bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
MRI guided focused ultrasound robotic system for the treatment of gynaecological tumors
Authors: Epaminonda Eva , Drakos Theoharis , Kalogirou Christina , Theodoulou Margarita , Yiallouras Christos , Damianou Christakis 
Published: March 2015

AbstractBackgroundA novel MRI‐conditional robot that navigates focused ultrasound (FUS) for the treatment of gynaecological tumors endovaginally was developed.MethodsThe robotic system has two PC‐controlled axes (linear and angular). The robotic system was manufactured using a digital manufacturing 3D printer using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. Evaluation of the device was performed in a 1.5T MRI using excised porcine tissue.ResultsThe robotic system was successfully tested for MRI safety and compatibility. The robotic system has been tested for its functionality for creating multiple (overlapping) lesions in an in vitro model.ConclusionsAn MRI‐conditional FUS robotic system was developed that has the potential to create thermal lesions with the intention of treating gynaecological tumors. In the future a third axis will be needed that lifts the robot up or down in order to access vaginas which are at a variable height from the MRI table. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Widespread ingestion of lead pellets by wild chukars in Northwestern Utah
Authors: Bingham Richard J. , Larsen Randy T. , Bissonette John A. , Hall Jeffery O. 
Published: March 2015

ABSTRACTThe use of lead ammunition has generated much debate because lead is toxic and elevated lead exposure is documented in >130 wildlife species. We expanded on prior reports of ingested lead in chukars (Alectoris chukar) to assess lead exposure at greater spatial and temporal extents. Our specific objectives concerning lead exposure in chukars from northwestern Utah, USA (approx. 49,000 km2) were to: 1) approximate a threshold for background versus elevated lead exposure; 2) investigate spatial and temporal variation of lead exposure; and 3) assess the utility of combining frequencies of ingested gizzard lead and elevated liver lead to estimate lead ingestion rates. We obtained hunter and volunteer‐harvested chukars collected during July–January, 2003–2011. Using liver lead residues from wild chukars, we estimated a threshold of 1 μg/g wet weight to separate background versus elevated lead exposure for our data set. For wild chukars, we documented elevated lead exposure (ingested gizzard lead or elevated liver lead) in 5 counties and 8 mountain ranges in years 2003–2007. We estimated lead ingestion rates of 9.3% (43 of 461) using ingested gizzard lead and 8.3% (10 of 121) employing elevated liver lead (≥1 μg/g wet weight), respectively. These frequencies were respectively 1.5% and 2.5% less than the combined frequency of ingested gizzard lead and elevated liver lead (10.8%; 52 of 481). Our observed rates of elevated lead exposure were among the highest in the literature for upland birds, suggesting that chukars in northwestern Utah risk lead poisoning. These results corroborate previous findings identifying elevated lead exposure as an issue affecting non waterfowl avian species. © 2015 The Wildlife Society.
Canadian Perspectives on the Clinical Actionability of Neuroimaging in Disorders of Consciousness
Authors: Lee Grace , Byram Adrian C. , Owen Adrian M. , Ribary Urs , Stoessl A. Jon , Townson Andrea , Stables Christine , Illes Judy 
Published: March 2015

AbstractBackground:Acquired brain injury is a critical public health and socioeconomic problem in Canada, leaving many patients in vegetative, minimally conscious, or locked-in states, unresponsive and unable to communicate. Recent advances in neuroimaging research have demonstrated residual consciousness in a few exemplary patients with acquired brain injury, suggesting potential misdiagnosis and changes in prognosis. Such progress, in parallel with research using multimodal brain imaging technologies in recent years, has promising implications for clinical translation, notwithstanding the many challenges that impact health care and policy development. This study explored the perspectives of Canadian professionals with expertise either in neuroimaging research, disorders of consciousness, or both, on the potential clinical applications and implications of imaging technology.Methods:Twenty-two professionals from designated communities of neuroimaging researchers, ethicists, lawyers, and practitioners participated in semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed for emergent themes.Results:The five most dominant themes were: (1) validation and calibration of the methods; (2) informed consent; (3) burdens on the health care system; (4) implications for the Canadian health care system; and (5) possibilities for improved prognosis.Conclusions:Movement of neuroimaging from research into clinical care for acquired brain injury will require careful consideration of legal and ethical issues alongside research reliability, responsible distribution of health care resources, and the interaction of technological capabilities with patient outcome.
Mortality estimates from ovarian age distributions of the tsetse flyGlossina pallidipesAusten sampled in Zimbabwe suggest the need for new analytical approaches
Authors: Hargrove J.W. , Ackley S.F. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractMortality estimates are central to understanding tsetse fly population dynamics, but are difficult to acquire from wild populations. They can be obtained from age distribution data but, with limited data, it is unclear whether the assumptions required to make the estimates are satisfied and, if not, how violations affect the estimates. We evaluate the assumptions required for existing mortality estimation techniques using long-term longitudinal ovarian dissection data from 144,106 female tsetse,Glossina pallidipesAusten, captured in Zimbabwe between 1988 and 1999. At the end of the hot-dry season each year, mean ovarian ages peaked, and maximum-likelihood mortality estimates declined to low levels, contrary to mark-recapture estimates, suggesting violations of the assumptions underlying the estimation technique. We demonstrate that age distributions are seldom stable forG. pallidipesat our study site, and hypothesize that this is a consequence of a disproportionate increase in the mortality of pupae and young adults at the hottest times of the year. Assumptions of age-independent mortality and capture probability are also violated, the latter bias varying with capture method and with pregnancy and nutritional status. As a consequence, mortality estimates obtained from ovarian dissection data are unreliable. To overcome these problems we suggest simulating female tsetse populations, using dynamical modelling techniques that make no assumptions about the stability of the age distribution.
Personalization and rule strategies in data-intensive intelligent context-aware systems
Authors: Moore Philip T. , Pham Hai V. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThe concept of personalization in its many forms has gained traction driven by the demands of computer-mediated interactions generally implemented in large-scale distributed systems and ad hoc wireless networks. Personalization requires the identification and selection of entities based on a defined profile (a context); an entity has been defined as a person, place, or physical or computational object. Context employs contextual information that combines to describe an entities current state. Historically, the range of contextual information utilized (in context-aware systems) has been limited to identity, location, and proximate data; there has, however, been advances in the range of data and information addressed. As such, context can be highly dynamic with inherent complexity. In addition, context-aware systems must accommodate constraint satisfaction and preference compliance.This article addresses personalization and context with consideration of the domains and systems to which context has been applied and the nature of the contextual data. The developments in computing and service provision are addressed with consideration of the relationship between the evolving computing landscape and context. There is a discussion around rule strategies and conditional relationships in decision support. Logic systems are addressed with an overview of the open world assumption versus the closed world assumption and the relationship with the Semantic Web. The event-driven rule-based approach, which forms the basis upon which intelligent context processing can be realized, is presented with an evaluation and proof-of-concept. The issues and challenges identified in the research are considered with potential solutions and research directions; alternative approaches to context processing are discussed. The article closes with conclusions and open research questions.
A survey on text mining in social networks
Authors: Irfan Rizwana , King Christine K. , Grages Daniel , Ewen Sam , Khan Samee U. , Madani Sajjad A. , Kolodziej Joanna , Wang Lizhe , Chen Dan , Rayes Ammar , Tziritas Nikolaos , Xu Cheng-Zhong , Zomaya Albert Y. , Alzahrani Ahmed Saeed , Li Hongxiang 
Published: March 2015

AbstractIn this survey, we review different text mining techniques to discover various textual patterns from the social networking sites. Social network applications create opportunities to establish interaction among people leading to mutual learning and sharing of valuable knowledge, such as chat, comments, and discussion boards. Data in social networking websites is inherently unstructured and fuzzy in nature. In everyday life conversations, people do not care about the spellings and accurate grammatical construction of a sentence that may lead to different types of ambiguities, such as lexical, syntactic, and semantic. Therefore, analyzing and extracting information patterns from such data sets are more complex. Several surveys have been conducted to analyze different methods for the information extraction. Most of the surveys emphasized on the application of different text mining techniques for unstructured data sets reside in the form of text documents, but do not specifically target the data sets in social networking website. This survey attempts to provide a thorough understanding of different text mining techniques as well as the application of these techniques in the social networking websites. This survey investigates the recent advancement in the field of text analysis and covers two basic approaches of text mining, such as classification and clustering that are widely used for the exploration of the unstructured text available on the Web.
Evolutionary multi-agent systems
Authors: Byrski Aleksander , Dreżewski Rafał , Siwik Leszek , Kisiel-Dorohinicki Marek 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to give a survey on the development and applications of evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS). The paper starts with a general introduction describing the background, structure and behaviour of EMAS. EMAS application to solving global optimisation problems is presented in the next section along with its modification targeted at lowering the computation costs by early removing certain agents based on immunological inspirations. Subsequent sections deal with the elitist variant of EMAS aimed at solving multi-criteria optimisation problems, and the co-evolutionary one aimed at solving multi-modal optimisation problems. Each variation of EMAS is illustrated with selected experimental results.
Prevalence and risk factors forLeptospiraexposure in New Zealand veterinarians
Authors: SANHUEZA J. M. , HEUER C. , WILSON P. R. , BENSCHOP J. , COLLINS-EMERSON J. M. 
Published: March 2015

SUMMARYThis study assessed seroprevalence and risk factors forLeptospira(serovars Hardjo, Pomona, Ballum, Copenhageni, Tarassovi) exposure in New Zealand veterinarians. Veterinarians (n = 277) at one of two conferences were voluntarily enrolled and blood samples taken. Microscopic agglutination test (MAT) titres ⩾48 were considered seropositive. Fourteen veterinarians (5·1%, 95% confidence interval 2·8−8·3) were seropositive toLeptospira. Home slaughter of cattle or pigs were significant risk factors forLeptospiraexposure. There were no clear relationships between the animal species handled at work and serostatus. However, veterinarians spending a ‘mid to high’ proportion of their time (>50% to ⩽75%) with pets had higher odds of being seropositive than those not working with pets. A borderline positive association (P = 0·09) was observed between seropositivity and clinical influenza-like illness (⩾3 days off work) in the 18 months before the study. Assuming causality, this suggests that 8·3% of these cases may be attributed toLeptospiraexposure.
Do Better Committee Assignments Meaningfully Benefit Legislators? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the Arkansas State Legislature
Authors: Broockman David E. , Butler Daniel M. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractA large literature argues that the committee assignment process plays an important role in shaping legislative politics because some committees provide legislators with substantial benefits. However, evaluating the degree to which legislators benefit from winning their preferred assignments has been challenging with existing data. This paper sheds light on the benefits legislators accrue from winning their preferred committee assignments by exploiting rules in Arkansas’ state legislature, where legislators select their own committee assignments in a randomized order. The natural experiment indicates that legislators reap at most limited rewards from winning their preferred assignments. These results potentially raise questions about the robustness of widely held assumptions in literatures on party discipline and legislative organization.
Individual versus Group Play in the Repeated Coordinated Resistance Game
Authors: Cason Timothy N. , Mui Vai-Lam 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThis paper reports an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of repeated interactions in deterring leaders from using divide-and-conquer strategies to extract surplus from their subordinates, when every decision-maker involved is a group instead of an individual. We find that both the resistance rate by subordinates and the divide-and-conquer transgression rate by leaders are the same in the group and individual repeated coordinated resistance games. Similar to the individual game, adding communication to the group game can help deter opportunistic behavior by the leaders even in the presence of repetition.
Subsistence strategies in traditional societies distinguish gut microbiomes
Authors: Obregon-Tito Alexandra J. , Tito Raul Y. , Metcalf Jessica , Sankaranarayanan Krithivasan , Clemente Jose C. , Ursell Luke K. , Zech Xu Zhenjiang , Van Treuren Will , Knight Rob , Gaffney Patrick M. , Spicer Paul , Lawson Paul , Marin-Reyes Luis , Trujillo-Villarroel Omar , Foster Morris , Guija-Poma Emilio , Troncoso-Corzo Luzmila , Warinner Christina , Ozga Andrew T. , Lewis Cecil M. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractRecent studies suggest that gut microbiomes of urban-industrialized societies are different from those of traditional peoples. Here we examine the relationship between lifeways and gut microbiota through taxonomic and functional potential characterization of faecal samples from hunter-gatherer and traditional agriculturalist communities in Peru and an urban-industrialized community from the US. We find that in addition to taxonomic and metabolic differences between urban and traditional lifestyles, hunter-gatherers form a distinct sub-group among traditional peoples. As observed in previous studies, we find that Treponema are characteristic of traditional gut microbiomes. Moreover, through genome reconstruction (2.2–2.5 MB, coverage depth × 26–513) and functional potential characterization, we discover these Treponema are diverse, fall outside of pathogenic clades and are similar to Treponema succinifaciens, a known carbohydrate metabolizer in swine. Gut Treponema are found in non-human primates and all traditional peoples studied to date, suggesting they are symbionts lost in urban-industrialized societies.
A data-driven mathematical model of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii transmission in an intensive care unit
Authors: Wang Xia , Chen Yong , Zhao Wei , Wang Yan , Song Qing , Liu Hui , Zhao Jingya , Han Xuelin , Hu Xiaohua , Grundmann Hajo , Xiao Yanni , Han Li 
Published: March 2015

AbstractMajor challenges remain when attempting to quantify and evaluate the impacts of contaminated environments and heterogeneity in the cohorting of health care workers (HCWs) on hospital infections. Data on the detection rate of multidrug-resistantAcinetobacter baumannii(MRAB) in a Chinese intensive care unit (ICU) were obtained to accurately evaluate the level of environmental contamination and also to simplify existing models. Data-driven mathematical models, including mean-field and pair approximation models, were proposed to examine the comprehensive effect of integrated measures including cohorting, increasing nurse-patient ratios and improvement of environmental sanitation on MRAB infection. Our results indicate that for clean environments and with strict cohorting, increasing the nurse-patient ratio results in an initial increase and then a decline in MRAB colonization. In contrast, in contaminated environments, increasing the nurse-patient ratio may lead to either a consistent increase or an initial increase followed by a decline of MRAB colonization, depending on the level of environmental contamination and the cohorting rate. For developing more effective control strategies, the findings suggest that increasing the cohorting rate and nurse-patient ratio are effective interventions for relatively clean environments, while cleaning the environment more frequently and increasing hand washing rate are suitable measures in contaminated environments.
The benefits of resource discovery for publishers: a librarian's view
Authors: STONE Graham 
Published: March 2015

ABSTRACTA core goal of librarians is to maximize usage of the content to which their libraries subscribe. Webscale or resource discovery systems offer a single search box for library users to access subscribed content. This article examines usage data at the University of Huddersfield to show how resource discovery has helped to increase the usage of publisher content that has been made available to discovery vendors, and considers the implications for publishers who are yet to do this. The article concludes that resource discovery systems have effectively levelled the playing field, allowing small to medium‐sized publishers to make content discoverable to users, and encourages publishers who do not have their content indexed in resource discovery systems to speak to discovery service vendors in order to do so at the earliest opportunity.
EW_dmGWAS: edge-weighted dense module search for genome-wide association studies and gene expression profiles
Authors: Wang Quan , Yu Hui , Zhao Zhongming , Jia Peilin 
Published: March 2015

Abstract
Summary: We previously developed dmGWAS to search for dense modules in a human protein–protein interaction (PPI) network; it has since become a popular tool for network-assisted analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). dmGWAS weights nodes by using GWAS signals. Here, we introduce an upgraded algorithm, EW_dmGWAS, to boost GWAS signals in a node- and edge-weighted PPI network. In EW_dmGWAS, we utilize condition-specific gene expression profiles for edge weights. Specifically, differential gene co-expression is used to infer the edge weights. We applied EW_dmGWAS to two diseases and compared it with other relevant methods. The results suggest that EW_dmGWAS is more powerful in detecting disease-associated signals.
Availability and implementation: The algorithm of EW_dmGWAS is implemented in the R package dmGWAS_3.0 and is available at http://bioinfo.mc.vanderbilt.edu/dmGWAS.
Contact: zhongming.zhao@vanderbilt.edu or peilin.jia@vanderbilt.edu
Supplementary information: Supplementary materials are available at Bioinformatics online.
Arabidopsis RIC1 Severs Actin Filaments at the Apex to Regulate Pollen Tube Growth
Authors: Zhou Zhenzhen , Shi Haifan , Chen Binqing , Zhang Ruihui , Huang Shanjin , Fu Ying 
Published: March 2015

Abstract
Pollen tubes deliver sperms to the ovule for fertilization via tip growth. The rapid turnover of F-actin in pollen tube tips plays an important role in this process. In this study, we demonstrate that Arabidopsis thaliana RIC1, a member of the ROP-interactive CRIB motif-containing protein family, regulates pollen tube growth via its F-actin severing activity. Knockout of RIC1 enhanced pollen tube elongation, while overexpression of RIC1 dramatically reduced tube growth. Pharmacological analysis indicated that RIC1 affected F-actin dynamics in pollen tubes. In vitro biochemical assays revealed that RIC1 directly bound and severed F-actin in the presence of Ca2+ in addition to interfering with F-actin turnover by capping F-actin at the barbed ends. In vivo, RIC1 localized primarily to the apical plasma membrane (PM) of pollen tubes. The level of RIC1 at the apical PM oscillated during pollen tube growth. The frequency of F-actin severing at the apex was notably decreased in ric1-1 pollen tubes but was increased in pollen tubes overexpressing RIC1. We propose that RIC1 regulates F-actin dynamics at the apical PM as well as the cytosol by severing F-actin and capping the barbed ends in the cytoplasm, establishing a novel mechanism that underlies the regulation of pollen tube growth.
Perceptions of success in performance-based procurement
Authors: Duren Joop Van , Dorée André , Voordijk Hans 
Published: March 2015

Purpose
– The purpose of this study is to analyse, from the perspective of agency theory, differences between client and contractor in their perceptions of changes in uncertainty and in inclination to opportunistic behaviour while using a performance-based procurement procedure. In agency theory, dealing appropriately with the uncertainty and opportunism that results from information asymmetry is an essential precondition for successful procurement.

Design/methodology/approach
– The procurement procedure analysed is the Performance Information Procurement System (PiPS). PiPS is a performance-based procurement method that uses historic performance information to select the expected best performing contractor. In a theoretical model, a PiPS is interpreted as a set of contractual and organisational safeguards. Through a survey, based on this model, the perceived effects of the PiPS safeguards for both clients and contractors are investigated.

Findings
– Both clients and contractors believe that applying PiPS introduces safeguards that reduce transaction uncertainty. The perceived changes in the discouragement to use opportunistic behaviour when using PiPS differ between client and contractor. Clients do not know and contractors are sceptical as to whether applying PiPS discourages opportunistic behaviour. This difference in perceptions can be explained by the often-traditional background of the two parties’ project teams and the existence of information asymmetry.

Originality/value
– This is one of the first studies to show that changes in the transaction environment in a performance-based procurement process are perceived differently by the client and the contractor. It is necessary to align the roles of both parties to avoid problems related to opportunistic behaviour.