite the same references. Our approach first collects the papers that cite the reference papers of the paper being written and extracts the corresponding citation sentences to form a citation document. It then extracts keywords from the citation document and the paper being written and constructs a graph of the keywords. Once the keywords that discriminate the two documents are determined, the minimum Steiner tree that covers the discriminative keywords and the topic keywords is generated. The summary is generated by extracting the sentences covering the Steiner tree. According to ROUGE evaluations, the experiments show that the citations are suitable for related work generation and our approach outperforms the three baseline methods of MEAD, LexRank, and ReWoS. This work verifies the general summarization method based on connotation and extension through citation.
Drawbacks of impedance networks
Authors: Rymarski Zbigniew , Bernacki Krzysztof 
Published: September 2017

SummaryThis paper presents the influence of voltage‐fed impedance networks, known as Z‐source and quasi–Z‐source, as well as some more sophisticated networks on the static and dynamic properties of voltage source inverters. The impedance networks increase output voltage distortions with the second harmonic of the fundamental harmonic and decrease the power efficiency. The distortions of the output voltage increase for the discontinuous current mode of the impedance network. The DC voltage boost factor depends on the impedance network power losses. The impedance networks add 2 resonant frequencies that are very close each other to the control transfer function of the inverter in the frequency range that is close to the fundamental frequency. The influence of the impedance network on the control transfer function depends on the effective damping resistance in the impedance network. The impedance network operation during the “shoot‐through” time increases the damping of the inverter output filter. The effective damping resistances and the inductance of the coils depend on the power losses in the magnetic materials. Theoretical models along with experimental verification can help to estimate the real influence of impedance networks on the inverter properties.
Sliding‐window forward error correction using Reed‐Solomon code and unequal error protection for real‐time streaming video
Authors: Weng Yung‐Tsung , Shih Chi‐Huang , Chou Yeh‐Kai 
Published: September 2017

SummaryForward error correction (FEC) techniques are widely used to recover packet losses over unreliable networks in real‐time video streaming applications. Traditional frame‐level FEC encodes 1 video frame in each FEC coding window. By contrast, in the expanding‐window FEC scheme, high‐priority frames are included in the FEC processing of the following frames, so as to construct a larger coding window. In general, expanding‐window FEC improves the recovery performance of FEC, because the high‐priority frame can be protected by multiple windows and the use of a larger coding window increases the efficiency. However, the larger window size also increases the complexity of the coding and the memory space requirements. Consequently, expanding‐window FEC is limited in terms of practical applications. Sliding‐window FEC adopts a fixed window size in order to approximate the performance of the expanding‐window FEC method, but with a reduced complexity. Previous studies on sliding‐window FEC have generally adopted an equal error protection (EEP) mechanism to simplify the analysis. This paper considers the more practical case of an unequal error protection (UEP) strategy. An analytical model is derived for estimating the playable frame rate (PFR) of the proposed sliding‐window FEC scheme with a Reed‐Solomon erasure code for real‐time non‐scalable streaming applications. The analytical model is used to determine the optimal FEC configuration which maximizes the PFR value under given transmission rate constraints. The simulation results show that the proposed sliding‐window scheme achieves almost the same performance as the expanding‐window scheme, but with a significantly lower computational complexity.
The evolution of queen control over worker reproduction in the social Hymenoptera
Authors: Olejarz Jason , Veller Carl , Nowak Martin A. 
Published: September 2017

AbstractA trademark of eusocial insect species is reproductive division of labor, in which workers forego their own reproduction while the queen produces almost all offspring. The presence of the queen is key for maintaining social harmony, but the specific role of the queen in the evolution of eusociality remains unclear. A long‐discussed scenario is that a queen either behaviorally or chemically sterilizes her workers. However, the demographic and ecological conditions that enable such manipulation are still debated. We study a simple model of evolutionary dynamics based on haplodiploid genetics. Our model is set in the commonly observed case where workers have lost the ability to lay female (diploid) eggs by mating, but retain the ability to lay male (haploid) eggs. We consider a mutation that acts in a queen, causing her to control the reproductive behavior of her workers. Our mathematical analysis yields precise conditions for the evolutionary emergence and stability of queen‐induced worker sterility. These conditions do not depend on the queen's mating frequency. We find that queen control is always established if it increases colony reproductive efficiency, but can evolve even if it decreases colony efficiency. We further derive the conditions under which queen control is evolutionarily stable against invasion by mutant workers who have recovered the ability to lay male eggs.
Incorporating ecological functions in conservation decision making
Authors: Decker Emilia , Linke Simon , Hermoso Virgilio , Geist Juergen 
Published: September 2017

AbstractSystematic conservation planning has become a standard approach globally, but prioritization of conservation efforts hardly considers species traits in decision making. This can be important for species persistence and thus adequacy of the conservation plan. Here, we developed and validated a novel approach of incorporating trophic information into a systematic conservation planning framework. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach using fish data from Europe's second largest river, the Danube. Our results show that adding trophic information leads to a different spatial configuration of priority areas at no additional cost. This can enhance identification of priority refugia for species in the lower position of the trophic web while simultaneously identifying areas that represent a more diverse species pool. Our methodological approach to incorporating species traits into systematic conservation planning is generally applicable, irrespective of realm, geographical area, and species composition and can potentially lead to more adequate conservation plans.
The CD45+ fraction in murine adipose tissue derived stromal cells harbors immune‐inhibitory inflammatory cells
Authors: Nasti Alessandro , Sakai Yoshio , Seki Akihiro , Buffa Geraldine Belen , Komura Takuya , Mochida Hatsune , Yamato Masatoshi , Yoshida Keiko , Ho Tuyen T. B. , Takamura Masayuki , Usui Soichiro , Wada Takashi , Honda Masao , Kaneko Shuichi 
Published: September 2017

AbstractStromal cells in adipose tissue are useful for repair/regenerative therapy as they harbor a substantial number of mesenchymal stem cells; therefore, freshly isolated autologous uncultured adipose tissue derived stromal cells (u‐ADSCs) are useful for regenerative therapy, and obviate the need for mesenchymal stem cells. We evaluated the therapeutic effect of murine u‐ADSCs and sorted subsets of u‐ADSCs in a concanavalin A (ConA) induced murine model of hepatitis, as well as their characteristics. We found that 10–20% of u‐ADSCs expressed the CD45 leukocyte‐related antigen. CD68, which is a marker of macrophages (MΦs), was expressed by 50% of CD45+ u‐ADSCs. About 90% of CD68+CD45+ cells expressed CD206 antigen, which is a marker of inhibitory M2‐type MΦs. Genes related to M2‐type MUs were especially more highly expressed by CD45+CD206+ u‐ADSCs than by CD45− u‐ADSCs. CD45+ u‐ADSCs inhibited the expression of cytokines/chemokines and suppressed the proliferation of splenocytes stimulated with ConA. We observed that not only whole u‐ADSCs, but also the CD45+ subset of u‐ADSCs ameliorated the ConA‐induced hepatitis in mice. In conclusion, we show that freshly isolated murine u‐ADSCs were effective against acute hepatitis, and CD45+ u‐ADSCs acting phenotypically and functionally like M2‐type MΦs, contributed to the repair of liver tissue undergoing inflammation.
Biocompatible Polymeric Nanoparticles From Castor Oil Derivatives via Thiol‐Ene Miniemulsion Polymerization
Authors: Cardoso Priscilla B. , Machado Thiago O. , Feuser Paulo E. , Sayer Claudia , Meier Michael A. R. , Araújo Pedro H. H. 
Published: September 2017

Biocompatible polymeric nanoparticles are obtained via thiol‐ene polymerization of a biobased monomer in miniemulsion. The α,ω‐diene‐diester monomer is synthesized through esterification reaction of a glycerol derivative, namely 1,3‐propanediol, with 10‐undecenoic acid, a long‐chain diene carboxylic acid. In order to investigate how different monomeric structures behave toward thiol‐ene polymerization in miniemulsion, two types of thiols are investigated: 1,4‐butanedithiol and 2‐mercaptoethyl ether. Poly(thioether‐ester)s with weight average molecular weight up to 15 kDa (Mn) are obtained, depending on initiator concentration and types of surfactant and dithiol employed. Finally, biobased poly(thioether‐ester) nanoparticles are submitted to cytotoxicity and hemolysis analyses. High cell viability and no significant changes in cell morphology are observed after the incubation on murine fibroblast (L929) and human cervical cancer cells (HeLa). Last, hemolysis assays revealed blood compatibility and therefore polymeric nanoparticles have been shown to be a potential alternative drug delivery vector for intravenous administration.Practical Applications: There is a great demand for polymeric systems that fulfill a number of requirements, such as biodegradability and biocompatibility, for biomedical applications. In this context, biobased polymers obtained from vegetable oils are a very attractive sustainable alternative to fossil‐derived polymeric materials, presenting potential biodegradability and low toxicity. By thiol‐ene reactions, polymeric materials containing ester groups in the main chain—which can undergo hydrolysis—can be prepared in miniemulsion, enabling their degradation in physiological environment and, therefore, being interesting for biomedical applications and material disposal. Such novel materials could be used in temporary implants, tissue engineering, and drug delivery systems.Biocompatible polymeric nanoparticles are obtained via thiol‐ene polymerization of a biobased monomer in miniemulsion. Nanoparticles revealed to be a potential alternative controlled release drug delivery vector for intravenous administration.
Sensitive Electrochemical Detection of Bisphenol A Using Molybdenum Disulfide/Au Nanorod Composites Modified Glassy Carbon Electrode
Authors: Wang Mingxia , Shi Yifei , Zhang Yubin , Wang Yang , Huang Huayu , Zhang Jiangyi , Song Jinxi 
Published: September 2017

AbstractBisphenol A, an important compound that is classified as an environmental hormone, has been proven to have harmful effects on human health and ecology. A molybdenum disulfide/Au nanorod‐modified glassy carbon electrode was prepared as an electrochemical sensor for the detection of bisphenol A using a simple and convenient approach. UV–Vis spectrophotometry and transmission electron microscopy were employed to characterize the composite. The electrochemical behavior of bisphenol A at the modified electrode was investigated via differential pulse voltammetry and cyclic voltammetry. The results show that bisphenol A exhibits a good electrochemical signal at the modified electrode under optimized conditions, and a good linear relationship was observed between the bisphenol A concentration and peak current within the range of 0.01–50 μM, with a detection limit of 3.4 nM. Furthermore, the fabricated electrodes showed good anti‐interference, reproducibility and stability. The proposed electrochemical method was successfully applied for the detection of bisphenol A in milk and water samples, and its potential for applications in pollutant detection was demonstrated.
Comparison of different solvents for extraction of polyhydroxybutyrate from Cupriavidus necator
Authors: Aramvash Asieh , Moazzeni Zavareh Fatemeh , Gholami Banadkuki Narges 
Published: September 2017

AbstractPolyhydroxybutyrate (PHBs) have attracted much attention due to their biodegradability and biocompatibility properties. The main drawback to the commercial production of them is their high cost. The recovery of PHB from bacterial cytoplasm significantly increases total processing costs. Efficient, economical, and environment‐friendly extraction of PHB from cells is required for its industrial production. In the present study, several nonhalogenated organic solvents (ethylene carbonate, dimethyl sulfoxide, dimethyl formamide, hexane, propanol, methanol, and acetic acid) were examined for their efficacy regarding recovery at different temperatures from culture broth containing Cupriavidus necator cells. The highest recovery percentage (98.6%) and product purity (up to 98%) were seen to be those of ethylene carbonate‐assisted extraction at 150°C within 60 min of incubation time. Average molecular weight of the recovered PHB (1.3 × 106) was not significantly affected by the extraction solvent and conditions. The melting point of PHB extracted using ethylene carbonate was measured to be 176.2°C with an enthalpy of fusion of 16.8% and the corresponding degree of crystallinity of 59.2%. NMR and GC analyses confirmed that the extracted biopolymer was PHB. The presented strategy can help researchers to reduce the cost to obtain the final product.