bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Prospective evaluation of indirect costs due to acute rotavirus gastroenteritis in Spain: the ROTACOST study
Authors: Bouzón-Alejandro Marta , Redondo-Collazo Lorenzo , Sánchez-Lastres Juan Manuel , Martinón-Torres Nazareth , Martinón-Sánchez José María , Martinón-Torres Federico ,   the ROTACOST research team
Published: September 2011

Abstract

Background
The effect of rotavirus in developed countries is mainly economic. This study aimed to assess the indirect costs induced by rotavirus acute gastroenteritis (RVAGE) in Spain.

Methods
A prospective observational study was conducted from October 2008 to June 2009. It included 682 children up to 5 years of age with acute gastroenteritis (AGE) who attended primary care (n = 18) and emergency room/hospital settings (n = 10), covering the regions of Galicia and Asturias (North-west Spain). All non-medical expenses incurred throughout the episode were recorded in detail using personal interviews and telephone contact.

Results
Among the 682 enrolled children, 207 (30.4%) were rotavirus positive and 170 (25%) had received at least one dose of rotavirus vaccine. The mean (standard deviation) indirect cost caused by an episode of AGE was estimated at 135.17 (182.70) Euros. Costs were 1.74-fold higher when AGE was caused by rotavirus compared with other etiologies: 192.7 (219.8) Euros vs. 111.6 (163.5) Euros (p < .001). The costs for absenteeism were the most substantial with a mean of 91.41 (134.76) Euros per family, resulting in a loss of 2.45 (3.17) days of work. In RVAGE patients, the absenteeism cost was 120.4 (154) Euros compared with 75.8 (123) for the other etiologies (p = .002), because of loss of 3.5 (3.6) vs 1.9 (2.9) days of work (p < .001). Meals costs were 2-fold-higher (48.5 (55) vs 24.3 (46) Euros, p < .001) and travel costs were 2.6-fold-higher (32 (92) vs 12.5 (21.1) Euros, p = .005) in RVAGE patients compared with those with other etiologies. There were no differences between RVAGE and other etiologies groups regarding costs of hiring of caregivers or purchase of material. Patients with RVAGE were admitted to hospital more frequently than those with other etiologies (47.8% vs 14%, p < .001).

Conclusions
Rotavirus generates a significant indirect economic burden. Our data should be considered in the decision-making process of the eventual inclusion of rotavirus vaccine in the national immunization schedule of well developed countries.
Side population rather than CD133+ cells distinguishes enriched tumorigenicity in hTERT-immortalized primary prostate cancer cells
Authors: Zhou Jianjun , Wang Honghe , Cannon Virginetta , Wolcott Karen Marie , Song Hongbin , Yates Clayton 
Published: September 2011

Abstract

Background
Subpopulations of cancer cells with the capacity of generating solid tumors have been characterized. In various cancer types, including prostate cancer cells, a side population (SP) and CD133-expressing cells have been proposed as containing a population cancer cells with stem-like ability. Therefore the aim of this work was to determine, in prostate cancer cell lines, the frequency and tumorigenic potential of SP and CD133+ cells.

Results

In vitro 2D colony-forming assay and sphere-forming assay, Flow cytometry analysis and magnetic cell sorting were utilized to sort CD133+, CD133- and Side population (SP) cells. Our findings indicate that CD44 and integrin α-6 are uniformly expressed in the hTERT cell lines; however, CD133 is expressed only in a small population (< 0.1%). FACS-sorted CD133+ and CD133- cells exhibited similar tumorigenicity in vitro and in vivo. Additionally, for the hTERT cells, SP rather than CD133 expression showed an 8-fold enhanced tumorigenic potential. The data suggest that SP cells, rather than those with CD133 marker, contain the rare population of CSC capable of producing prostate tumors.

Conclusion
Collectively, our data suggest that although CD133 is expressed only in a small population of hTERT-immortalized prostate cancer cells, it is not likely to be associated with stem cells, as CD133- and CD133+ cells exhibited similar tumorigenicity. However, SP isolated cells, appear to be enriched with tumorigenic stem-like cells capable of generating palpable tumors.
Upregulated expression of indoleamine 2, 3-dioxygenase in CHO cells induces apoptosis of competent T cells and increases proportion of Treg cells
Authors: Sun Jingyan , Yu Jinpu , Li Hui , Yang Lili , Wei Feng , Yu Wenwen , Liu Juntian , Ren Xiubao 
Published: September 2011

Abstract

Introduction
The inflammatory enzyme indoleamine 2, 3-dioxygenase (IDO) participates in immune tolerance and promotes immune escape of IDO+ tumors. A recent hypothesis suggested that IDO may contribute to the differentiation of new T regulatory cells (Tregs) from naive CD4+ T cells. In this study we investigated the role of IDO in induction of immunosuppression in breast cancer by increasing the apoptosis of T cells and the proportion of Tregs.

Methods
An IDO expression plasmid was constructed and Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells were stably transfected with human IDO. Purified CD3+ T cells were isolated from the peripheral blood monouclear cells of breast cancer patients. After co-culturing IDO expressing or untransfected (control) CHO cells with T cells, T cells apoptosis were determined by flow cytometry analysis and annexin-V and PI staining. The proportion of the regulatory T cell (Tregs [CD4 + CD25 + CD127-]) subset was measured by flow cytometry analysis. T cells total RNA and cellular protein samples were isolated for detecting Foxp3 gene and protein expression.

Results
IDO transgenic CHO cells yielded high levels of IDO enzymatic activity, resulting in complete depletion of tryptophan from the culture medium. We found that apoptosis occurred in 79.07 ± 8.13% of CD3+T cells after co-cultured with IDO+ CHO cells for 3 days and the proportion of CD4 + CD25 + CD127- T cells increased from 3.43 ± 1.07% to 8.98 ± 1.88% (P < 0.05) as well. The specific inhibitor of IDO,1-MT efficiently reversed enhancement of T cells apoptosis and amplification of Tregs in vitro. Increased expression of Foxp3, a key molecular marker of Tregs, was confirmed by RT-PCR, real-time RT-PCR and Western blot analysis at the same time.

Conclusions
These results suggest that IDO helps to create a tolerogenic milieu in breast tumors by directly inducing T cell apoptosis and enhancing Treg-mediated immunosuppression.
Expanding whole exome resequencing into non-human primates
Authors: Vallender Eric J 
Published: September 2011

Abstract
Background
Complete exome resequencing has the power to greatly expand our understanding of non-human primate genomes. This includes both a better appreciation of the variation that exists in non-human primate model species, but also an improved annotation of their genomes. By developing an understanding of the variation between individuals, non-human primate models of human disease can be better developed. This effort is hindered largely by the lack of comprehensive information on specific non-human primate genetic variation and the costs of generating these data. If the tools that have been developed in humans for complete exome resequencing can be applied to closely related non-human primate species, then these difficulties can be circumvented.

Results
Using a human whole exome enrichment technique, chimpanzee and rhesus macaque samples were captured alongside a human sample and sequenced using standard next-generation methodologies. The results from the three species were then compared for efficacy. The chimpanzee sample showed similar coverage levels and distributions following exome capture based on the human genome as the human sample. The rhesus macaque sample showed significant coverage in protein-coding sequence but significantly less in untranslated regions. Both chimpanzee and rhesus macaque showed significant numbers of frameshift mutations compared to self-genomes and suggest a need for further annotation.

Conclusions
Current whole exome resequencing technologies can successfully be used to identify coding-region variation in non-human primates extending into old world monkeys. In addition to identifying variation, whole exome resequencing can aid in better annotation of non-human primate genomes.
Space Frames: The Space Within—A Guided Tour
Authors: Gabriel J. François 
Published: September 2011

New configurations as well as new applications are constantly discovered for space structures. There is every indication that this trend will continue for a very longtime. This paper describes four configurations developed in the last ten years to provide architects with a framework for the accommodation of any building program. These configurations have their origin in a multi-layer, three-way space frame. They are, however, very different from each other. Although these have been the subjects of separate publications, they are discussed here together for the first time. The author feels that the discussion of topological aspects of space frames which relate to architectural considerations will make a positive contribution towards a more generalized use of space structures.
The Rise of Black Ethnics: The Ethnic Turn in African American Religions, 1916–1945
Authors: Johnson Sylvester A. 
Published: September 2011

AbstractDuring the world war years of the early twentieth century, new African American religious movements emerged that emphasized black heritage identities. Among these were Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew's Congregation of Commandment Keepers (Jewish) and “Noble” Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America (Islamic). Unlike African American religions of the previous century, these religious communities distinctly captured the ethos of ethnicity (cultural heritage) that pervaded American social consciousness at the time. Their central message of salvation asserted that blacks were an ethnic people distinguished not by superficial phenotype but by membership in a heritage that reached far beyond the bounds of American history and geography. The academic study of these religions has largely moved from dismissal and cynicism to serious engagement with African American Jews and Muslims as veritable forms of religion. Despite this progress among scholars, some recent studies continue todenythat Matthew’s and Ali's communities were authentically Jewish and Islamic (respectively). When scholars dispense with theological or racial biases that bifurcate religions into ‘true’ and ‘false’ forms, the study of these black ethnic religions might best yield important insights for understanding the linkage among ethnicity, the nation-state, and religion. The religious reasoning of Matthew and Ali produced resourceful, complicated challenges to dominant colonial and racist paradigms for understanding agency and history. Their theology is appropriately discerned not as illusion, hybridity, or confusion but as thoughtful anticolonial expressions of Judaism and Islam that sought inclusion and honor through black ethnicity. At a time when African Americans were viewed as cultureless and without any legacy of inheritance except the deformities of slavery, the rise of black ethnics introduced religious traditions that demonstrated blacks were indeed a people with heritage.
CRT implantation: Lead stabilization using coronary sinus side branch stenting
Authors: Szilágyi Sz. , Merkely Béla , Molnár L. , Zima E. , Osztheimer I. , Végh E. M. , Gellér L. 
Published: September 2011

Abstract

Objective
We describe a method to stabilize CS lead position using stent implantation in a CS side branch to anchor the electrode to the wall of the vein, in cases of intraoperative or postoperative lead dislocation, unstable lead position and phrenic nerve stimulation (PNS).

Methods
403 patients were treated with stenting. After finding the desired lead position bare metal coronary stent was introduced via another guide wire, but in the same CS sheath. The stent was deposited 5–35 mm proximal to the tip of the electrode with a pressure of 6 to 14 atmospheres.

Results
Mechanical damage of the CS side branch or pericardial effusion was not observed. During follow-up (median 39, 23–48, max. 82 months) re-operation was necessary in only two patients because of high pacing threshold, while repositioning with ablation catheter was performed in 7 cases because of PNS. Impedance measurements did not suggest lead insulation failure. Transvenous extraction of stented CS leads was successful after 3, 18 and 49 months, while 4 leads were extracted easily during heart transplantation.

Conclusion
Stent implantation to stabilize CS lead position seems to be effective and safe for the prevention and treatment of CS lead dislocation in special cases.
An Active Method for Characterization of Flow Units Between Injection/Production Wells by Injection-Rate Design
Authors: Lee Kun-Han , Ortega Antonio , Nejad Amir Mohammad , Ershaghi Iraj 
Published: September 2011

SummaryThis paper presents a novel data-mining method to characterize the flow units between injection and production wells in a waterflood, using carefully implemented variations in injection rates. The method allows the computation of weight factors representing the influence of any of the injectors surrounding a given producer. The weight factors are used to characterize the effective contribution of injection wells to the total gross production in surrounding production wells. A wavelet approach is used to design the perturbation in the injection rates and to analyze the observed variations in the gross production rates.Tracking the contribution of injectors to various producers can help in balancing voidage replacement in waterflood optimization. A second application is reservoir characterization, in which information provided by the proposed procedure can help in mapping high-permeability flow units such as channels and fractures as well as flow barriers between wells. The method was calibrated and tested successfully for simulated line-drive and five-spot patterns with various assumed flow units and flow-heterogeneity conditions. The paper also includes a case study for a tight-formation waterflood in which the weight factors are intended to delineate the pattern of natural high-permeability channels causing preferential flows.
Multiscale Mimetic Solvers for Efficient Streamline Simulation of Fractured Reservoirs
Authors: Natvig J.R.. R. , Skaflestad B.. , Bratvedt F.. , Bratvedt K.. , Lie K.-A.. -A. , Laptev V.. , Khataniar S.K.. K. 
Published: September 2011

Summary
Advances in reservoir characterization and modeling have given the industry improved ability to build detailed geological models of petroleum reservoirs. These models are characterized by complex shapes and structures with discontinuous material properties that span many orders of magnitude. Models that represent fractures explicitly as volumetric objects pose a particular challenge to standard simulation technology with regard to accuracy and computational efficiency.
We present a new simulation approach based on streamlines in combination with a new multiscale mimetic pressure solver with improved capabilities for complex fractured reservoirs. The multiscale solver approximates the flux as a linear combination of numerically computed basis functions defined over a coarsened simulation grid consisting of collections of cells from the geological model. Here, we use a mimetic multipoint-flux approximation to compute the multiscale-basis functions. This method has limited sensitivity to grid distortions. The multiscale technology is very robust with respect to fine-scale models containing geological objects such as fractures and fracture corridors. The methodology is very flexible in the choice of the coarse grids introduced to reduce the computational cost of each pressure solve. This can have a large impact on iterative modeling workflows.
Planning and Execution of Highly Overbalanced Completions From a Floating Rig: The Ursa-Princess Waterflood Project
Authors: Stair Craig D. , Hinnant Chuck H. , Hines Natalya O. , Schober Jamie M. , Davis Chris L. , Lizak Ken F. , Pugh Brian A. 
Published: September 2011

Summary
The Ursa-Princess Waterflood (UPWF) targets the Lower Yellow sand, the main reservoir in the Mars-Ursa basin in Mississippi Canyon, approximately 60 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The Lower Yellow sand, a world-class Upper Miocene turbidite reservoir, has been on production in the Ursa and Princess fields since 1999, and has been drawn down nearly to the bubblepoint. The waterflood is intended to increase and stabilize reservoir pressure, and to improve sweep efficiency. To accomplish this, four subsea injectors were designed and constructed to inject treated seawater at 40,000 B/D each for a target life of 30 years.
Because the Lower Yellow reservoir was already highly depleted, unique risks were identified in the planned subsea completion operations, to be conducted from a mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU). Seawater, used as a completion fluid, was expected to be up to 4,000 psi overbalanced to the reservoir, depending on the well location. This created the risk of either an uncontrollable fluid-level drop in the marine riser or an extreme impairment to the sandface completion. In order to maintain well control with a fluid level at the surface and still deliver low-skin completions, multiple design and procedural issues needed to be addressed, including the following:
Control systems on the rig and riser system to prevent uncontrollable fluid-level drop. Perforating systems to minimize impairment in a highly overbalanced environment without adding undue risk to well control. Pill designs that could both control fluid loss at the sandface and clean up effectively. Downhole completion systems capable of functioning either under very high pressure differentials or against very high loss rates. Development of high-burst screens suited to the use of fluid-loss-control pills as a contingency provision in the event that mechanical fluid-loss devices failed.
As more deepwater reservoirs approach depletion, specialized tools and procedures will be required to continue to deliver safe and effective sandface completions from floating rigs. This paper details many of these considerations and summarizes the execution experience and results for one such reservoir.
A Major Advancement in Expandable Connection Performance, Enabling Reliable Gastight Expandable Connections
Authors: DeLange Richard , Gandikota Raju , Osburn Scott 
Published: September 2011

Summary
Since the introduction almost 15 years ago of today's solid-expandable-liner systems, threaded-connection technologies have advanced very little compared with the development of sophisticated, state-of-the-art expansion tools and systems. The severity of damage caused to threaded connections during the downhole expansion process leaves some threads unengaged and badly deformed, reducing the connections’ mechanical dependability. Even worse, traditional metal seals incorporated into most proprietary premium connections are destroyed during the expansion process or damaged to the point of being undependable.
Even though solid-expandable-liner systems offer a large number of important and valuable solutions, connection performance is obviously a problem. For more than a decade, engineers have worked on the development of connection features that are more resistant to damage caused during expansion. Although there has been some advancement, today most or all expanded connections share little resemblance to unexpanded connections when subjected to ISO 13679 (2002) qualification tests with gas.
This paper details new expansion-cone technology that eliminates the majority of damage caused to connections when expanded with traditional cones. This paper will provide finite-element analyses and physical-testing verification to show how this new technology leaves connections with minimal visible damage to the threads and metal seals after expansion.
The Effect of CO2-Saturated Brine on the Conductivity of Wellbore-Cement Fractures
Authors: Yalcinkaya Tevfik , Radonjic Mileva , Hughes Richard G. , Willson Clinton S. , Ham Kyungmin 
Published: September 2011

Summary
The efficiency of carbon-capture and -storage (CCS) projects is directly related to the long-term sealing ability of cemented sections in wellbores penetrating CO2-storage reservoirs. The microfractures inside the wellbore cement and/or microannuli are possible pathways for CO2 leakage to the surface and/or freshwater-aquifer leakage and could jeopardize safe and long-term containment of CO2 in the subsurface. This paper presents an experimental study that investigates the changes inside the cement internal structure when exposed to acidic brine through an artificial fracture. A 30-day-long flow-through experiment was conducted using a 1 × 12-in. cement core and CO2-saturated brine as a permeant at a flow rate of 2 mL/min in a coreflooding apparatus with 10 and 600 psi of injection and net overburden pressure, respectively [low-pressure (LP) experiment]. The same experiment was repeated with the same flow rate but with 1,800 and 600 psi of injection and net overburden pressures, respectively, for 10 days in order to account for the effects of pressure on the degradation process of cement [high-pressure (HP) experiment]. High-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT) was used to image several subvolumes extracted from the flow-through cores. The images were processed and thresholded, followed by calculation of porosity. Total porosity was observed to decrease from 26 to 22% after 30 days of exposure in the LP experiment. The HP experiment did not cause any significant change in total porosity, possibly because of the short duration of the experiment.
Effects of Injected-Water Salinity on Waterflood Sweep Efficiency Through Induced Fines Migration
Authors: Lemon Phillip , Zeinijahromi Abbas , Bedrikovetsky Pavel , Shahin Ibrahim 
Published: September 2011

Summary
Permeability decline during corefloods with varying water composition, especially with low-salinity water, has been observed in numerous laboratory studies. It has often been explained by the lifting, migration, and subsequent plugging of pores by fine particles, which have been observed in numerous coreflood tests with altered water composition. In this paper, we investigated the concept that this permeability decline may be used for mobility control during waterflooding. The Dietz model for waterflooding in a layer-cake reservoir with a given injection and production rate was combined with a particle-detachment model to provide a simple analytical model for the process. The application of the model to an example data set showed that the induced fines migration may improve sweep efficiency.