bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Low serum albumin and total lymphocyte count as predictors of 30 day hospital readmission in patients 65 years of age or older
Authors: Robinson Robert 
Published: January 2018

Introduction: Hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge is a target for health care cost savings through the medicare Value Based Purchasing initiative. Because of this focus, hospitals and health systems are investing considerable resources into the identification of patients at risk of hospital readmission and designing interventions to reduce the rate of hospital readmission. Malnutrition is a known risk factor for hospital readmission.
Materials and Methods: All medical patients 65 years of age or older discharged from Memorial Medical Center from January 1, 2012 to March 31, 2012 who had a determination of serum albumin level and total lymphocyte count on hospital admission were studied retrospectively. Admission serum albumin levels and total lymphocyte counts were used to classify the nutritional status of all patients in the study. Patients with a serum albumin less than 3.5 grams/dL and/or a TLC less than 1,500 cells per mm3 were classified as having protein energy malnutrition. The primary outcome investigated in this study was hospital readmission for any reason within 30 days of discharge.
Results: The study population included 1,683 hospital discharges with an average age of 79 years. The majority of the patients were female (55.9%) and had a DRG weight of 1.22 (0.68). 219 patients (13%) were readmitted within 30 days of hospital discharge. Protein energy malnutrition was common in this population. Low albumin was found in 973 (58%) patients and a low TLC was found in 1,152 (68%) patients. Low albumin and low TLC was found in 709 (42%) of patients. Kaplan-Meier analysis shows any laboratory evidence of PEM is a significant (p < 0.001) predictor of hospital readmission. Low serum albumin (p < 0.001) and TLC (p = 0.018) show similar trends. Cox proportional-hazards regression analysis showed low serum albumin (Hazard Ratio 3.27, 95% CI: 2.30-4.63) and higher DRG weight (Hazard Ratio 1.19, 95% CI: 1.03-1.38) to be significant independent predictors of hospital readmission within 30 days.
Discussion: This study investigated the relationship of PEM to the rate of hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge in patients 65 years of age or older. These results indicate that laboratory markers of PEM can identify patients at risk of hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge. This risk determination is simple and identifies a potentially modifiable risk factor for readmission: protein energy malnutrition.
Whale shark behaviors observed in northeastern Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Authors: de la Parra Rafael , Dove Alistair D.M. , Galván Beatriz 
Published: January 2018

Background: Whale shark feeding aggregations in northeastern Quintana Roo (Yucatan Peninsula) between May and September are a natural phenomenon well known to local people for decades. Since 2001 we have observed these animals, first as tourists and then as part of formal research activities including conventional tagging, aerial survey and photographic identification. During this time we have made significant behavioral observations, other than previously described: passive and active feeding, banking as predatory response, tolerance even to be touched by people.
Methods: Observations were made primarily during snorkeling surveys of the wale shark aggregation between 2001 and 2013. Video documenting and photographic identifications were made using ECOCEAN and our own photographic catalogue of individual Quintana Roo animals. Data collected on each whale shark included its location, sex, total length estimation, tagging, photographs and behavioral observations. Over 1,340 hours were spent in documenting many conducts performed by whale sharks. Important to notice that these observations were made mostly around tourism activities, but many were made before or after tour operation, or on separate sub-aggregations, under SEMARNAT permission: SGPA/DGVS/10048/12 Results: 54,662 photographs were obtained during 366 observation days, plus 1,382 videos for over 315 minutes, on a decade of study and survey. Individual whale sharks in the QR aggregation have also been observed in Belize, Honduras and the Gulf of Mexico and some have visitation records exceeding 10 years. Occasionally, early spring ephemeral aggregations occur, perhaps in response to short term plankton blooms, these are composed by the same individual animals as revealed after photographic identification. These aggregations are mostly male and immature. Larger females seem to stay on the periphery of the aggregation or even form separate small groups. Smaller animals appear to be more curious of humans than ar e older animals. Many animals feed vertically and some are observed “coughing” and “mouth washing”. Vigorous tail-flapping and increased remora activity often precedes defecation, banking behavior may be social.
Conclusion: Prolonged observation shows that whale sharks have a more diverse behavioral repertoire than known previously and confirming observations made of aquarium-held animals, as well as their ability to synchronize their presence with high productivity occurrence. More detailed studies of group composition are definitely needed, as are functional studies of some of the other intriguing behaviors. Since whale shark behavior is often opportunistic and facultative, and depends on many factors to coincide, like specific weather and oceanic conditions, food concentration as well as anthropogenic influence, statistical analysis is beyond this study consideration. Do these events play a role in breeding opportunity?
Were the necks of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus adapted for combat?
Authors: Taylor Michael P , Wedel Mathew J , Naish Darren , Engh Brian 
Published: January 2018

The apatosaurine sauropods — Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus and possibly others — resemble their diplodocine relatives, but are generally more robust. Apatosaur necks are much thicker than in other sauropods: cervical ribs and their supports are uniquely robust, and the ribs are strongly displaced ventrally. The diapophyseal and parapophyseal rami therefore project ventrolaterally, so that the neck would have been subtriangular in cross-section, not tubular.
Why did apatosaurines evolve necks that were apomorphically expensive to build, maintain, and operate? While sexual selection is not a convincing explanation for the evolution of sauropod necks in general, several features of apatosaurine necks suggest adaptation for combat:
1. Ventral displacement of cervical ribs improved the lever arms of the hypaxial muscles, strengthening ventral neck movements.
2. Ventrolaterally directed parapophyseal rami were oriented to resist ventral impacts.
3. The ventral trough between the cervical ribs provided soft-tissue protection for the trachea, oesophagus, and major blood vessels.
4. The ventrolateral processes on the cervical ribs may have been bony clubs, bearing thickened pads of connective tissue or keratinous knobs or spikes.
These adaptations suggest a style of combat in which the neck itself was crashed down or sideways into the opponent, rather than giraffe-style combat in which the head is the weapon. The closest extant analogue may be the elephant seal Mirounga: males fight by crashing their necks and anterior thoraxes together. As with apatosaurs, their cervical vertebrae are more robust than in relatives, and their ventral processes more pronounced; but enormous soft-tissue padding makes the analogy very inexact.
Motion and morphometry in clinical populations
Authors: Pardoe Heath R , Kucharsky Hiess Rebecca , Kuzniecky Ruben 
Published: January 2018

Introduction The relationship between participant motion, demographic variables and MRI-derived morphometric estimates was investigated in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia. Participant motion was estimated using resting state fMRI and used as a proxy measure for motion during T1-weighted MRI acquired in the same session. Analyses were carried out in scans qualitatively assessed as free from motion-related artifact.
Methods Whole brain T1-weighted MRI and resting state fMRI acquisitions from the ABIDE, ADHD-200 and COBRE databases were included in our analyses. Motion was estimated using coregistration of sequential resting state volumes. Morphometric estimates were obtained using Freesurfer v5.3. We investigated if motion is related to diagnosis, age and gender, and scanning site. We further determined if there is a relationship between participant motion and cortical thickness, contrast, and volumetric estimates.
Results 2131 participants were included in our analyses. Participant motion was higher in all clinical groups compared with healthy controls. Younger (age < 20 years) and older (age > 40 years) people move more than individuals aged 20 – 40 years. Increased motion is associated with reduced average cortical thickness (-0.02 mm thickness per mm motion, p = 4.03×10-5) and cortical contrast (0.95% contrast reduction per mm motion, p = 5.25×10-11) in scans that have been qualitatively assessed as free from motion artifact.
Conclusions Participant motion is increased in clinical groups and is systematically associated with morphometric estimates. These findings indicate that accounting for participant motion may be important for improving the statistical validity of morphometric studies.
Denied and false pregnancies: Opposite settings of a single evolutionary conflict
Authors: Sandoz Patrick 
Published: January 2018

Aim: A woman in denial of pregnancy is pregnant but remains unaware of her gravid state. In the case of a false pregnancy; the woman is not pregnant but believes she is and presents signs and symptoms of pregnancy. These syndromes correspond to opposite contradictions that were mainly explored separately. Our aim is to explain them by a common and consistent etiology.
Method: We explore internal conflicts inherited from the evolutionary transition from solitary animals to social species.
Results: The solitary and social characters are contradictory. They induce internal conflicts intrinsic to the human condition. At the reproduction level, those conflicts oppose primitive interests (genes transmission) to social identity ones (to become a parent). Both syndromes are described by powerful identity interests in contradiction with the actual physiological state: i) actual pregnancy but unacceptable motherhood (denial), and ii) imperative motherhood in a non-pregnant woman (false pregnancy). The physiological symptoms results from a temporarily adaptive artifice hiding the internal tension and fulfilling simultaneously (but superficially) the incompatible demands.
Conclusion: The proposed model explains clinical observations satisfactorily. It complies with a huge diversity of causative events for the identity tensions involved as reported in literature. The model also elucidates the temporary adaptive character of those psychosomatic dysfunctions. To explain those syndromes in a rational and understandable way will facilitate health professional information, thus favoring the detection and follow-up of cases. The acceptation of their condition by concerned women will also be made easier.
Regional variation in digital cushion pressure in the forefeet of horses and elephants.
Authors: Warner Sharon E , Henry Victoria , Roskilly Kyle , Hildebrandt Thomas , Panagiotopoulou Olga , Hutchinson John R 
Published: January 2018

Horses and elephants have extreme foot designs; horses have an unguligrade foot posture with small, single-toed, rigid hooves housing a small fibrous digital cushion, whereas elephants have large, multi-toed, functionally plantigrade, compliant feet with large adipose filled digital cushions. The morphology of the digital cushion is divergent in these species, in terms of its size, shape, volume, composition and organisation. In the context of foot-ground contact this is interesting, because feet nonetheless have to perform similar mechanical functions in all terrestrial species. How well the digital cushion functions under load may contribute to the aetiopathogenesis of foot disease; a sub-optimal digital cushion is less likely to distribute (and thus reduce) high pressures, moderate impact shock and vibration, or prevent unwarranted bone displacement.
In this study, we seek to understand how the digital cushion morphologies evident in horse and elephant feet influence internal and external foot pressures. Our novel use of invasive blood pressure monitoring equipment, combined with a pressure pad and force plate, enabled measurements of (ex vivo) digital cushion pressure under increasing axial loads in seven horse and six elephant forefeet. Linear mixed effects models (LMER) revealed that internal digital cushion pressures increase under load and differ depending on region; elephant feet experienced higher magnitudes of medial digital cushion pressure, whereas horse feet experienced higher magnitudes of centralised digital cushion pressure. Direct comparison of digital cushion pressure magnitudes in both species, at equivalent loads relative to body weight, revealed that medial and lateral pressures increased more rapidly with load in elephant limbs. Within the same approximate region, internal pressures exceeded external, palmar pressures (on the sole of the foot), supporting previous Finite Element (FE) predictions. High pressures and large variations in pressure may relate to the development of foot pathology, which is a major concern in horses and elephants in a captive/domestic environment.
We suggest that heterogeneity within the digital cushion allows it to perform conflicting mechanical functions during locomotion; different digital cushion regions may be responsible for specific functions and therefore feature appropriate properties to do so. Determining how internal structures such as the digital cushion respond to locomotor loading is essential to understanding foot health and pathology, as well as the functional consequences of evolutionary changes in foot morphology.
The Vertebrate Taxonomy Ontology: A framework for reasoning across model organism and species phenotypes
Authors: Midford Peter E , Dececchi T Alex , Balhoff James P , Dahdul Wasila M , Ibrahim Nizar , Lapp Hilmar , Lundberg John G , Mabee Paula M , Sereno Paul C , Westerfield Monte , Vision Todd J , Blackburn David C 
Published: January 2018

Background: A hierarchical taxonomy of organisms is a prerequisite for semantic integration of biodiversity data. Ideally, there would be a single, expansive, authoritative taxonomy that includes extinct and extant taxa, information on synonyms and common names, and monophyletic supraspecific taxa that reflect our current understanding of phylogenetic relationships.
Description: As a step towards development of such a resource, and to enable large-scale integration of phenotypic data across the vertebrates, we created the Vertebrate Taxonomy Ontology (VTO), a semantically defined taxonomic resource derived from the integration of existing taxonomic compilations, and freely distributed under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain waiver. The VTO includes both extant and extinct vertebrates and currently contains 106,927 taxonomic terms, 23 taxonomic ranks, 104,506 synonyms, and 162,132 taxonomic cross-references. Key challenges in constructing the VTO included (1) extracting and merging names, synonyms, and identifiers from heterogeneous sources; (2) replacing subgroups with more authoritative local taxonomies; and (3) automating this process as much as possible to accommodate updates in source taxonomies.
Conclusions: The VTO is the primary source of taxonomic information used by the Phenoscape Knowledgebase (http://phenoscape.org/), which integrates genetic and evolutionary phenotype data across both model and nonmodel vertebrates. The VTO is useful for crudely inferring phenotypic changes on the vertebrate tree of life, which enables queries for candidate genes for different episodes in vertebrate evolution.
In a fit of pique: Analyzing microbial ChIP-Seq data with Pique
Authors: Neches Russell Y , Seitzer Phillip M , Wilbanks Elizabeth G , Facciotti Marc T 
Published: January 2018

While numerous effective peak finders have been developed for eukaryotic systems, we have found that the approaches used can be error prone when run on high coverage bacterial and archaeal ChIP-Seq datasets. We have developed Pique, an easy to use ChIP-Seq peak finding application for bacterial and archaeal ChIP-Seq experiments. The software is cross-platform and Open Source, and based on only freely licensed dependencies. Output is provided in standardized file formats, and may be easily imported by the Gaggle Genome Browser (Bare et al. 2010) for manual curation and data exploration, or into statistical and graphics software such as R (R Core Team 2013) for further analysis. The software is available under the BSD-3 license, and tutorial and test data are included with the documentation.
http://github.com/ryneches/pique.
CauseMap: Fast inference of causality from complex time series
Authors: Maher M. Cyrus , Hernandez Ryan D. 
Published: January 2018

Background: Establishing health-related causal relationships is a central pursuit in biomedical research. Yet, the interdependent non-linearity of biological systems renders causal dynamics laborious and at times impractical to disentangle. This pursuit is further impeded by the dearth of time series that are sufficiently long to observe and understand recurrent patterns of flux. However, as data generation costs plummet and technologies like wearable devices democratize data collection, we anticipate a coming surge in the availability of biomedically-relevant time series data. Given the life-saving potential of these burgeoning resources, it is critical to invest in the development of open source software tools that are capable of drawing meaningful insight from vast amounts of time series data.
Results: Here we present CauseMap, the first open source implementation of convergent cross mapping (CCM), a method for establishing causality from long time series data (> ~25 observations). Compared to existing time series methods, CCM has the advantage of being model-free and robust to unmeasured confounding that could otherwise induce spurious associations. CCM builds on Takens’ Theorem, a well-established result from dynamical systems theory that requires only mild assumptions. This theorem allows us to reconstruct high dimensional system dynamics using a time series of only a single variable. These reconstructions can be thought of as shadows of the true causal system. If the reconstructed shadows can predict points from the opposing time series, we can infer that the corresponding variables are providing views of the same causal system, and so are causally related. Unlike traditional metrics, this test can establish the directionality of causation, even in the presence of feedback loops. Furthermore, since CCM can extract causal relationships from times series of, e.g. a single individual, it may be a valuable tool to personalized medicine. We implement CCM in Julia, a high-performance programming language designed for facile technical computing. Our software package, CauseMap, is platform-independent and freely available as an official Julia package.
Conclusions: CauseMap is an efficient implementation of a state-of-the-art algorithm for detecting causality from time series data. We believe this tool will be a valuable resource for biomedical research and personalized medicine.
Preliminary needs assessment of mobile technology use for healthcare among homeless veterans
Authors: McInnes D Keith , Fix Gemmae M , Solomon Jeffrey L , Petrakis Beth Ann , Sawh Leon , Smelson David A 
Published: January 2018

BACKGROUND: Homeless veterans have complex healthcare needs, but experience many barriers to treatment engagement. While information technologies (IT), especially mobile phones, are used to engage patients in care, little is known about homeless veterans’ IT use. This study examines homeless veterans’ access to and use of IT, attitudes toward health-related IT use, and barriers to IT in the context of homelessness.
METHODS: Qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 homeless veterans in different housing programs in Boston, MA. Inductive thematic analysis was used.
RESULTS: Most participants (90%) had a mobile phone and were receptive to IT use for health-related communications. A common difficulty communicating with providers was the lack of a stable mailing address. Some participants were using mobile phones to stay in touch with providers. Participants felt mobile-phone calls or text messages could be used to remind patients of appointments, prescription refills, medication taking, and returning for laboratory results. Mobile phone text messaging was seen as convenient, helped participants stay organized because necessary information was saved in text messages. Some reported concerns about the costs associated with mobile phone use (calls and texting), the potential to be annoyed by too many text messages, and not knowing how to use text messaging.
CONCLUSION: Homeless veterans use IT and welcome its use for health-related purposes. Technology-assisted outreach among this population may lead to improved engagement in care.
Observations of Blossfeldia liliputana (Cactaceae) populations in Jujuy province (Argentina)
Authors: Panassiti Bernd , Ahumada Osvaldo , Porembski Stefan 
Published: January 2018

Introduction. Blossfeldia liliputana Werdermann (Cactaceae) is known as the tiniest cactus with a distribution from southern Bolivia and to mid-west Argentina. Due to the inconspicuous habitus, little was known about the environmental effects on its distribution. The main objectives of this study were to describe the distribution of B. liliputana in Jujuy province, north-western Argentina, and to identify abiotic and biotic environmental parameters affecting the numerical abundance of B. liliputana populations.
Material and methods. Using existing information about ecology and previously described growth sites, we localized populations of B. liliputana and counted the number of above ground stems (hereinafter referred as “heads”) within plots of 10cm2. A set of environmental data was derived from direct measurements, laboratory analysis and literature. Descriptive and multivariate statistics were used to infer habitat requirements.
Results. We found seven locations with B. liliputana populations at Jujuy. Average populations size per plot ranged from four to 22 heads. B. liliputana prefers shaded rock crevices made of shale and slates and a annual mean temperature below 14°C and a annual precipitation lower than 200 mm. Seed dispersal by ants was not observed.
Discussion. Although even after extensive field survey as much as seven locations were found, the cactus is not scarcely distributed rather the habitat is located in hardly accessible areas. Our findings suggest that B. liliputana is a habitat specialist adapted to extreme environments.