bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
KW-2449 and VPA exert therapeutic effects on human neurons and cerebral organoids derived from MECP2-null hESCs
Authors: Xu Ya-Jie , Liu Pei-Pei , Yan Zhong-Ze , Wang Ying-Ying , Li Qian , Teng Zhao-Qian , Liu Chang-Mei 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Background
Rett syndrome (RTT), mainly caused by mutations in methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MECP2), is one of the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders in girls. However, the underlying mechanism of MECP2 remains largely unknown and currently there is no effective treatments available for RTT.
Methods
We generated MECP2-KO human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), and differentiated them into neurons and cerebral organoids to investigate MECP2 loss-of-function phenotypes as well as potential therapeutic agents in human neuronal models, and the mechanism was verified after transcriptome sequencing.
Results
We found that MECP2 deletion caused reduced number of hESCs-derived neurons and simplified dendritic morphology. Moreover, MECP2-KO cortical organoids exhibited fewer neural progenitor cells and neurons at day 60. Transcriptome analysis of organoids identified an PI3K-AKT pathway downregulated following MECP2 deletion. Treatment with either KW-2449 or VPA, small molecules for the activation of PI3K-AKT signaling pathway, alleviated neuronal deficits and transcriptome impairment of MECP2-KO human neuronal models.
Conclusions
Together, these data suggest that KW-2449 and VPA might be promising drugs for RTT treatment.
Robust and Efficient Parameter Estimation for Discretely Observed Stochastic Processes
Authors: Hore Rohan , Ghosh Abhik 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
In various practical situations, we encounter data from stochastic processes which can be efficiently modelled by an appropriate parametric model for subsequent statistical analyses. Unfortunately, the most common estimation and inference methods based on the maximum likelihood (ML) principle are susceptible to minor deviations from assumed model or data contamination due to their well known lack of robustness. Since the alternative non-parametric procedures often lose significant efficiency, in this paper, we develop a robust parameter estimation procedure for discretely observed data from a parametric stochastic process model which exploits the nice properties of the popular density power divergence measure in the framework of minimum distance inference. In particular, here we define the minimum density power divergence estimators (MDPDE) for the independent increment and the Markov processes. We establish the asymptotic consistency and distributional results for the proposed MDPDEs in these dependent stochastic process setups and illustrate their benefits over the usual ML estimator for common examples like Poisson process, drifted Brownian motion and auto-regressive models.
Dysregulation of GYS1 and GYS2 correlated with poor prognosis and immune infiltrates in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma
Authors: Li Gong , Zhang Peng , Wei Bajin , Jiang Bin , Li Xuefeng , Li Huili , Xing Chunyang , Wan Yunyan , Ma Wei , Zhou Wuhua 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Glycogen synthase encoding genes GYS1 and GYS2 are aberrantly expressed and play a vital role in progression of multiple malignancies. However, the clinical significance and biological function of GYS1 and GYS2 in hepatocellular carcinoma remain little known. The present study aims to evaluate the relationship of GYS1 and GYS2 expression with clinicopathologic characteristics, prognostic pattern and immune infiltration in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) using the data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The expression of GYS1 and GYS2 in HCC and normal liver tissues were primarily compared using TCGA data and further validated by another independent cohort from the gene expression omnibus (GEO) database and human protein atlas (HPA). Wilcoxon rank sum test, Chi-square test and logistical regression analysis were used to examine the relationship of GYS1 and GYS2 expression with clinicopathological features. Gene ontology (GO) term analysis, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis and Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) were conducted to explain the enrichment pathways and underlying molecular mechanism for GYS1 and GYS2. Kaplan-meier analysis, Cox regression and nomograms were used to evaluate the predictive value of GYS1 and GYS2 expression on clinical outcomes in HCC. Receive operating characteristic (ROC) curve was performed to illustrate the correlation of GYS1 and GYS2 expression with the risk of HCC. In addition, the relationship of GYS1 and GYS2 expression with immune infiltrate cells and immune checkpoint related genes were analyzed. Higher GYS1 expression and lower GYS2 expression were examined in HCC than in normal liver tissue and prominently associated with AFP level, tumor stage, histologic grade, pathologic stage and unfavorable overall survival (OS). ROC analysis showed that GYS1 and GYS2 may serve as reasonable diagnostic biomarkers for HCC patients. Moreover, GYS1 expression and GYS2 expression were significantly correlated with abundance of immune infiltrate cells and level of immune checkpoint related genes. Function annotation disclosed that both GYS1 and GYS2 were probably involved in synapse membrane, potassium ion transport, passive transmembrane transporter activity, channel activity, synaptic membrane, transport complex, neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction, allograft rejection, E2F targets, epithelial mesenchymal transition, G2M checkpoint and KRAS signaling pathway. The current study demonstrated that GYS1 upregulation and GYS2 downregulation might reshape tumor immune microenvironment and contribute progression of HCC. Both GYS1 and GYS2 were identified as promising biomarkers associated with diagnosis, prognosis and immune infiltration in HCC.
Closed-loop chemical recycling of cross-linked polymeric materials based on reversible amidation chemistry
Authors: Qin Bo , Liu Siyuan , Huang Zehuan , Zeng Lingda , Xu Jiang-Fei , Zhang Xi 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Closed-loop chemical recycling provides a solution to the end-of-use problem of synthetic polymers. However, it remains a major challenge to design dynamic bonds, capable of effective bonding and reversible cleaving, for preparing chemically recyclable cross-linked polymers. Herein, we report a new dynamic maleic acid tertiary amide bond based upon reversible amidation reaction between maleic anhydrides and secondary amines. This dynamic bond allows for the construction of polymer networks with tailorable and robust mechanical properties, covering strong elastomers with a tensile strength of 22.3 MPa and rigid plastics with a yield strength of 38.3 MPa. Impressively, these robust polymeric materials can be completely depolymerized in an acidic aqueous solution at ambient temperature, leading to efficient monomer recovery with > 94% separation yields. This work unveils a general approach to design polymer networks with tunable mechanical performance and closed-loop recyclability, which will open a new avenue for sustainable polymeric materials.
The correlation between fat-soluble vitamin levels and inflammatory factors in pediatric community-acquired pneumonia : a retrospective study.
Authors: Wang Qing-tai , Wei Jian-wei , Jiang Hua , Chen Gang-xin 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Objective: To analyze the correlation between vitamin A, D, E levels and tumor necrosis factor (TNF-a), interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-10 (IL-10), neutrophil, C-reactive protein (CRP) levels in pediatric community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Methods: 110 children with CAP and 100 normal children were collected.The concentrations of fat-soluble vitamin A, D, E, the proportion of leukocytes and subtypes, the concentration of CRP, and the concentration of cytokines TNF-a, IL-1, and IL-10 were tested. Differences between vitamin levels and inflammatory factor levels were compared between the two groups.The correlation between vitamin levels and inflammatory factor levels was analyzed in children with CAP. Results: The hemoglobin, leukocyte concentration, neutrophils, monocytes and CRP concentration in the CAP group showed significant differences (P <0.05).The levels of vitamin A, D and E in the CAP group were lower than those in the control group, and the levels of TNF-a and IL-1 were higher than those in the control group, and the difference was statistically significant (P<0.05). IL-10 levels have no significant between 2 groups (P>0.05).The Pearson analysis showed that the vitamin A, D, and E levels were all correlated with the TNF-a, IL-10, and CRP levels (P <0.05). Conclusion: The vitamin A, D, E levels of CAP children were lower than normal children. The content of fat-soluble vitamins are somewhat correlated with the secretion of TNF-a and IL-10 .
Road Anomaly Segmentation Based on Pixel-wise Logit Variance with Iterative Background Highlighting
Authors: Lee Dongkun , Kim Han-Gyu , Choi Ho-Jin 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Anomaly segmentation on the urban landscape scene is an important task in autonomous driving. This process exploits a pre-trained semantic segmentation network to estimate anomalous regions. The anomaly segmentation approaches implemented with extra requirements such as out-of-domain data, extra network, or network retraining might increase computational cost or degradation of segmentation performance. In this research, to exploit information from the segmentation network for more robust anomaly segmentation, we propose the use of pixel-wise logit variance, which tends to be small for anomalies as network outputs even logits without confidence. Additionally, to detect anomalous objects on the background robustly, iterative background highlighting is also proposed, which is implemented by feeding the logits back into the linear classifier of the network. We achieved state-of-the-art performance among anomaly segmentation approaches without extra requirements, reaching relative average precision improvements of 21.7% on Fishyscapes Lost&Found and 17.4% on Fishyscapes Static compared to the state-of-the-art method.
WITHDRAWN: Learning to Optimize Decision Boundary for One-Shot One-Class Image Recognition
Authors: Chen Linkai , Zhu Hongjin , You Congzhe , Fan Honghui , Ruan Yaduan 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
In this paper, we study One-Shot One-Class classification (OSOC), where the aim is to identify the objects of a specific class amongst all objects by using only one single sample of that class as training data. The key challenge of this task is how to learn a robust decision boundary to distinguish a class in such an extreme case. Towards this goal, we propose a novel meta-learning strategy to meta learn a mapping function from the exemplar image of a target class to the categorical classifier as well as a reference score for this class. The classifier is applied to a testing sample to predict the classification score, which will be compared against the reference score to decide whether this sample belongs to the target class or not. To realize this idea, in the meta training phase, we propose a ranking loss that employs the reference score as the threshold to distinguish samples both from the target class and other non-target classes. On top of this basic loss function, we develop another two terms: a fidelity term to ensure the learned classifier has high fidelity to the exemplar and a learnable slack term to adaptively adjust the reference score on the fly. These two terms compete against each other and consequently seek a balance to optimize the decision boundary. Comprehensive experimental results on five OSOC datasets demonstrate the proposed method can obviously outperform state-of-the-art
Clinically unsuspected orthopedic implants during S. aureus bacteremia do not require additional diagnostic work-up
Authors: Kouijzer Ilse , Speijker Lydia , Aarntzen Erik , Rijnen Wim , Somford Matthijs , Maat Ianthe , Meer Maurits van , Oever Jaap ten , Gisolf Jet 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Purpose
To assess the likelihood of occult infection in patients with clinically unsuspected orthopedic implants during Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB).
Methods
In a retrospective study in two Dutch hospitals, we included all patients with SAB between 2013 and 2020 with one or more orthopedic implants in whom [18F]FDG-PET/CT was performed. The primary outcome was the percentage of patients who had an infected orthopedic implant by S. aureus. Also, we compared the clinical parameters of infected and uninfected orthopedic implants.
Results
Fifty-five of 191 (29%) orthopedic implants in 118 SAB patients included had clinical signs of infection. Of all 136 unsuspected implants, 5 (3%, all arthroplasties), showed increased [18F]FDG uptake around the prosthesis on [18F]FDG-PET/CT. The clinical course of these patients without clinically overt infection or relapse of bacteremia during follow-up of a median of 48 months (range 0–48), however, argued against prosthetic joint infection.
Conclusion
Although orthopedic implants are evidently a risk factor for metastatic infection during SAB, the absence of clinical symptoms obviate the need of additional investigations or prolonged antibiotic treatment.
Place, position and pedagogy: Using collaborative autoethnography to explore the teaching of qualitative research methods in health and medicine
Authors: Ibrahim Kinda , Weller Susie , Elvidge Elissa , Tavener Meredith 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
This article explores experiences of teaching qualitative research (QR) methods in health and medicine, highlighting the challenges faced, and offering suggestions for overcoming them. Using collective online interviews, collaborative autoethnography (CAE) was employed to generate data comprising educator’s reflective accounts of teaching QR in medical schools across two continents. Three main themes were identified through collaborative thematic analysis: making meaningful contributions from a marginalized position; finding our pedagogical feet; and recognizing the translational applicability and value of qualitative research. We reflected on the marginalized positioning of QR methods in medical and health sciences teaching and the under estimation of the value and contribution of QR to such disciplines. Analysis revealed a lack of formal training for educators and curriculum space for QR methods. Our teaching pedagogies, developed through our own research experiences, self-reflection and student feedback, were primarily student-centred employing a range of novel approaches aimed at "retraining” students’ minds from a quantitative-dominant perspective to introduce greater curiosity and an appreciation of the significance of QR to health and medical sciences. Future curriculum development should aim to break down the perception of competing/ opposing qualitative and quantitative methodologies and instead emphasise the place and value of different approaches, methods and data to health and medicine. CAE allowed us to reflect and identify some key recommendations that could help educators plan their QR methods teaching in these disciplines.
Comparison of 3D Quantitative Osteoarthritis Imaging Biomarkers from Paired CT and MR Images: data from the IMI-APPROACH study
Authors: Brett Alan , Bowes Michael A , Conaghan Philip G 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Introduction: MRI bone surface area and femoral bone shape (B-score) measures have been employed as quantitative endpoints in DMOAD clinical trials. Computerized Tomography (CT) imaging is more commonly used for 3D visualization of bony anatomy due to its high bone-soft tissue contrast. We aimed to compare CT and MRI assessments of 3D imaging biomarkers. Methods: We used baseline and 24-month image data from the IMI-APPROACH 2-year prospective cohort study. Femur and tibia were automatically segmented using active appearance models to measure 3D bone shape, area and 3D joint space width (3DJSW). Linear regression was used to test for correlation between measures. Limits of agreement and bias were tested using Bland-Altman analysis. Results: CT-MR pairs of the same knee were available from 434 participants (78% female). B-scores from CT and MR were strongly correlated (R2 = 0.938) with minimal bias of 0.1. Area measures were also correlated but showed a consistent bias (MR smaller). 3DJSW showed different bias (MR larger) in lateral and medial sides. Discussion: The strong correlation and small B-score bias suggests that B-score may be measured reliably using either modality. It is likely that the bone surface identified using MR and CT will be at slightly different positions within the bone/cartilage boundary. The negative bone area bias suggests the MR bone boundary is inside the CT boundary producing smaller areas for MR, consistent with the positive 3DJSW bias. The lateral-medial 3DJSW difference is possibly due to a difference in knee pose during acquisition (fully extended for CT, flexed for MR).Trial registration number: NCT03883568
Potential neuroprotective capacity of L-glutamic acid attached to silica nanoparticles on behavioral disturbances, neural oxidative stress,and neural damage induced by hydrogen peroxide in rats
Authors: Hamdi Essia , Muniz-Gonzalez Ana-Belén , Hidouri Slah , Bermejo Alberto Marcos , Sakly Mohsen , Venero César , Amara Salem 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Exposure to certain environmental factors and xenobiotic agents can lead to an excess of reactive oxygen species and free radical formation that can damage neuronal cells and affect cognitive function. Silica nanoparticles, as probes for genes or proteins, are already used in nanomedicine as a nanocarrier for several drugs. In the present study, SiO2 NPs were functionalized with glutamate to fight the oxidative-induced stress following chronic exposure to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). This study aims to investigate whether Glutamate-functionalized Silica Nanoparticles can prevent the neurobehavioral and functional modifications displayed by adult male rats exposed to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). We observed that subchronic exposure (21 days)to H2O2 induced an anxious state and a decrease in locomotor activity in the animals compared to controls. It the Morris water maze task, rats exposed to H2O2 showed impaired spatial learning and memory abilities. In addition, we observed that compared to controls, H2O2 exposed animals showed an imbalance in the redox status and disturbances of the enzyme’s activities-acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and Monoamine Oxidase (MAO) that were prevented by concomitant SiO2 NPs administration. Furthermore, H2O2 treatment enhanced the occurrence of necrotic and degenerative cell changes in several brain areas (hippocampus, subiculum, caudate-putamen and frontal cortex), that were ameliorated by SiO2 NPs treatment. In summary, the supplementation of L-glutamic acid-functionalized silica Nanoparticles corrected enzymatic activities, reduced behavioral disturbances and diminished histological alterations induced by H2O2. Our results suggest that SiO2 NPs are useful to prevent or ameliorate behavioral impairment, as well as antioxidant enzymatic disturbances and neural damage induced by oxidative stress in the hippocampus and frontal cortex.
Spatial-Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Crime Prediction
Authors: Sun Yuting , Chen Tong , Yin Hongzhi 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Exposure to crime and violence can harm individuals’ quality of life and the economic growth of communities. In light of the rapid development in machine learning, there is a rise in the need to explore automated solutions to prevent crimes. With the increasing availability of both fine-grained urban and public service data, there is a recent surge in fusing such cross-domain information to facilitate crime prediction. By capturing the information about social structure, environment, and crime trends, existing machine learning predictive models have explored the dynamic crime patterns from different views. However, these approaches mostly convert such multi-source knowledge into implicit and latent representations(e.g., learned embeddings of districts), making it still a challenge to investigate the impacts of explicit factors on the occurrences of crimes behind the scenes. In this paper, we present a Spatial-Temporal Meta-path guided Explainable Crime prediction (STMEC) framework to capture dynamic patterns of criminal behaviors and explicitly characterize how the environmental and social factors mutually interact to produce forecasts. Extensive experiments show the superiority of STMEC compared with other SOTA spatiotemporal models, especially in predicting felonies (e.g., robberies and assaults with dangerous weapons).
Peroxisome Proliferator Activated Receptors Gamma Serum levels and Gene Polymorphism in Frontal Fibrosing Alopecia: A Case Control Study
Authors: Farag Assem Mohamed , Adawy Dina EL , Abdelrahman Amira Mohamed Noureldin , Ibrahim Shady Mahmoud Attia , Salem Rehab Mohammed 
Published: July 2022

Abstract
Background : Frontal fibrosing alopecia (FFA) is a scarring alopecia with a complex pathogenesis that is not completely clear yet. Objective : The aims of the study were to evaluate serum PPAR gamma levels and gene polymorphism in a sample of Egyptian FFA patients.Methods : The case-control study included 93 FFA female patients, and 157 matching apparently healthy control subjects. Patients were subjected to clinical and trichoscopic examinations to diagnose FFA according to the updated diagnostic criteria. FFA severity was evaluated using FFA severity index (FFASI). Serum PPARγ levels and gene polymorphisms were assessed in all participants using ELISA and PCR techniques respectively.Results : Serum PPARγ levels in patients’ group were significantly lower than that of control subjects’ group. PPARG (Pro12Ala) gene polymorphism was significantly predominant in FFA patients when compared to the control subjects. Patients carrying polymorphic genotypes showed significantly reduced serum PPARγ levels when compared to patients carrying the wild genotype. Limitations : Compliance of patients didn’t allow to evaluate PPARγ agonist therapeutic efficacy and safety on FFA.Conclusion : PPARγ may play an important role in FFA development. It might have a potential utility as biomarker in FFA.