gebhart/patrepeval huggingface dataset:
Bone Morphogenetic Proteins, Carriers, and Animal Models in the Development of Novel Bone Regenerative Therapies (2021)

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) possess a unique ability to induce new bone formation. Numerous preclinical studies have been conducted to develop novel, BMP-based osteoinductive devices for the management of segmental bone defects and posterolateral spinal fusion (PLF). In these studies, BMPs were combined with a broad range of carriers (natural and synthetic polymers, inorganic materials, and their combinations) and tested in various models in mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, sheep, and non-human primates. In this review, we summarized bone regeneration strategies and animal models used for the initial, intermediate, and advanced evaluation of promising therapeutical solutions for new bone formation and repair. Moreover, in this review, we discuss basic aspects to be considered when planning animal experiments, including anatomical characteristics of the species used, appropriate BMP dosing, duration of the observation period, and sample size.
Privacy-preserving Distributed Probabilistic Load Flow (2020)

Probabilistic load flow (PLF) allows to evaluate uncertainties introduced by renewable energy sources on system operation. Ideally, the PLF calculation is implemented for an entire grid requiring all the parameters of the transmission lines and node load/generation to be available. However, in a multi-regional interconnected grid, the independent system operators (ISOs) across regions may not share the parameters of their respective areas with other ISOs. Consequently, the challenge is how to identify the functional relationship between the flows in the regional grid and the uncertain power injections of renewable generation sources across regions without full information about the entire grid. To overcome this challenge, we first propose a privacy-preserving distributed accelerated projection-based consensus algorithm for each ISO to calculate the corresponding coefficient matrix of the desired functional relationship. Then, we leverage a privacy-preserving accelerated average consensus algorithm to allow each ISO to obtain the corresponding constant vector of the same relationship. Using the two algorithms, we finally derive a privacy-preserving distributed PLF method for each ISO to analytically obtain its regional joint PLF in a fully distributed manner without revealing its parameters to other ISOs. The correctness, effectiveness, and efficiency of the proposed method are verified through a case study on the IEEE 118-bus system.
Pd Model Catalysts: Effects of Aging Environment, Aging Duration and Interrupting Aging with Brief Air Pulses on Lean Pd Redispersion. (2016)

The goals of this investigation were to determine how automotive catalyst characteristics were affected by prolonged exposure to a simulated engine exhaust gas environment, and identify opportunities to limit or reverse catalyst deactivation that correlate with conditions achievable on a vehicle. Model Palladium-based powder catalysts supported on ceria-zirconia (Pd/CZO) and 4wt% La2O3 stabilized γ-Al2O3 (Pd/Al) were selected since these are the primary washcoat components of an automotive catalytic converter. The catalysts were deactivated by constant exposure at 700°C in three different aging environments, oxidizing (lean-only), reducing (rich-only) or a 10 minute cycling of each (redox), for up to three different aging durations, 20 minutes, 2 hours or 16 hours. We determined the aging environment severity ranking of these samples aged for 2 hours or more was as follows: redox > rich-only >> lean-only. The reducing aging environment caused strong metal-support interactions (SMSI) that limited gas-phase access to the Pd surface and dramatically lower catalyst activity, which was much more severe for Pd/CZO catalysts than for Pd/Al catalysts. Dry air treatments applied for 2 hours at 550°C or 700°C showed various degrees of success at reversing SMSI effects, and restoring the fresh-like Pd particle size and catalyst activity depending on the support material, aging duration and dry air temperature. Catalysts with larger average Pd particle size caused by a longer aging duration showed diminishing effects from post-aging dry air treatments, indicating that air should be applied before 20 minutes of aging while the Pd particles were still small. These changes were then made to the redox aging cycle by intermittant replacment of the aging gas with dry air to interrupt the Pd sintering mechanism. Interrupting air pulses on the time scale of a common engine 10 second fuel cut were shown to maintain fresh-like Pd particle size after 16 hours for Pd/Al catalysts, but Pd/CZO catalysts required 10 minute air pulses to achieve the same effect. The insight gained from this work could be used to develop engine control and aftertreatment systems to actively intervene and regenerate a catalyst that is designed to be capable of rapid Pd redispersion.
The free hormone hypothesis: Correlation of decreases in PSA with free testosterone rather than total testosterone in men with advanced prostate cancer treated with GTx-758. (2013)

e16015 Background: Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) improves disease-free survival but disease progression is related, in part, to ineffective castration. The free hormone hypothesis states that the biological activity of steroid hormones is affected by its unbound (free) rather than its protein-bound concentration. Serum total testosterone (T) concentrations predominantly reflect the T bound to plasma proteins and do not accurately predict prostatic levels of T. Methods: In a Phase II study (G200705), men with advanced prostate cancer (n=159) were randomized to receive 1000 mg or 2000 mg GTx-758 daily or leuprolide as their initial ADT. Serum total T (mass spectrometry), free T (equilibrium dialysis), SHBG and PSA concentrations were measured. A second Phase II study (G20007) was performed in men (n=9) with CRPC who then received GTx-758 2000 mg daily. Results: Although both treatments reduced serum total T levels to &lt; 50 ng/dL, leuprolide decreased them to a greater extent. However, GTx-758 caused greater reductions in serum PSA, suggesting that total T concentrations did not accurately reflect the suppression of androgen activity. Both dosages of GTx-758 reduced free T levels to a greater extent (mean of 0.7 and 0.4 pg/ml at day 60, and 0.4 and 0.4 pg/ml on day 90, respectively) than leuprolide (mean of 1.4 pg/ml on day 60 and 1.4 pg/ml on day 90; p values &lt;0.03). Similar clinical results were observed in CRPC patients where GTx-758 daily resulted in a 71% decrease in %free T and clinically relevant PSA reductions in men maintained on ADT with LHRH agonists. As a result of adverse events at higher doses of GTx-758, the trial was stopped early. Conclusions: The ERα agonist, GTx-758, reduced the biologically active form of T, free T, to significantly lower levels than leuprolide. Reductions in PSA appeared to be more highly associated with changes in free T. These data provide compelling evidence to support the free hormone hypothesis and suggest that serum free T concentrations would provide a better measure of therapeutic efficacy in ADT than total T. A Phase II clinical trial utilizing lower doses of GTx-758 (G200712) is currently being performed. Clinical trial information: NCT01326312.
FootsNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for Footstep-based Person Identification (2022)

In recent times seismic signal-based person identification has gained significant popularity in the field of biometrics. The existing techniques of person identification are extremely effective and achieve high prediction accuracy. However, these techniques are inefficient in accommodating new users in the system. It requires retraining the model with a large amount of data, which is time-consuming and labour-intensive. To address this issue, we proposed FootsNet, a transfer learning convolutional neural network. FootsNet has a two-stage training process; first, the model is trained using classes with many labelled samples. Then the model is fine-tuned using the novel classes (representing new users), which have a limited number of labelled samples. We perform extensive experiments using datasets collected from 15 human subjects and compare the performance of FootsNet with the existing state-of-the-art techniques. We also study FootsNet's performance by varying the number of labelled footstep samples of the novel classes.
Congenital Diabetes in an Infant with Trisomy 21 (1998)

A newborn infant with trisomy 21 was found to have congenital diabetes which appears to be permanent. Congenital diabetes is extremely rare and differs from type I or type II diabetes. It has never been reported previously in Down's syndrome and it seems to be due to a selective beta cell defect with undetectable C-peptide but normal alpha-cell function.
Motion vector quantization for efficient low-bit-rate video coding (2008)

The most recent video coding standard H.264 achieves excellent compression performances at many different bit-rates. However, it has been noted that, at very high compression ratios, a large part of the available coding resources is only used to code motion vectors. This can lead to a suboptimal coding performance. This paper introduces a new coding mode for a H.264-based video coder, using quantized motion vector (QMV) to improve the management of the resource allocation between motion information and transform coeffcients. Several problems have to be faced with in order to get an efficient implementation of QMV techniques, yet encouraging results are reported in preliminary tests, allowing to improve the performances of H.264 at low bit-rates over several sequences.
Falls requiring medical attention among veterans with multiple sclerosis: A cohort study (2011)

The purpose of this study was to estimate the relative risk of an injurious fall requiring medical attention in veterans with multiple sclerosis (MS) compared with veterans without MS after controlling for sex, age, and healthcare use. The sample included 195,417 veterans treated at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities in the Northwest United States in fiscal year 2008. We obtained information regarding MS diagnosis, injurious falls (operationalized as International Classifi cation of Diseases-9th Revision-Clinical Modification codes E880-E888), and demographic and healthcare use data from the VHA Consumer Health Information Performance Set database. Using logistic regression, we determined the adjusted odds ratio (OR) of an injurious fall to be three times higher in female veterans with MS than in female veterans without MS (OR = 3.0, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.6-5.5). The adjusted OR of an injurious fall for men with MS was also higher than for men without MS, but this difference was not statistically significant (OR = 1.2, 95% CI = 0.8-2.1). We recommend further studies evaluating the medical, social, and economic consequences of injurious falls, as well as interventions to prevent injurious falls, to improve the independence and quality of life of veterans and others living with MS.
Carbon nanotube doped lithium ion batteries (2002)

Carbon Nanotube Doped Lithium Ion Batteries, Proceedings of the 2002 Annual APS March Meeting. American Physical Society. Held at the Indiana Convention Center: Indianapolis, Indiana: 18-22 March 2002.
Piezoelectric Surgery –A Novel Technique for Laminectomy (2014)

Based on our study, PiezoL is considered a safe and viable technique for performing ovine dorsal laminectomy in the preclinical research setting.
Measure Locally, Reason Globally: Occlusion-sensitive Articulated Pose Estimation (2006)

Part-based tree-structured models have been widely used for 2D articulated human pose-estimation. These approaches admit efficient inference algorithms while capturing the important kinematic constraints of the human body as a graphical model. These methods often fail however when multiple body parts fit the same image region resulting in global pose estimates that poorly explain the overall image evidence. Attempts to solve this problem have focused on the use of strong prior models that are limited to learned activities such as walking. We argue that the problem actually lies with the image observations and not with the prior. In particular, image evidence for each body part is estimated independently of other parts without regard to self-occlusion. To address this we introduce occlusion-sensitive local likelihoods that approximate the global image likelihood using per-pixel hidden binary variables that encode the occlusion relationships between parts. This occlusion reasoning introduces interactions between non-adjacent body parts creating loops in the underlying graphical model. We deal with this using an extension of an approximate belief propagation algorithm (PAMPAS). The algorithm recovers the real-valued 2D pose of the body in the presence of occlusions, does not require strong priors over body pose and does a quantitatively better job of explaining image evidence than previous methods.
Author response: 27 T ultra-high static magnetic field changes orientation and morphology of mitotic spindles in human cells (2017)

Nowadays, a number of methods can be used to ‘look’ inside the body to investigate potential health problems. One of these is a technique called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that uses magnetic fields that are several hundred times stronger than a fridge magnet (or over 10,000 times stronger than the Earth’s natural magnetic field) to generate images of the inside of the body. In general, stronger magnetic fields enable higher quality images to be obtained. However, the effects of exposing the body’s cells to these magnetic fields have not been fully determined. Like most other biological materials, protein polymers called microtubules can respond to high magnetic fields – for example, by aligning with the field. Microtubules play a number of roles inside cells. This includes forming the mitotic spindle that separates copies of chromosomes – the structures in which the majority of a cell’s genetic material is stored – equally between dividing cells. The orientation of the mitotic spindle determines the direction in which a cell will divide. This direction is important for generating different types of cells and tissues. Furthermore, many cancerous cells have incorrectly oriented spindles. Zhang, Hou et al. have now exposed cancerous and normal human cells to magnetic fields of varying strengths. The maximum magnetic field strength tested (27 Tesla – or around 10 times the highest field strengths produced by standard hospital MRI scanners) did not kill the cells after four hours of exposure, but the orientation of the spindles inside the cells did change. In addition, the 27 Tesla magnetic field caused spindles that were perpendicular to the direction of the field to widen. At an intermediate field strength (9 Tesla – a magnetic field strength that has been used in some experimental MRI scanners), the orientation of the spindle only changed after three days of continuous exposure to the magnetic field. Lower field strengths (such as those currently used in hospital MRI scanners) did not alter the orientation of the spindle even after seven days of exposure. Zhang, Hou et al. also observed that the magnetic field acts on both the microtubules and chromosomes. However, the alignment of the chromosomes in the cell was the greatest determinant of the direction in which the spindle would align itself in response to the magnetic field. The next step is to analyze the consequences of magnetic field-induced spindle orientation changes – can these lead to cancer or reduce cancer growth, or change how animal tissues develop? Understanding how to control the position of the spindle could also ultimately make it possible to use ultra-high magnetic fields to engineer tissues or stimulate their regeneration.
Genome Sequences of 13 Isolates of Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium var. Copenhagen Obtained from Wild Pigeons in Canada (2018)

Pigeon-adapted strains of <i>Salmonella enterica</i> serovar Typhimurium var. Copenhagen phage types 2 and 99 obtained from the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario, Canada, were analyzed using whole-genome sequencing. All isolates contained the <i>Salmonella</i> virulence plasmid despite the low pathogenicity of this lineage in their avian host.
Single-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser by graded-index lens spatial filtering (1997)

4.5 mW of power in a single spatial mode has been obtained from a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) in an external cavity setup, using a graded index (GRIN) lens with a spatial filtering high reflecting aperture deposited on its endface. The spatial filter on the GRIN lens endface forces a larger single transverse mode in the VCSEL than is obtained without it. A brightness of 5.1×105 W/cm2 str is demonstrated, which is 91% of the maximum achievable.
Tuning the effective spin-orbit coupling in molecular semiconductors (2017)

The control of spins and spin to charge conversion in organics requires understanding the molecular spin-orbit coupling (SOC), and a means to tune its strength. However, quantifying SOC strengths indirectly through spin relaxation effects has proven difficult due to competing relaxation mechanisms. Here we present a systematic study of the g-tensor shift in molecular semiconductors and link it directly to the SOC strength in a series of high-mobility molecular semiconductors with strong potential for future devices. The results demonstrate a rich variability of the molecular g-shifts with the effective SOC, depending on subtle aspects of molecular composition and structure. We correlate the above g-shifts to spin-lattice relaxation times over four orders of magnitude, from 200 to 0.15 μs, for isolated molecules in solution and relate our findings for isolated molecules in solution to the spin relaxation mechanisms that are likely to be relevant in solid state systems.
Granulocyte accumulation in postischemic intestine: role of leukocyte adhesion glycoprotein CD11/CD18 (1992)

Neutrophils play an important role in ischemia-reperfusion (I/R)-induced vascular injury in the small intestine. Monoclonal antibodies against the leukocyte adhesion glycoprotein CD11/CD18 afford protection against I/R-induced microvascular injury. It has been suggested that the response to I/R differs between the various layers of the bowel wall, with relatively few granulocytes accumulating in the mucosa compared with the serosa or mesentery. The objectives of this study were to determine whether I/R-induced neutrophil accumulation is 1) homogenous in the different layers of intestine (mucosa, submucosa, muscle, and mesentery) and 2) dependent on the expression and/or activation of the leukocyte adhesion glycoprotein CD11/CD18. Neutrophil infiltration was monitored by measuring myeloperoxidase activity in mucosa, submucosa, muscle, and mesentery of cat small intestine subjected to 3 h ischemia (blood flow reduced to 20% of control) and reperfusion. I/R elicited a comparable degree of polymorphonuclear (PMN) infiltration in mucosa, submucosa, and mesentery, with the muscularis exhibiting a greater response. Pretreatment with the CD18-specific monoclonal antibody (IB4) significantly attenuated the I/R-induced PMN accumulation in all layers of the bowel wall and mesentery, indicating that the granulocyte accumulation elicited by I/R is dependent on the expression and/or activation of the leukocyte adhesion molecule CD11/CD18.
18F-FDG-PET scans and high dose of iodine-131 (I-131) treatment in patients with elevated thyroglobulin and negative iodine-131 scan differentiated thyroid carcinoma (2012)

2111 Objectives To investigate the usefulness of 18F-FDG-PET and therapeutic effects of high dose I-131 in differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) with elevated serum thyroglobulin (Tg) but negative radioactive iodine scan (RAI). Methods One hundred and twenty nine patients who had FDG-PETs for elevated Tg and negative RAI from February 2002 to December 2009 were included after total thyroidectomy followed by radioiodine ablation. Results 69 patients had positive findings on FDG-PET, true positive in 58 patients, false positive in 11 patients, true negative and false negative in 32, 28 patients, respectively. The overall sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of FDG-PETs were 67%, 74%, and 70%, respectively. FDG-PET had a high specificity (94%) in patients with positive post-therapy scan. Clinical management changed for 58 of 129 (45%) patients, including surgery, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy. Of 129 patients included, 101 patients received I-131 treatment. The post-therapy scans were positive in 54/101 (53%) patients, and 51/101 (50%) patients had 50% decrease in stimulated Tg. The change of stimulated Tg before (15.2, range from 2 to 1349) and after (5.55, range from 0.4 to 7666) I-131 treatment was statically significant after 26 ±22.1 months period of follow-up (p=0.001). In 13 patients without any treatment, 8 patients (8/13, 62%) had 50% decrease in Tg. Conclusions FDG-PET scan is useful in the diagnosis of recurrence and metastases of DTC with elevated Tg and negative scan, and have a high specificity in patients with positive post-therapy scan. Iodine-131 treatment achieved 53% positive post-therapy scan and 50% decrease in stimulated Tg, which suggests that I-131 therapy has a therapeutic effect for half of patients when the Tg level is considered an index of tumour burden. However, the spontaneous decrease of Tg in limited patients (8/13, 62%) with relatively low Tg without any treatment indicated that iodine-131 therapy should be individualised according to clinical characteristics. Research Support Alberta Cancer Foundation, Canada Foundation for Innovatio
Heat-shock proteins in inflammation and cancer (2008)

Heat shock protein in inflammation and cancer. Recent data have expanded the concept that inflammation is a critical component of tumor progression. Many cancer types have their origin in infection places, chronic irritation and inflammation. It is now becoming clear that the tumor microenvironment, which is largely orchestrated by inflammatory cells, is an indispensable participant in the neoplasic processes. The tumor cells have co-opted some of the molecules of signaling of the innate immune system to be able to carry out the invasion processes, migration and metastasis. At the present time, the chaperones or heat shock protein (HSPs) emerge as stimulating of the immune system and they are key pieces in the modulation of the inflammation. In this review we integrated the functional relationships between inflammation and cancer, as well as the role of the chaperones in the interface of both pathologies.
Toward a normative approach for forensicability (2016)

Sociotechnical systems (STSs), where users interact with software components, support automated logging, i.e., what a user has performed in the system. However, most systems do not implement automated processes for inspecting the logs when a misuse happens. Deciding what needs to be logged is crucial as excessive amounts of logs might be overwhelming for human analysts to inspect. The goal of this research is to aid software practitioners to implement automated forensic logging by providing a systematic method of using attackers' malicious intentions to decide what needs to be logged. We propose Lokma: a normative framework to construct logging rules for forensic knowledge. We describe the general forensic process of Lokma, and discuss related directions.