bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Distal radial approach between theory and clinical practice.. Time to go distal!
Authors: Sanhoury Mohamed I. , Sobhy Mohamed A. , Saddaka Mohamed A. , Nassar Mohamed A. , Elwany Mostafa N. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Background
Transradial access (TRA), which has a minimal risk of problems such as radial artery occlusion (RAO), hemorrhage, spasm, and so on, is now considered the standard procedure for cardiac catheterization. The aim of the study is to present the distal transradial access (d-TRA) as a possible promising novel technique in the field of cardiac coronary interventions comparing it to the standard conventional TRA using primary and secondary endpoints, exploring its benefits and drawbacks as a new experience in Alexandria University. One hundred cases with variable indications for coronary interventions were randomized to two arms using systematic random sampling method, coronary interventions in the first one were done via d-TRA (50 patients) and in the second arm via conventional TRA group (50 patients).

Results
Technically, there were highly statistically significant differences between the two arms in favor of TRA regarding procedural success, number of punctures taken, Access time, Total procedural time, vasodilator used, and crossover to another access site; meanwhile safety profile parameters have showed statistically significant differences in favor of d-TRA regarding post-operative hematoma, AV fistula, post-operative pain and compression time, and there were no statistically significant differences regarding RAO although it occurred more in TRA group.

Conclusions
In the realm of cardiac intervention, the distal radial approach is a promising technique. When compared to TRA, we found it to be a viable and safe method for coronary angiography and interventions and it could be a real option for the interventionists in the near future, with a lower risk of radial artery blockage and no significant differences in wrist hematoma and radial artery spasm. The success rate of d-TRA is proportional to the steepness of the operator's learning curve and the quality of the examples chosen.
Implementation of a diabetes prevention program within two community sites: a qualitative assessment
Authors: Dineen Tineke E. , Bean Corliss , Jung Mary E. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Background
Despite numerous translations of diabetes prevention programs, implementation evaluations are rarely conducted. The purpose of this study was to examine the implementation process and multilevel contextual factors as an evidence-based diabetes prevention program was implemented into two local community organization sites to inform future scale-up. To build the science of implementation, context and strategies must be identified and explored to understand their impact.

Methods
The program was a brief-counseling diet and exercise modification program for individuals at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. A 1-year collaborative planning process with a local not-for-profit community organization co-developed an implementation plan to translate the program. A pragmatic epistemology guided this research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff who delivered the program (n = 8), and a focus group was completed with implementation support staff (n = 5) at both community sites. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed using a template approach. The consolidated framework for implementation research (CFIR) is a well-researched multilevel implementation determinant framework and was used to guide the analysis of this study. Within the template approach, salient themes were first inductively identified, then identified themes were deductively linked to CFIR constructs.

Results
Implementation strategies used were appropriate, well-received, and promoted effective implementation. The implementation plan had an impact on multiple levels as several CFIR constructs were identified from all five domains of the framework: (a) process, (b) intervention characteristics, (c) outer setting, (d) inner setting, and (e) individual characteristics. Specifically, results revealed the collaborative 1-year planning process, program components and structure, level of support, and synergy between program and context were important factors in the implementation.

Conclusion
This study offers insights into the process of implementing a community-based diabetes prevention program in two local sites. Successful implementation benefited from a fully engaged, partnered approach to planning, and subsequently executing, an implementation effort. The CFIR was a useful and thorough framework to evaluate and identify multilevel contextual factors impacting implementation. Results can be used to inform future implementation and scale-up efforts.
Quality assessment and Analytical Quality by Design-based RP-HPLC method development for quantification of Piperine in Piper nigrum L.
Authors: Parab Gaonkar Vishakha , Mannur Vinodh Kumar , Hullatti Kirankumar 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Background
Piper nigrum L. is one of the widely used herbs in Ayurvedic medicine. Piperine is a major phytoconstituent that is responsible for most of the activity of the herb. Quality assessment and standardization of such phytoconstituents is the need of the hour. The present study aims at developing a Quality by design (QbD)-based RP-HPLC Method for marker-based standardization of Piper nigrum L. fruits along with its quality assessment.

Results
The quality assessment of the crude sample was carried out by evaluating pharmacognostic parameters and analysis of toxic contaminants. The analytical target profile and critical quality attributes were determined and 22 factorial design was employed for optimization of the method. By performing the experiments as per the QbD concept the optimized mobile phase was identified as Acetonitrile and Water with 0.05% Acetic acid in the ratio of 70:30, with a flow rate of 1 mL/min and UV detection at 342 nm. The retention time of Piperine was found to be 5.5 min and the amount of Piperine in crude P. nigrum fruits and its extract was found to be 3.6% w/w 5.62% w/w, respectively. The Pharmacognostic parameters showed the results within specified limits and the crude drug sample showed the absence of toxic contaminants in it thus indicating the purity of the drug.

Conclusion
The utilization of the QbD approach leads to the development of a more precise and reliable method for the quantification of phytocompounds.
Fasting salivary pepsin level as a reliable non-invasive method of screening for laryngopharyngeal reflux in Egyptian patients
Authors: Sabry Manal , Yosef Tarek Mohamed , Mahmoud Ahmed Mohammed , George Michael Tari M. A. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Background
Laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) is caused by the regurgitation of gastric contents above the upper esophageal sphincter. Diagnostic gold standard tests like multichannel intraluminal impedance (MII) and 24-h dual-probe pH-metry are invasive and expensive which limits their accessibility especially in resource-limited settings. Since pepsin is only produced in the stomach, detecting pepsin in the laryngopharynx would make it a specific marker for reflux.
Therefore, in this study, we measured fasting salivary pepsin in patients with symptoms suggestive of LPR. We aimed to confirm the role of fasting salivary pepsin as a non-invasive diagnostic tool of LPR, to detect a cut-off value for it in Egyptian patients and to study predictors of changes in its level.

Methods
We conducted a prospective case control study at the gastroenterology clinic in Ain Shams University Hospitals. After testing with esophageal pH-metry, 25 symptomatic patients with confirmed LPR and 25 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. Patients diagnosed with organic upper gastrointestinal disorders, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, malignancy or organ failure were excluded. Patients on PPI were advised to stop 2 weeks before testing. All patients were tested for fasting salivary pepsin levels, esophageal pH-metry, and indirect laryngoscopy in addition to routine laboratory parameters.

Results
Out of the 25 LPR patients, 16% of patients had laryngoscope abnormality in the form of mucosal hyperemia and inflammation, and the average percentage of time pH < 4 in esophageal pH-metry testing was 29.14 ± 39.5%.
Comparative study between the 2 groups revealed a significant increase in salivary pepsin in LPR group compared to control group (p < 0.001). By using ROC-curve analysis, salivary pepsin at a cut-off point > 5 ng/ml diagnosed patients with LPR, with fair (77.9%) accuracy, sensitivity = 100% and specificity = 56% (p = 0.0001) while pH-metry (% Time pH < 4) at a cut-off point > 14% diagnosed patients with LPR, with good (87%) accuracy, sensitivity = 80%, and specificity = 100% (p < 0.0001)

Conclusion
Fasting salivary pepsin level at a cut-off value of > 5 ng/ml is a reliable, non-invasive method for detection of LPR especially in resource-limited settings.
A review of the identification methods and types of collapsible soils
Authors: Opukumo Alfred Wilson , Davie Colin T. , Glendinning Stephanie , Oborie Ebiegberi 
Published: February 2022

AbstractCollapsible soils have caused infrastructural damages resulting in several economic losses and loss of lives in certain cases. The prerequisite for collapse occurring is an open metastable structure; capable of developing in any soil type given the right placement or aging conditions. Natural and anthropogenic (engineered and non-engineered) collapsible soils exist in many regions of the world. In their unsaturated state, these soils exhibit high enough shear strength and stiffness (provided by inter-particle bonds of either suction, clay, calcium carbonate, or other salts) but upon wetting and/or loading they undergo repacking due to bond softening/weakening. This collapse of the soil structure leads to a rapid volume decrease and consequently associated issues such as rapid differential settlement, ground fissuring and landslides occur causing damages to civil structures, and loss of lives. Despite these threats and the large body of research available in this subject, there is still poor understanding of the process of softening/weakening and the collapse mechanism of certain bond in some collapse elements. The aim of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art comprehensive review of the different types of collapsible soils, field, and laboratory methods of predicting and measuring their potential to collapse. This understanding is crucial for geotechnical characterisation of soils in order to design safe and economic infrastructures with their long-term serviceability also in focus.
MSI-RPi: Affordable, Portable, and Modular Multispectral Imaging Prototype Suited to Operate in UV, Visible and Mid-Infrared Regions
Authors: Arunachalam Ajay , Andreasson Henrik 
Published: February 2022

Digital plant inventory provides critical growth insights, given the associated data quality is good. Stable & high-quality image acquisition is critical for further examination. In this work, we showcase an affordable, portable, and modular spectral camera prototype, designed with open hardware’s and open-source software’s. The image sensors used were color, and infrared Pi micro-camera. The designed prototype presents the advantage as being low-cost and modular with respect to other general commercial market available spectral devices. The micro-size connected sensors make it a compact instrument that can be used for any general spectral acquisition purposes, along with the provision of custom selection of the bands, making the presented prototype design a Plug-nd-Play (PnP) setup that can be used in different wide application areas. The images acquired from our custom-built prototype were back-tested by performing image analysis and qualitative assessments. The image acquisition software, and processing algorithm has been programmed, which is bundled with our developed system. Further, an end-to-end automation script is integrated for the users to readily leverage the services on-demand. The design files, schematics, and all the related materials of the spectral block design is open-sourced with open-hardware license & is made available at https://github.com/ajayarunachalam/Multi-Spectral-Imaging-RaspberryPi-Design. The automated data acquisition scripts & the spectral image analysis done is made available at https://github.com/ajayarunachalam/SI-RPi.
Experimental Evaluation of UWB Transmission Waveform with Body-Shadowing in an Indoor Environment
Authors: Suwan Supakorn , Promwong Sathaporn 
Published: February 2022

Wireless radio transmission performance in a realistic environment is a significant issue for designing and evaluating in short-range transmission technologies. Human body-shadowing is a significant propagation effect in an indoor wireless communication network. This paper presents the measurement model of impulse radio transmission with human body-shadowing in an indoor environment with IEEE 802.15.4 multipath impulse parameters. The impulse radio transfer function measurement model for the human body impulse radio transfer function with frequency band cover from 3 GHz to 11 GHz. The optimum system evaluation of impulse radio transmission is due to the human body and antennas. The characteristics of impulse radio transmission loss are using decay factor, log-normal standard, clusters, and ray arrival rate. The contributions of this research can be evaluating the human body impulse radio transfer function. And the design of the wireless radio system with the body shadowing effects and ambient environments.
ParChain
Authors: Yu Shangdi , Wang Yiqiu , Gu Yan , Dhulipala Laxman , Shun Julian 
Published: February 2022

This paper studies the hierarchical clustering problem, where the goal is to produce a dendrogram that represents clusters at varying scales of a data set. We propose the ParChain framework for designing parallel hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithms, and using the framework we obtain novel parallel algorithms for the complete linkage, average linkage, and Ward's linkage criteria. Compared to most previous parallel HAC algorithms, which require quadratic memory, our new algorithms require only linear memory, and are scalable to large data sets. ParChain is based on our parallelization of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm, and enables multiple clusters to be merged on every round. We introduce two key optimizations that are critical for efficiency: a range query optimization that reduces the number of distance computations required when finding nearest neighbors of clusters, and a caching optimization that stores a subset of previously computed distances, which are likely to be reused.
Experimentally, we show that our highly-optimized implementations using 48 cores with two-way hyper-threading achieve 5.8--110.1x speedup over state-of-the-art parallel HAC algorithms and achieve 13.75--54.23x self-relative speedup. Compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, our algorithms require up to 237.3x less space. Our algorithms are able to scale to data set sizes with tens of millions of points, which existing algorithms are not able to handle.
Scabbard
Authors: Theodorakis Georgios , Kounelis Fotios , Pietzuch Peter , Pirk Holger 
Published: February 2022

Single-node multi-core stream processing engines (SPEs) can process hundreds of millions of tuples per second. Yet making them fault-tolerant with exactly-once semantics while retaining this performance is an open challenge: due to the limited I/O bandwidth of a single-node, it becomes infeasible to persist all stream data and operator state during execution. Instead, single-node SPEs rely on upstream distributed systems, such as Apache Kafka, to recover stream data after failure, necessitating complex cluster-based deployments. This lack of built-in fault-tolerance features has hindered the adoption of single-node SPEs.We describe Scabbard, the first single-node SPE that supports exactly-once fault-tolerance semantics despite limited local I/O bandwidth. Scabbard achieves this by integrating persistence operations with the query workload. Within the operator graph, Scabbard determines when to persist streams based on the selectivity of operators: by persisting streams after operators that discard data, it can substantially reduce the required I/O bandwidth. As part of the operator graph, Scabbard supports parallel persistence operations and uses markers to decide when to discard persisted data. The persisted data volume is further reduced using workload-specific compression: Scabbard monitors stream statistics and dynamically generates computationally efficient compression operators. Our experiments show that Scabbard can execute stream queries that process over 200 million tuples per second while recovering from failures with sub-second latencies.
DARLING
Authors: Chapnik Koral , Kolchinsky Ilya , Schuster Assaf 
Published: February 2022

Complex event processing (CEP) is widely employed to detect user-defined combinations, or patterns, of events in massive streams of incoming data. Numerous applications such as healthcare, fraud detection, and more, use CEP technologies to capture critical alerts, threats, or vital notifications. This requires that the technology meet real-time detection constraints. Multiple optimization techniques have been developed to minimize the processing time for CEP, including parallelization techniques, pattern rewriting, and more. However, these techniques may not suffice or may not be applicable when an unpredictable peak in the input event stream exceeds the system capacity. In such cases, one immediate possible solution is to drop some of the load in a technique known as load shedding.
We present a novel load shedding mechanism for real-time complex event processing. Our approach uses statistics that are gathered to detect overload. The solution makes data-driven load shedding decisions to drop the less important events such that we preserve a given latency bound while minimizing the degradation in the quality of results. An extensive experimental evaluation on a broad set of real-life patterns and datasets demonstrates the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art techniques.
Rearchitecting in-memory object stores for low latency
Authors: Zhuo Danyang , Zhang Kaiyuan , Li Zhuohan , Zhuang Siyuan , Wang Stephanie , Chen Ang , Stoica Ion 
Published: February 2022

Low latency is increasingly critical for modern workloads, to the extent that compute functions are explicitly scheduled to be co-located with their in-memory object stores for faster access. However, the traditional object store architecture mandates that clients interact with the server via inter-process communication (IPC). This poses a significant performance bottleneck for low-latency workloads. Meanwhile, in many important emerging AI workloads, such as parallel tree search and reinforcement learning, all the worker processes accessing the object store belong to a single user.
We design Lightning, an in-memory object store rearchitected for modern, low-latency workloads in a single-user, multi-process setting. Lightning departs from the traditional design by adopting a shared memory model, enabling clients to directly access the object store without IPC boundary. Instead, client isolation is achieved by a novel integration of Intel Memory Protect Keys (MPK) hardware, transaction logging, and formal verification. Our evaluations show that Lightning outperforms state-of-the-art in-memory object stores by up to 9.0x on five standard NoSQL workloads and up to 4.5x in scaling up a Python tree search program. Lightning improves the throughput of a popular reinforcement learning framework that uses an in-memory object store for data sharing by up to 40%.
APEX
Authors: Lu Baotong , Ding Jialin , Lo Eric , Minhas Umar Farooq , Wang Tianzheng 
Published: February 2022

The recently released persistent memory (PM) offers high performance, persistence, and is cheaper than DRAM. This opens up new possibilities for indexes that operate and persist data directly on the memory bus. Recent learned indexes exploit data distribution and have shown great potential for some workloads. However, none support persistence or instant recovery, and existing PM-based indexes typically evolve B+-trees without considering learned indexes.
This paper proposes APEX, a new PM-optimized learned index that offers high performance, persistence, concurrency, and instant recovery. APEX is based on ALEX, a state-of-the-art updatable learned index, to combine and adapt the best of past PM optimizations and learned indexes, allowing it to reduce PM accesses while still exploiting machine learning. Our evaluation on Intel DCPMM shows that APEX can perform up to ~15× better than existing PM indexes and can recover from failures in ~42ms.
Physician-Assisted Suicide, the Right to Die, and Misconceptions About Life
Authors: De Andrade Pedro Fior Mota , Moreno Mario Tito Ferreira 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the legal situation regarding physician-assisted suicide in the world. Our hypothesis is that the prohibitive stance on physician-assisted suicide in most societies in the world today seems to be related to our moral attitudes toward suicide. This brings us to a discussion about life itself. We claim that the total lack of legal protection for physician-assisted suicide from international organizations and most countries in the world lies in a philosophical assumption that supports much of our common beliefs about what life really is. This assumption states that life must be thought of as not belonging exclusively to the individual. We argue that this assumption is a misconception that can be heard in the debate on suicide. Consequently we endorse a different conception of life which tends to favor a pro-choice stance towards suicide and assisted death in general. This position takes the patient’s decision about when to die more seriously. We conclude that there is no reason why physician-assisted suicide does not deserve legal protection as an individual right to die under international law.
Percieved Stress in Emerging Adulthood: The Role of Sense of Control and the Mediation Effects of Religiosity and Materialistic Values
Authors: Masoom Muhammad Rehan 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The research addresses the effect of sense of control on perceived stress by controlling for the intervening effects of Religiosity and Materialism. A total of 609 emerging adults living in Dhaka city participated in the survey; surveyors used a 48-item structural closed-ended questionnaire to collect the responses. The elicited responses were quantified, and structural equation models were formulated to identify any associations among the variables of interest. The findings suggest that sense of control is a strong determinant of perceived stress; neither religiosity nor materialism mediate the association. The study advances the transactional model of stress and coping.