bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the Incidence, Clinical Significance and Predictors for Vocal Cord Palsy and Incidental Laryngopharyngeal Conditions before Elective Thyroidectomy: Is There a Case for Routine Laryngoscopic Examination?
Authors: Lang Brian Hung‐Hin , Chu Kevin Ka‐Wan , Tsang Raymond King‐Yin , Wong Kai Pun , Wong Birgitta Yee‐Hang 
Published: September 2013

AbstractBackgroundRoutine preoperative laryngeal examination remains controversial. We aimed to assess the utility of preoperative routine flexible laryngoscopy (FL) by looking at the incidence, clinical significance and predictors for preoperative vocal cord paresis (VCP) and incidental laryngopharyngeal conditions (LPC) in our consecutive cohort.MethodsA total of 302 patients underwent laryngeal examination by an independent otorhinolaryngologist and were specifically asked about voice/swallowing symptoms suggestive of VCP 1 day before surgery. As well as vocal cord (VC) mobility, the naso‐pharynx and larynx were examined using FL. Any VCP and/or LPC was recorded. VCP was defined as reduced or absent movement in one or more VC. An LPC was considered clinically significant if the ensuing thyroidectomy was changed or deferred.ResultsSeven (2.3 %) patients had preoperative VCP, while an additional seven patients had an incidental LPC. Of the seven VCPs, five were caused by previous thyroidectomy, while two were caused by a benign goitre. The incidence of asymptomatic VCP in a previously non‐operated cohort was 1/245 (0.41 %). Voice/swallowing symptoms (p = 0.033) and previous thyroidectomy (p < 0.001) were the two significant predictors for VCP. The seven incidental LPCs were vallecular cyst (n = 1), VC scar and polyp (n = 2), nasopharyngeal cyst and polyp (n = 3) and redundant arytenoid mucosa (n = 1); however, as they were benign, all seven patients proceeded to thyroidectomy as planned.ConclusionsGiven the low incidence (0.41 %) of asymptomatic VCP in a previously non‐operated cohort and that none of the seven LPCs were considered clinically significant, routine preoperative laryngoscopic examination should be reserved for those with previous thyroidectomy and/or voice/swallowing symptoms.
Dendroclimatic signals deduced from riparian versus upland forest interior pines in North Karelia, Finland
Authors: Helama Samuli , Arentoft Birgitte W. , Collin‐Haubensak Olivier , Hyslop Michael D. , Brandstrup Charlotte K. , Mäkelä Hanna M. , Tian QinHua , Wilson Rob 
Published: September 2013

AbstractRadial growth of boreal tree species is only rarely studied in riparian habitats. Here we investigated chronologies of earlywood, latewood, and annual ring widths and blue intensity (BI; a surrogate to latewood density) from riparian lake shore and upland forest interior pines (Pinus sylvestris L.) growing in boreal forest in eastern Finland. Riparian and upland chronologies were compared to examine differences in the pine growth variability and growth response to climatic variation in the two habitats. It was found that the climatic variables showing statistically significant correlations with the tree‐ring chronologies were related to snow conditions at the start of the growing season. Deeper snowpack led to reduced upland pine growth, possibly due to delayed snowmelt and thus postponed onset of the growing season. Warm late winters were followed by increased riparian pine growth because of earlier start of the snow‐melt season and thus a lower maximum early summer lake level. Moreover, riparian pines reacted negatively to increased rainfall in June, whereas the upland pines showed a positive response. Latewood growth reacted significantly to summer temperatures. The BI chronology showed a strong correlation with warm‐season temperatures, indicating an encouraging possibility of summer temperature reconstruction using middle/south boreal pine tree‐ring archives.
Clinical Issues‐October 2013
Authors: Wood Amber 
Published: September 2013

This MonthCovering lead aprons during operative or other invasive proceduresKey words: lead apron, radiological exposure, personal protective equipment, PPE, gown.Terminal cleaning of sterile processing areasKey words: terminal cleaning, cleaning, sterile processing.Preventing transmission of carbapenem‐resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE)Key words: carbapenem‐resistant Enterobacteriaceae, CRE, Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase, KPC, carbapenem, multidrug‐resistant organism, MDRO, isolation, contact precautions, cleaning.
Implementing AORN Recommended Practices for Care of Patients Undergoing Pneumatic Tourniquet‐Assisted Procedures
Authors: Hicks Rodney W. , Denholm Bonnie 
Published: September 2013

AbstractPerioperative nurses are likely to encounter the use of pneumatic tourniquets in a variety of operative and invasive extremity procedures. Use of a pneumatic tourniquet offers an opportunity to obtain a near‐bloodless surgical field; however, the use of tourniquets is not without risk. Unfavorable outcomes include pain, thrombotic events, nerve compression injuries, and disruption of skin integrity. Perioperative nurses should be familiar with the indications, contraindications, and changes in physiology associated with pneumatic tourniquet use. The revised AORN “Recommended practices for care of patients undergoing pneumatic tourniquet‐assisted procedures” is focused on the perioperative nurse's role in patient care and provides guidance for developing, implementing, and evaluating practices that promote patient safety and improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
Clinical evaluation of peripartum outcomes of mediolateral versus lateral episiotomy
Authors: Karbanova Jaroslava , Rusavy Zdenek , Betincova Lucie , Jansova Magdalena , Parizek Antonin , Kalis Vladimir 
Published: September 2013

AbstractObjectiveTo evaluate the incidence and extent of vaginal and perineal trauma among primiparous women after mediolateral and lateral episiotomy.MethodsIn a prospective randomized study at University Hospital Pilsen, Czech Republic, 790 consecutive primiparous women were enrolled between April 2010 and April 2012. Mediolateral episiotomy (MLE) followed an angle of at least 60° from the midline. Lateral episiotomy (LE) started 1–2 cm laterally from the midline and was directed toward the ischial tuberosity. A rectal examination was performed before episiotomy repair.ResultsMLE was performed for 390 women, and LE for 400. The groups did not differ in maternal or neonatal characteristics. No difference was found in incidence or extent of vaginal and perineal trauma; or in additional perineal (1.8% vs 1.5%, P = 0.6) or vaginal (8.5% vs 10.6%, P = 0.2) trauma continuing along the episiotomy incision. The incidence of anal sphincter injury did not differ between MLE and LE (1.5% vs 1.3%, P = 0.7). MLE was associated with shorter repair times (P < 0.05), less suturing material (P < 0.05), and shorter distances from the anus (P < 0.001).ConclusionRisk of additional vaginal and perineal trauma, and anal sphincter injury after adequately performed mediolateral episiotomy is relatively low and corresponds to that of lateral episiotomy.
Perceptions matter: how fishermen's perceptions affect trends of sustainability in Indian fisheries
Authors: Karnad Divya , Gangal Mayuresh , Karanth Krithi K. 
Published: September 2013

AbstractIndian marine fisheries have expanded four-fold in the last 50 years in the form of open-access commons. Although studies predict that fish stocks are on the decline there is little evidence that these declines are being countered by changes in either fishing regulations or fishing practices. Fishermen rarely comply with regulations, instead operationalizing and directing the fishery on their own. In these circumstances understanding how fishermen perceive and use resources has significant management and policy implications. Our study examined fishermen's perceptions about the state of fish stocks and documents current fishing practice and management strategies in India. We surveyed 342 fishermen in two states, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. We found that 86% of fishermen perceived a decline in catch and 69% perceived a decline in bycatch. Fishermen adapt to these declines by increasing fishing area and time spent, changing their gear, and overlapping in fishing zones. The convoluted interactions between ineffective community and state regulations guiding their actions has prevented fishermen from developing successful models of sustainable fisheries management. We identified non-compliance with regulations and government incentives as an important livelihood opportunity. Non-compliance drives change in fishing practice by giving fishermen the flexibility to respond to perceived fish catch dynamics by modifying their practices. We recommend strengthening local fishing communities by enabling them to enforce fishing regulations locally and by scaling back of existing government incentives, to protect the sustainability of these fisheries.
Characterization of hepatitis C infection in tuberculosis patients in an urban city in the USA
Authors: CAMPO M. , SHRESTHA A. , OREN E. , THIEDE H. , DUCHIN J. , NARITA M. , CROTHERS K. 
Published: September 2013

SUMMARYThe impact of hepatitis C virus infection (HCI), the most common bloodborne virus infection in the USA, on outcome of active tuberculosis (TB) treatment is largely unknown. We aimed to describe characteristics of TB patients with hepatitis C virus infection (TB-HCI) in King County, Washington, including TB treatment duration and outcome. We reviewed 1510 records of patients treated for active TB at the Public Health – Seattle & King County Tuberculosis Control Program between 2000 and 2010, and identified 53 with HCI. Advanced age, being born in the USA, HIV infection, homelessness and injection drug use were independently associated with HCI in TB cases. Independent factors associated with increased treatment duration included HIV infection, excess alcohol use, extrapulmonary TB, and any drug-resistant TB disease. Our findings suggest that TB-HCI patients can be successfully treated for active TB without extending treatment duration.
Temporal and farm-management-associated variation in faecal-pat prevalence ofCampylobacter fetusin sheep and cattle
Authors: DUNCAN J. S. , LEATHERBARROW A. J. H. , FRENCH N. P. , GROVE-WHITE D. H. 
Published: September 2013

SUMMARYThe faecal-pat prevalence (as estimated by culture) ofCampylobacter fetusfrom cattle and sheep on 19 farms in rural Lancashire was investigated using standardCampylobacterculture techniques and PCR during a 2-year longitudinal study.C. fetuswas isolated from 9·48% [95% confidence interval (CI) 8·48–10·48] of cattle faecal pats and 7·29% (95% CI 6·21–9·62) of sheep faecal pats. There was evidence of significant differences in shedding prevalence between geographical regions; cows in geographical zone 3 had an increased risk of sheddingC. fetuscompared to cows in geographical zones 1 and 2 (OR 6·64, 95% CI 1·67–26·5,P = 0·007), as did cows at pasture (OR 1·66, 95% CI 1·01–2·73,P = 0·046) compared to when housed. Multiple logistic regression modelling demonstrated underlying seasonal periodicity in both species.
Challenges facing human rabies control: the Lebanese experience
Authors: BIZRI A. , ALAWIEH A. , GHOSN N. , BERRY A. , MUSHARRAFIEH U. 
Published: September 2013

SUMMARYRabies is one of the most important zoonotic infections worldwide. The burden of the disease continues to be significant in countries in the Middle East where the most important vector is stray dogs. Control efforts are hindered by lack of awareness and incomplete post-exposure prophylaxis. The aim of this article is to re-assess the situation of rabies in Lebanon and compare it to other Middle Eastern countries. Eight cases of rabies and 5280 incidents of animal bites to humans were reported to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health between 2001 and 2012. Dogs were the only vector of infection and were responsible for most reported animal bites to humans. An average of 3·2 doses of vaccine per bite was administered as post-exposure prophylaxis. The status of human and canine rabies control, the risks associated with children's behaviour and the hazards of secondary wild reservoirs are discussed. Our data illustrates the importance of prevention through vector control, public awareness and education, and timely administration of active and passive immunization, as well as the significance of regional cooperation and monitoring the circulation of viral variants in wild animals.
Delimited continuations for prolog
Authors: SCHRIJVERS TOM , DEMOEN BART , DESOUTER BENOIT , WIELEMAKER JAN 
Published: September 2013

AbstractDelimited continuations are a famous control primitive that originates in the functional programming world. It allows the programmer to suspend and capture the remaining part of a computation in order to resume it later. We put a new Prolog-compatible face on this primitive and specify its semantics by means of a meta-interpreter. Moreover, we establish the power of delimited continuations in Prolog with several example definitions of high-level language features. Finally, we show how to easily and effectively add delimited continuations support to the WAM.
ASP with non-herbrand partial functions: a language and system for practical use
Authors: BALDUCCINI MARCELLO 
Published: September 2013

AbstractDealing with domains involving substantial quantitative information in Answer Set Programming (ASP) often results in cumbersome and inefficient encodings. Hybrid “CASP” languages combining ASP and Constraint Programming aim to overcome this limitation, but also impose inconvenient constraints – first and foremost that quantitative information must be encoded by means of total functions. This goes against central knowledge representation principles that contribute to the power of ASP, and makes the formalization of certain domains difficult. ASP{f} is being developed with the ultimate goal of providing scientists and practitioners with an alternative to CASP languages that allows for the efficient representation of qualitative and quantitative information in ASP without restricting one's ability to deal with incompleteness or uncertainty. In this paper we present the latest outcome of such research: versions of the language and of the supporting system that allow for practical, industrial-size use and scalability. The applicability of ASP{f} is demonstrated by a case study on an actual industrial application.
Disjunctive logic programs with existential quantification in rule heads
Authors: YOU JIA-HUAI , ZHANG HENG , ZHANG YAN 
Published: September 2013

AbstractWe consider disjunctive logic programs without function symbols but with existential quantification in rule heads, under the semantics of general stable models. There are at least two interesting prospects in these programs. The first is that a program can be made more succinct by using existential variables, and the second is on the potential in representing defeasible ontological knowledge by these logic programs. This paper studies some of the properties of these programs. First, we show a simple yet intuitive definition of stable models for these programs that does not resort to second-order logic. Second, the stable models of these programs can be characterized by an extension of progression for disjunctive programs, which provides a native characterization of justification for stable models. We then study the decidability issue. While the stable model existence problem for safe disjunctive programs is decidable, with existential quantification allowed in rule heads the problem becomes undecidable. We identify an interesting decidable fragment by exploring a new notion of stratification over existential quantification.
A declarative extension of horn clauses, and its significance for datalog and its applications
Authors: MAZURAN MIRJANA , SERRA EDOARDO , ZANIOLO CARLO 
Published: September 2013

AbstractFS-rules provide a powerful monotonic extension for Horn clauses that supports monotonic aggregates in recursion by reasoning on the multiplicity of occurrences satisfying existential goals. The least fixpoint semantics, and its equivalent least model semantics, hold for logic programs with FS-rules; moreover, generalized notions of stratification and stable models are easily derived when negated goals are allowed. Finally, the generalization of techniques such as seminaive fixpoint and magic sets, make possible the efficient implementation of DatalogFS, i.e., Datalog with rules with Frequency Support (FS-rules) and stratified negation. A large number of applications that could not be supported efficiently, or could not be expressed at all in stratified Datalog can now be easily expressed and efficiently supported in DatalogFS and a powerful DatalogFS system is now being developed at UCLA.
Business process verification with constraint temporal answer set programming
Authors: GIORDANO LAURA , MARTELLI ALBERTO , SPIOTTA MATTEO , DUPRÉ DANIELE THESEIDER 
Published: September 2013

AbstractThe paper provides a framework for the verification of business processes, based on an extension of answer set programming (ASP) with temporal logic and constraints. The framework allows to capture expressive fluent annotations as well as data awareness in a uniform way. It allows for a declarative specification of a business process but also for encoding processes specified in conventional workflow languages. Verification of temporal properties of a business process, including verification of compliance to business rules, is performed by bounded model checking techniques in Answer Set Programming, extended with constraint solving for dealing with conditions on numeric data.
SeaLion: An eclipse-based IDE for answer-set programming with advanced debugging support
Authors: BUSONIU PAULA-ANDRA , OETSCH JOHANNES , PÜHRER JÖRG , SKOČOVSKÝ PETER , TOMPITS HANS 
Published: September 2013

AbstractIn this paper, we present SeaLion, an integrated development environment (IDE) for answer-set programming (ASP). SeaLion provides source-code editors for the languages of Gringo and DLV and offers popular amenities like syntax highlighting, syntax checking, code completion, visual program outline, and refactoring functionality. The tool has been realised in the context of a research project whose goal is the development of techniques to support the practical coding process of answer-set programs. In this respect, SeaLion is the first IDE for ASP that provides debugging features that work for real-world answer-set programs and supports the rich languages of modern answer-set solvers. Indeed, SeaLion implements a stepping-based debugging approach that allows the developer to quickly track down programming errors by simply following his or her intuitions on the intended semantics. Besides that, SeaLion supports ASP development using model-driven engineering techniques including domain modelling with extended UML class diagrams and visualisation of answer sets in corresponding instance diagrams. Moreover, customised visualisation as well as visual editing of answer sets is realised by the Kara plugin of SeaLion. Further implemented features are a documentation generator based on the Lana annotation language, support for external solvers, and interoperability with external tools. SeaLion comes as a plugin of the popular Eclipse platform and provides interfaces for future extensions of the IDE.
A practical analysis of non-termination in large logic programs
Authors: LIANG SENLIN , KIFER MICHAEL 
Published: September 2013

AbstractA large body of work has been dedicated to termination analysis of logic programs but relatively little has been done to analyze non-termination. In our opinion, explaining non-termination is a much more important task because it can dramatically improve a user's ability to effectively debug large, complex logic programs without having to abide by punishing syntactic restrictions. Non-termination analysis examines program execution history when the program is suspected to not terminate and informs the programmer about the exact reasons for this behavior. In Liang and Kifer (2013), we studied the problem of non-termination in tabled logic engines with subgoal abstraction, such as XSB, and proposed a suite of algorithms for non-termination analysis, called Terminyzer. These algorithms analyze forest logging traces and output sequences of tabled subgoal calls that are the likely causes of non-terminating cycles. However, this feedback was hard to use in practice: the same subgoal could occur in multiple rule heads and in even more places in rule bodies, so Terminyzer left too much tedious, sometimes combinatorially large amount of work for the user to do manually.Here we propose a new suite of algorithms, Terminyzer+, which closes this usability gap. Terminyzer+ can detect not only sequences of subgoals that cause non-termination, but, importantly, the exact rules where they occur and the rule sequences that get fired in a cyclic manner, thus causing non-termination. This makes Terminyzer+ suitable as a back-end for user-friendly graphical interfaces on top of Terminyzer+, which can greatly simplify the debugging process. Terminyzer+ back-ends exist for the SILK system as well as for the open-source ${\cal F}$lora-2 system. A graphical interface has been developed for SILK and is currently underway for ${\cal F}$lora-2. We also report experimental studies, which confirm the effectiveness of Terminyzer+ on a host of large real-world knowledge bases. All tests used in this paper are available online.1In addition, we make a step towards automatic remediation of non-terminating programs by proposing an algorithm that heuristically fixes some causes of misbehavior. Furthermore, unlike Terminyzer, Terminyzer+ does not require the underlying logic engine to support subgoal abstraction, although it can make use of it.
Finding optimal plans for multiple teams of robots through a mediator: A logic-based approach
Authors: ERDEM ESRA , PATOGLU VOLKAN , SARIBATUR ZEYNEP G. , SCHÜLLER PETER , URAS TANSEL 
Published: September 2013

AbstractWe study the problem of finding optimal plans for multiple teams of robots through a mediator, where each team is given a task to complete in its workspace on its own and where teams are allowed to transfer robots between each other, subject to the following constraints: 1) teams (and the mediator) do not know about each other's workspace or tasks (e.g., for privacy purposes); 2) every team can lend or borrow robots, but not both (e.g., transportation/calibration of robots between/for different workspaces is usually costly). We present a mathematical definition of this problem and analyze its computational complexity. We introduce a novel, logic-based method to solve this problem, utilizing action languages and answer set programming for representation, and the state-of-the-art ASP solvers for reasoning. We show the applicability and usefulness of our approach by experiments on various scenarios of responsive and energy-efficient cognitive factories.