jimnoneill/paper-to-field-training huggingface dataset:
Unfolding History of Local Guinea Sorghum Enhanced for Food Quality through Potassium Hydroxide and Bleach Test: Farmer Alternative to Climate Variability Resilience

Field: Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L). Moench) is an important staple food crop produced essentially under rained conditions in Mali. To preserve and exploit sorghum genetic diversity, germplasm collection was undertaken in 1978 across Mali. During this germplasm evaluation in 1982, a particular guinea sorghum cultivar from Chegue village in north western Mali, recorded as CSM63, was identified for its earliness and photoperiod insensitivity. This cultivar was unfortunately segregating not only for a testa presence, which is detrimental to Tô color and nutritional quality, but also for flowering time and plant height. Field screening coupled with the potassium hydroxide and bleach (KOH: B) tests were performed to eliminate testa while maintaining CSM63 agronomic values. Overall objectives were to trace history of CSM63 native population, screen for testa absence and define its favorable cropping zone. Field experiments were conducted at the Cinzana Agronomic Research Station (SRAC) while laboratory tests for testa absence and cooking quality were conducted at Sotuba Food Technology Laboratory (LTA) in Mali. Two thousand (2000) plants from original CSM63 population were grown in a complete isolation from other sorghum varieties to select 288 panicles for testa absence. For yield trial, a completely randomized block design was used with 3 replications. After series of selfing, a pure new line (CSM63-18-1AF) was identified without a testa with similar maturity, grain yield, better Tô color and nutritional values than the original CSM63. The new line was named CSM63E and its cropping zones were delimited beyond its center of origin. CSM63E was released for large scale production by Institut d'Economie Rurale (IER) and registered in National and West African Countries Regional Sorghum Catalogs. The adopted line is named Jakunbe (prevent drought) in Bambara language) by farmers. Jakunbe is the number one certified sorghum seed produced in Mali in 2016 in term of quantity. Cropping both Jakunbe and late maturing varieties beyond isohyets 700 mm exposes farmers to yield losses caused by non-proper environment.
DI-021 Qt prolongation in an acute psychiatric setting: fact or fiction?

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Background

Several psychotropic drugs can induce QT prolongation, which is a well known risk factor for developing Torsade de Pointes (TdP) and sudden death. The clinical relevance of this side effect of psychotropic medication remains unclear, especially in patients hospitalised in an acute hospital.

Purpose

To interpret the clinical importance of psychotropic drug induced QT prolongation, we investigated the prevalence of these electrocardiographic changes.

Material and methods

A prospective study was conducted on four psychiatric wards in a general hospital: two acute short-term psychiatric units (ASP1 and ASP2), one additional service unit (ASU) and one geriatric–psychiatric ward (GPW). All adult patients admitted between 1 October 2015 and 15 March 2016 to a psychiatric ward were eligible for inclusion. At admission, an ECG (ECG0) was performed and creatinine and potassium levels were measured. A second ECG (ECG1) was performed at least 7days after the start of a psychotropic drug associated with a risk of QT prolongation.1 QTc prolongation was defined as 470 ms for men and 480 ms for women. Clinically relevant QTc prolongation was defined as ≥500 ms.2 Statistical analysis (R software) was done as appropriate.

Results

268 patients (mean age 55 years, 59% women) were enrolled in the analysis. In 85 patients, ECG1 was performed. QTc0+1 were prolonged in 2.3% (5/220) of women and 3.7% (5/136) of men. No clinically relevant prolongation (≥500 ms) was registered. Higher QTc intervals were measured in the geriatric population. 28.5% (36/126) of all measured QTc (450≥QTc0+1≤500 ms) occurred in the GPW versus 9.4% (22/233) in the other units. Significant difference in QTc changes was associated with sex (p=0.02246). There was no correlation between QTc prolongation and age, number of psychotropic drugs or a specific single psychotropic drug (p>0.05).

Conclusion

In this study, QTc prolongation due to psychotropic drugs was less common than previously described.3 4 ECG monitoring may be unnecessary in the follow-up of patients without risk factors and could reduce hospital and community costs. However, considering the potential harm associated with TdP, QT prolongation should be avoided. We recommend recording an ECG before the start of a QT prolonging psychotropic drug in at risk patients: patients with chronic alcohol or drug addiction, cardiac history, on concomitant therapy with at least two QT prolonging psychotropic drugs, or in geriatric patients (>65 years).

References and/or acknowledgements

https://www.crediblemeds.org (January 2015). Drew, et al. Circulation2010. Girardin, et al. Am J Psychiatry2013. Reilly, et al. The Lancet 2000. No conflict of interest
Novel imaging technique could lead to early diagnosis of lung cancer

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Cancer comes in many forms.Worldwide, lung cancer is the most prevalent form of the disease, followed by breast, bowel and prostate cancer.There are two types of lung cancer: small cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).Of the two, NSCLC is by far the most common, accounting for around 80 to 85% of lung cancer cases.
Adoption of improved poultry production practices by rural women in Imo State

Field: Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)

The Adoption of improved poultry production practices by rural women in Imo state was studied with the objectives of analyzing the socio-economic determinants of the adoption and making policy recommendations. Data were generated from 258 randomly sampled rural women from the three agricultural zones of the state with the aid of interview schedule and structured questionnaire. The analyses were with the aid of simple percentage, frequency table and ordinary least square regression technique at 0.05 level of significance. The results indicated varied rates of adoption of the practices with watering ranking 1 st with 83.7 percent, artificial brooding/heating 77.5 percent, 2nd and supplementary feed/feeding 3rd with 39.9 percent. The variables; education (x 2), income (x 5), farm size (x 6) and extension contact (x 6) were the determinants of adoption of the practices. Significant relationship was established between the socio-economic variables and the adoption of improved poultry production practices. It was recommended that extension education campaign should be intensified to avail rural women of new practices in poultry. Deployment of appropriate number of properly trained extension agents for adequate coverage of the state as well as research and extension agencies being guided by the socio-economic characteristics of the target population as well as bio-physical environmental considerations are needed. Animal Production Research Advances Vol. 1(1) 2005: 39-44
An Explainable Transformer Model for Alzheimer's Disease Detection Using Retinal Imaging

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions worldwide. In the absence of effective treatment options, early diagnosis is crucial for initiating management strategies to delay disease onset and slow down its progression. In this study, we propose Retformer, a novel transformer-based architecture for detecting AD using retinal imaging modalities, leveraging the power of transformers and explainable artificial intelligence. The Retformer model is trained on datasets of different modalities of retinal images from patients with AD and age-matched healthy controls, enabling it to learn complex patterns and relationships between image features and disease diagnosis. To provide insights into the decision-making process of our model, we employ the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping algorithm to visualize the feature importance maps, highlighting the regions of the retinal images that contribute most significantly to the classification outcome. These findings are compared to existing clinical studies on detecting AD using retinal biomarkers, allowing us to identify the most important features for AD detection in each imaging modality. The Retformer model outperforms a variety of benchmark algorithms across different performance metrics by margins of up to 11\.
Carbon Footprint Analysis throughout the Life Cycle of the Continuous Deep Mixing Method (CDMM) Technology

Field: Environmental Science (Physical Sciences)

The objective of this article is to assess the carbon footprint across the Continuous Deep Mixing Method (CDMM) life cycle, considering its implementation in the context of sustainable, zero-emission, and decarbonising construction. Amidst global climate change challenges of greenhouse gas emissions in the construction sector, the CDMM emerges as a potentially effective solution to mitigate environmental impact. This study aims to address the gap in the existing scientific literature by evaluating the environmental aspects of CDMM application, with a focus on identifying primary emission sources. This research extends beyond the conventional focus on construction materials to include energy consumption from equipment and transportation, offering a holistic view of the technology’s environmental impact. This analysis identified cement as the major greenhouse gas emission source for the CDMM, underscoring the technology’s potential as an alternative to traditional geotechnical methods, in line with integrated design solutions and meeting growing social expectations for sustainability. The added value of this study comes from data derived from an actual project, enabling a realistic assessment of CDMM’s environmental impact and resource and energy efficiency.
A new method for mapping multidimensional data to lower dimensions

Field: Computer Science (Physical Sciences)

A multispectral mapping method is proposed which is based on the new concept of BEND (Bidimensional Effective Normalised Difference). The method, which involves taking one sample point at a time and finding the interrelationships between its features, is found very economical from the point of view of storage and processing time. It has good dimensionality reduction and clustering properties, and is highly suitable for computer analysis of large amounts of data. The transformed values obtained by this procedure are suitable for either a planar 2-space mapping of geological sample points or for making grayscale and color images of geo-terrains. A few examples are given to justify the efficacy of the proposed procedure.
A likelihood ratio approach to sequential change point detection for a general class of parameters

Field: Mathematics (Physical Sciences)

In this paper we propose a new approach for sequential monitoring of a parameter of a $d$-dimensional time series, which can be estimated by approximately linear functionals of the empirical distribution function. We consider a closed-end-method, which is motivated by the likelihood ratio test principle and compare the new method with two alternative procedures. We also incorporate self-normalization such that estimation of the long-run variance is not necessary. We prove that for a large class of testing problems the new detection scheme has asymptotic level $α$ and is consistent. The asymptotic theory is illustrated for the important cases of monitoring a change in the mean, variance and correlation. By means of a simulation study it is demonstrated that the new test performs better than the currently available procedures for these problems.Finally the methodology is illustrated by a small data example investigating index prices from the dot-com bubble.
The history of greenhouse gas emissions and relation with the nuclear energy policy for Turkey

Field: Energy (Physical Sciences)

The globalising world, rapidly developing technology and growing population have brought many problems and led to disrupting the world ecological balance. Today, existing energy sources reached such a level that cannot meet the current needs of the world. Due to the fact that fossil fuels will run out in near future, it has made mankind tending to seek alternative energy sources. The main issues addressed in this paper are the history of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) and relations with nuclear energy policy, particularly in Turkey. Currently, nuclear has much less GHGe and high energy-efficiency, and also meets 10.6% of the world primary electiricty energy demand. Therefore, countries seriously began to evaluate nuclear energy instead of fossil-fuels. In line with this, Turkey started to build third nuclear plants and aims to meet at least 15% of its primary electiricity energy demand. Hereby, Turkey is not only reducing dependence on fossil-fuels but also planning to reach the undertaken GHGe level as a country of signed the Kyoto protocol.
GCSF with or without chemotherapy compared to Plerixafor with GCSF as salvage mobilization regimen in patients with multiple myeloma and lymphoma: Collection effectiveness and cost effectiveness analysis

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Introduction Plerixafor is a novel mobilizing agent of peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) in lymphoma and multiple myeloma (MM) patients whose cells mobilize poorly. Due to the substantial cost associated with its use, we aimed to compare the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of Plerixafor + GCSF (PG) versus GCSF ± Chemotherapy (GC) as salvage mobilization regimens. Methods The charts of consecutive lymphoma and MM patients who had undergone at least one previous attempt of PBSCs mobilization that failed or resulted in an insufficient cell dose for transplant between 2007 and 2010 were retrospectively reviewed. Patients identified received salvage mobilization with GC (prior to 2009) or PG after Plerixafor’s FDA approval. Data collected included demographics, medical histories, apheresis yields and transplant outcome. The cost effectiveness analysis was from the perspective of the Jordanian Ministry of Health. The incremental cost effectiveness ratio (ICER) was calculated by dividing the difference in cost by the difference in effectiveness for the two regimens. Results Five patients received GC and twelve received PG. A minimum CD34+ cell dose of 2 × 10 6 cells/kg was collected from 8 patients (67%) in the PG group compared to 3 (60%) in the GC group ( p=0.79). The average costs were US$8570 and US$25,700 for the GC group and the PG group, respectively. The ICER was US$244,714 per successful stem cell collection. Conclusion Salvage Plerixafor use showed a non-significant improvement in PBSCs collection with a significant increase in cost. Prospective comparative effectiveness studies are warranted to inform the optimal salvage mobilization regimen. To our knowledge, this is the first study from the Middle East to describe the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of Plerixafor.
Predictors of Intestinal Metaplasia in Minorities: Not Always Helicobacter pylori

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Purpose: Intestinal metaplasia (IM) of the stomach is a significant risk factor in developing intestinal type gastric cancer. IM has been linked to H. pylori infection and there has been emerging evidence that IM may be reversible with eradication of H. pylori. In this study, we investigated if the IM- H. pylori association exists in minority patients. One focus was looking for other predictors of IM in this population Methods: Charts of all adult patients who underwent upper endoscopy with biopsy at our medical center in a two year period were reviewed. Data about demographics, endoscopic, and histological findings were collected and analyzed. The presence of H. pylori infection was based on the immunohistopathological analysis of the biopsy samples. SAS software was used for statistical analysis. Results: Our cohort included 970 patients (37% males and 63% females). African American, Hispanics, and Asian Americans represented 52.5%, 28.3%, and 3.8% of the study population, respectively. The mean age was 59.1 (SD 17.1). The prevalence of H. pylori and gastric intestinal metaplasia were 24.64% and 11.6%, respectively. On a univariate analysis, gastric IM in patients with H. pylori infection was 18% in comparison to 7% in non-infected patients (P 0.0002). IM was also significantly associated with aging (6% in >65years, 3% in 50-65 years, 2% in <50 years, P <0.0001). There was no association found between IM and race or gender. On a multivariate logistic regression analysis, H. pylori infection and age more than 65 years retained significance in association with IM (OR 2.2 (1.4-3.3) and OR 2.3 (1.3-3.9), respectively). Conclusion: Gastric IM is relatively common among minority patients. H. pylori infection and aging are independent predictors of developing IM in this population. Further studies are warranted to elucidate the mechanism behind these findings.
Anti-Nociceptive and Anti-Inflammatory Activities of the Ethyl Acetate Extract of Belamcanda chinensis (L.) Redouté in Raw 264.7 Cells in vitro and Mouse Model in vivo

Field: Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics (Life Sciences)

Xirui He,1 Yan Yang,1 Xufang Yuan,1 Yin Sun,2 Yongsheng Li3 1Department of Bioengineering, Zhuhai Campus of Zunyi Medical University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, 519041, People’s Republic of China; 2Key Laboratory of Resource Biology and Biotechnology in Western China (Northwest University), Ministry of Education, Xi’an, 710169, People’s Republic of China; 3Honghui Hospital, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710054, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yongsheng Li, Honghui Hospital, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710054, People’s Republic of China, Email superlys2018@sina.comPurpose: Inflammation and accompanying pain is a common global health problem that seriously affects human quality of life worldwide. Here, we aimed to investigate the anti-nociceptive and anti-inflammatory activities of the ethyl acetate extract of B. chinensis (EAEBc) along with the underlying mechanisms of action.Methods: The in vitro anti-inflammatory activity of EAEBc was explored using an LPS-induced RAW264.7 cell inflammatory model. Nitric oxide (NO) production, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, and IL-6 levels were evaluated. In vivo anti-nociceptive and anti-inflammatory activities of EAEBc were assessed with the aid of classical experimental mouse models. In addition, LPS-induced biomarker contents (TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, NO, iNOS, and PGE2) and formalin-induced serum inflammatory factors (NO, PGE2, 5-HT, β-EP, substance P, and NE) were determined in mice.Results: In vitro, EAEBc significantly reduced LPS-induced NO generation and suppressed the production of TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-6 in RAW264.7 cells in a concentration-dependent manner. In vivo, EAEBc downregulated serum TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, NO, iNOS, and PGE2 contents in mice with LPS-induced inflammation in a dose-dependent manner. EAEBc displayed anti-inflammatory activity in carrageenan-induced paw edema and xylene ear edema tests. Intragastric administration of EAEBc at test doses of 100 and 200 mg/kg led to inhibition of nociception and capillary permeability induced by acetic acid to varying degrees. Similarly, EAEBc exerted analgesic effects in the formalin and hot plate tests. In particular, the administration of EAEBc reversed the changes in the levels of inflammatory indicators NO, PGE2, 5-HT, β-EP, substance P, and NE in a mouse model of formalin-induced pain.Conclusion: Our findings provide considerable evidence to support the extensive application of B. chinensis in traditional medicine and demonstrate the utility of this plant species as an effective candidate for prevention or treatment of various pain and inflammation-related conditions.Keywords: medicinal plants, Belamcanda chinensis, anti-nociceptive activity, anti-inflammatory activity, inflammatory mediators
OvarNet: Towards Open-vocabulary Object Attribute Recognition

Field: Computer Science (Physical Sciences)

In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously detecting objects and inferring their visual attributes in an image, even for those with no manual annotations provided at the training stage, resembling an open-vocabulary scenario. To achieve this goal, we make the following contributions: (i) we start with a naive two-stage approach for open-vocabulary object detection and attribute classification, termed CLIP-Attr. The candidate objects are first proposed with an offline RPN and later classified for semantic category and attributes; (ii) we combine all available datasets and train with a federated strategy to finetune the CLIP model, aligning the visual representation with attributes, additionally, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging freely available online image-caption pairs under weakly supervised learning; (iii) in pursuit of efficiency, we train a Faster-RCNN type model end-to-end with knowledge distillation, that performs class-agnostic object proposals and classification on semantic categories and attributes with classifiers generated from a text encoder; Finally, (iv) we conduct extensive experiments on VAW, MS-COCO, LSA, and OVAD datasets, and show that recognition of semantic category and attributes is complementary for visual scene understanding, i.e., jointly training object detection and attributes prediction largely outperform existing approaches that treat the two tasks independently, demonstrating strong generalization ability to novel attributes and categories.
Modelling customer satisfaction and loyalty on aggregate levels: Experience from the ECSI pilot study

Field: Decision Sciences (Social Sciences)

Abstract Aggregate Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) measures are becoming more and more common as indicators of business performance in different industries, and are used for a multitude of purposes. However, any comparison of such figures from one domain to another calls for tightly harmonized and co-ordinated methodological frameworks. In this paper we study the prerequisites for developing a common model structure useful for devising aggregate CSI results throughout Europe, and comparing also with similar efforts in other parts of the world. Our study is based on an evaluation of the stability and robustness of empirical results from the European Customers, Satisfaction Index (ECSI) pilot survey round. In spite of the fact that European customers, product supplies and cultural environments are different, it is found possible to specify a common structural model to be used in such diverse industries as telecoms, banking and supermarkets, throughout 11 European countries. This model is not optimal in the majority of cases (in terms of explanatory power), but neither in any case is it very far away from fulfilling high quality criteria. Thus, it fulfils the pre-specified requirements in terms of robustness, and is proposed to be used as the standard in future Pan-European activities of this character. In the second part of the paper the prerequisites for finding adequate manifest (measurable) variables for the structural latent variable model are very briefly considered. A comprehensive factor analysis study of all ECSI pilot corporate models (about 150) is scrutinized. The results of this study are rather comforting in terms of generating adequate factors (similar to the ones predefined as latent variables) and using a common (master) measurement instrument (questionnaire). However, for a few latents (especially perceived value) certain problems of measurement are identified.