nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
The role of zinc in liver cirrhosis.
Venue: Annals of hepatology

Zinc is an essential trace element playing fundamental roles in cellular metabolism. It acts mostly by binding a wide range of proteins, thus affecting a broad spectrum of biological processes, which include cell division, growth and differentiation. Zinc is critical to a large number of structural proteins, enzymatic processes, and transcription factors. Zinc deficiency can result in a spectrum of clinical manifestations, such as poor of appetite, loss of body hair, altered taste and smell, testicular atrophy, cerebral and immune dysfunction, and diminished drug elimination capacity. These are common symptoms in patients with chronic liver diseases, especially liver cirrhosis. The liver is the main organ responsible for the zinc metabolism which can be affected by liver diseases. On the other hand, zinc deficiency may alter hepatocyte functions and also immune responses in inflammatory liver diseases. Liver cirrhosis represents the most advanced stage of chronic liver diseases and is the common outcome of chronic liver injury. It is associated with energy malnutrition, with numerous metabolic disorders, such as hypoalbuminemia, with imbalance between branched chain amino acids and aromatic amino acids, and with reduced zinc serum concentrations. All these processes can influence the clinical outcome of patients, such ascites, hepatic encephalopathy and hepatocellular carcinoma. In the present review, we summarize the emerging evidence on the pitoval role of zinc in the pathogenesis of liver cirrhosis.
Bloodstream infections in patients with liver cirrhosis
Venue: Virulence

Bloodstream infections are a serious complication in patients with liver cirrhosis. Dysregulated intestinal bacterial translocation is the predominant pathophysiological mechanism of infections in this setting. For this reason enteric Gram negative bacteria are commonly encountered as the first etiological cause of infection. However, through the years, the improvement in the management of cirrhosis, the recourse to invasive procedures and the global spread of multidrug resistant pathogens have importantly changed the current epidemiology. Bloodstream infections in cirrhotic patients are characterized by high mortality rate and complications including metastatic infections, infective endocarditis, and endotipsitis (or transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt related infection) For this reason early identification of patients at risk for mortality and appropriated therapeutic management is mandatory. Liver cirrhosis can significantly change the pharmacokinetic behavior of antimicrobials. In fact hypoproteinaemia, ascitis and third space expansion and impairment of renal function can be translated in an unpredictable drug exposure.
Recent Advancements in Diagnosis and Therapy of Liver Cirrhosis.
Venue: Current drug targets

Cirrhosis is a diffuse pathophysiological state of the liver considered to be the final stage of various liver injuries, characterized by chronic necroinflammatory and fibrogenetic processes, with subsequent conversion of normal liver architecture into structurally abnormal nodules, dense fibrotic septa, concomitant parenchymal exaustment and collapse of the liver tissue. Alcoholic liver disease and chronic infections due to HBV and/or HCV constitute the main causes of liver cirrhosis worldwide. During a lag time of 15 to 30 years, chronic liver diseases can lead to liver cirrhosis and its complications. Active hepatic inflammation plays a pivotal role in the inflammation necrosis regeneration process, which eventually leads to liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Prognosis of liver cirrhosis is highly variable and influenced by several variables, such as etiology, severity of liver disease, presence of complications and comorbidities. In advanced cirrhosis, survival decreases to one or two years. Correct advanced diagnosis and selected treatment with different molecules may help in understanding mechanisms of fibrogenesis, the driving forces of cirrhosis's pathogenesis, and the scrupulous approach to more effective therapeutic procedures. Prevention of fibrosis with further deterioration of liver function through specific treatments is always required, through the removal of the underlying causes of liver disease. Advanced liver disease, with subsequent complications, requires targeted treatment. Therefore, the aim of this review is to assess the diagnosis and treatment of liver cirrhosis on the pathophysiological bases, searching for relevant studies published in English using the PubMed database from 2011 to the present.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma in the Absence of Cirrhosis in United States Veterans is Associated With Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.
Venue: Clinical gastroenterology and hepatology the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can develop in individuals without cirrhosis. We investigated risk factors for development of HCC in the absence of cirrhosis in a U.S.  We identified a national cohort of 1500 patients with verified HCC during 2005 to 2010 in the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) and reviewed their full VA medical records for evidence of cirrhosis and risk factors for HCC. Patients without cirrhosis were assigned to categories of level 1 evidence for no cirrhosis (very high probability) or level 2 evidence for no cirrhosis (high probability) which were based on findings from histologic analyses, laboratory test results, markers of fibrosis from noninvasive tests, and imaging features.  A total of 43 of the 1500 patients with HCC (2.9% had level 1 evidence for no cirrhosis, and 151 (10.1% had level 2 evidence for no cirrhosis; the remaining 1203 patients (80.1% had confirmed cirrhosis. Compared with patients with HCC in presence of cirrhosis, greater proportions of patients with HCC without evidence of cirrhosis had metabolic syndrome, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or no identifiable risk factors. Patients with HCC without evidence of cirrhosis were less likely to have abused alcohol or have hepatitis C virus infection than patients with cirrhosis. Patients with HCC and NAFLD (unadjusted odds ratio, 5.4; 95% confidence interval, 3.4 8.5) or metabolic syndrome (unadjusted odds ratio, 5.0; 95% confidence interval, 3.1 7.8) had more than 5 fold risk of having HCC in the absence of cirrhosis, compared with patients with HCV related HCC.  Approximately 13% of patients with HCC in the VA system do not appear to have cirrhosis. NAFLD and metabolic syndrome are the main risk factors for HCC in the absence of cirrhosis.
Systemic inflammation in decompensated cirrhosis: Characterization and role in acute on chronic liver failure
Venue: Hepatology

Acute on chronic liver failure (ACLF) in cirrhosis is characterized by acute decompensation (AD) organ failure(s) and high short term mortality. Recently, we have proposed (systemic inflammation [SI] hypothesis) that ACLF is the expression of an acute exacerbation of the SI already present in decompensated cirrhosis. This study was aimed at testing this hypothesis and included 522 patients with decompensated cirrhosis (237 with ACLF) and 40 healthy subjects. SI was assessed by measuring 29 cytokines and the redox state of circulating albumin (HNA2) a marker of systemic oxidative stress. Systemic circulatory dysfunction (SCD) was estimated by plasma renin (PRC) and copeptin (PCC) concentrations. Measurements were performed at enrollment (baseline) in all patients and sequentially during hospitalization in 255. The main findings of this study were: (1) Patients with AD without ACLF showed very high baseline levels of inflammatory cytokines, HNA2, PRC, and PCC. Patients with ACLF showed significantly higher levels of these markers than those without ACLF; (2) different cytokine profiles were identified according to the type of ACLF precipitating event (active alcoholism/acute alcoholic hepatitis, bacterial infection, and others) (3) severity of SI and frequency and severity of ACLF at enrollment were strongly associated. The course of SI and the course of ACLF (improvement, no change, or worsening) during hospitalization and short term mortality were also strongly associated; and (4) the strength of association of ACLF with SI was higher than with SCD.  These data support SI as the primary driver of ACLF in cirrhosis.
Acute on chronic liver failure in cirrhosis
Venue: Nature Reviews Disease Primers

The definition of acute on chronic liver failure (ACLF) remains contested. In Europe and North America, the term is generally applied according to the European Association for the Study of the Liver Chronic Liver Failure (EASL CLIF) Consortium guidelines, which defines this condition as a syndrome that develops in patients with cirrhosis and is characterized by acute decompensation, organ failure and high short term mortality. One third of patients who are hospitalized for acute decompensation present with ACLF at admission or develop the syndrome during hospitalization. ACLF frequently occurs in a closed temporal relationship to a precipitating event, such as bacterial infection or acute alcoholic, drug induced or viral hepatitis. However, no precipitating event can be identified in approximately 40% of patients. The mechanisms of ACLF involve systemic inflammation due to infections, acute liver damage and, in cases without precipitating events, probably intestinal translocation of bacteria or bacterial products. ACLF is graded into three stages (ACLF grades 1 3) on the basis of the number of organ failures, with higher grades associated with increased mortality. Liver and renal failures are the most common organ failures, followed by coagulation, brain, circulatory and respiratory failure. The 28 day mortality rate associated with ACLF is 30% Depending on the grade, ACLF can be reversed using standard therapy in only 16 51% of patients, leaving a considerable proportion of patients with ACLF that remains steady or progresses. Liver transplantation in selected patients with ACLF grade 2 and ACLF grade 3 increases the 6 month survival from 10% to 80%
Transient and 2 Dimensional Shear Wave Elastography Provide Comparable Assessment of Alcoholic Liver Fibrosis and Cirrhosis.
Venue: Gastroenterology

Alcohol abuse causes half of all deaths from cirrhosis in the West, but few tools are available for noninvasive diagnosis of alcoholic liver disease. We evaluated 2 elastography techniques for diagnosis of alcoholic fibrosis and cirrhosis; liver biopsy with Ishak score and collagen proportionate area were used as reference.  We performed a prospective study of 199 consecutive patients with ongoing or prior alcohol abuse, but without known liver disease. One group of patients had a high pretest probability of cirrhosis because they were identified at hospital liver clinics (in Southern Denmark) The second, lower risk group, was recruited from municipal alcohol rehabilitation centers and the Danish national public health portal. All subjects underwent same day transient elastography (FibroScan) 2 dimensional shear wave elastography (Supersonic Aixplorer) and liver biopsy after an overnight fast.  Transient elastography and 2 dimensional shear wave elastography identified subjects in each group with significant fibrosis (Ishak score =3) and cirrhosis (Ishak score =5) with high accuracy (area under the curve =0.92) There was no difference in diagnostic accuracy between techniques. The cutoff values for optimal identification of significant fibrosis by transient elastography and 2 dimensional shear wave elastography were 9.6 kPa and 10.2 kPa, and for cirrhosis 19.7 kPa and 16.4 kPa. Negative predictive values were high for both groups, but the positive predictive value for cirrhosis was >66% in the high risk group vs approximately 50% in the low risk group. Evidence of alcohol induced damage to cholangiocytes, but not ongoing alcohol abuse, affected liver stiffness. The collagen proportionate area correlated with Ishak grades and accurately identified individuals with significant fibrosis and cirrhosis.  In a prospective study of individuals at risk for liver fibrosis due to alcohol consumption, we found elastography to be an excellent tool for diagnosing liver fibrosis and for excluding (ruling out rather than ruling in) cirrhosis.
Increasing physical activity in stroke survivors using STARFISH, an interactive mobile phone application: a pilot study
Venue: Topics in stroke rehabilitation

Following stroke, people are generally less active and more sedentary which can worsen outcomes. Mobile phone applications (apps) can support change in health behaviors. We developed STARFISH, a mobile phone app based intervention, which incorporates evidence based behavior change techniques (feedback, self monitoring and social support) in which users' physical activity is visualized by fish swimming.  To evaluate the potential effectiveness of STARFISH in stroke survivors.  Twenty three people with stroke (12 women; age: 56.0 10.0 years, time since stroke: 4.2 4.0 years) from support groups in Glasgow completed the study. Participants were sequentially allocated in a 2:1 ratio to intervention (n 15) or control (n 8) groups. The intervention group followed the STARFISH program for six weeks; the control group received usual care. Outcome measures included physical activity, sedentary time, heart rate, blood pressure, body mass index, Fatigue Severity Scale, Instrumental Activity of Daily Living Scale, Ten Meter Walk Test, Stroke Specific Quality of Life Scale, and Psychological General Well Being Index.  The average daily step count increased by 39.3% (4158 to 5791 steps/day) in the intervention group and reduced by 20.2% (3694 to 2947 steps/day) in the control group (p 0.005 for group time interaction) Similar patterns of data and group time interaction were seen for walking time (p 0.002) and fatigue (p 0.003) There were no significant group time interactions for other outcome measures.  Use of STARFISH has the potential to improve physical activity and health outcomes in people after stroke and longer term intervention trials are warranted.
Present and future emissions of HAPs from crematories in China

China is the most populous country in the world. The amount of death population has reached 9.65 million and 49.5% of human corpses are cremated by about 1700 crematories spread throughout the country in 2012, leading to considerable discharge of various hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) into the atmosphere and great concerns on regional air quality and health risks for surrounding residents. By using the practicable or best available emission factors, for the first time, a multiple year emission inventory of typical hazardous air pollutants discharged from crematories in the Chinese mainland, has been established for the historical period of 1990 2012, and the future trends of HAPs emissions until 2030 are forecasted based on three scenarios analysis. Our results show that the total emissions have gradually increased to 906 t of NO X 443 t of SO 2 2713 t of CO, 477.7 t of PM, 377 t of HCl, 36 t of H 2 S, 25 t of NH 3 62 t of NMVOCs, 592 kg of Hg, 48 kg of Pb, 14 kg of Cd, 53 kg of As, 40 kg of Cr, 37 kg of Cu, 51 kg of Ni, and 96 g of PCDD/Fs as TEQ (toxic equivalent quantity) by the year 2012. Under the business as usual (BAU) scenario, various HAPs emitted from cremators would continuously increase with an average growth rate of 3% till to 2030; whereas the emissions will peak at around 2015 and then decline gradually with varied speed under the two improved control scenarios. To mitigate the associated air pollution and health risks caused by crematories, it is of great necessary for implementing more strict emission standards, applying combustion optimization and requiring installation of best available flue gas purification system, as well as powerful supervision for sound operation of crematories.
Hybrid Modeling Approach to Estimate Exposures of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) for the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA)
Venue: Environmental science technology

A hybrid air quality model has been developed and applied to estimate annual concentrations of 40 hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) across the continental United States (CONUS) to support the 2011 calendar year National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) By combining a chemical transport model (CTM) with a Gaussian dispersion model, both reactive and nonreactive HAPs are accommodated across local to regional spatial scales, through a multiplicative technique designed to improve mass conservation relative to previous additive methods. The broad scope of multiple pollutants capturing regional to local spatial scale patterns across a vast spatial domain is precedent setting within the air toxics community. The hybrid design exhibits improved performance relative to the stand alone CTM and dispersion model. However, model performance varies widely across pollutant categories and quantifiably definitive performance assessments are hampered by a limited observation base and challenged by the multiple physical and chemical attributes of HAPs. Formaldehyde and acetaldehyde are the dominant HAP concentration and cancer risk drivers, characterized by strong regional signals associated with naturally emitted carbonyl precursors enhanced in urban transport corridors with strong mobile source sector emissions. The multiple pollutant emission characteristics of combustion dominated source sectors creates largely similar concentration patterns across the majority of HAPs. However, reactive carbonyls exhibit significantly less spatial variability relative to nonreactive HAPs across the CONUS.
SC FDMA LTE Performance through High Altitude Platforms Communications HAPS Channel

It is known that high altitude platform system (HAPS) is one of the promising wireless technologies that exploit many advantages from cellular satellite system as well as from cellular terrestrial system. HAPS is envisaged to be a novel technology for communication, broadcasting, internet backbone, earth observation and surveillance, and also for navigation. One of upcoming technologies for communication is a long term term evolution (LTE) of a cellular forth generation (4G) Many techniques have been developed to make LTE come into real in the environment of cellular terrestrial. However, LTE that deployed through HAPS is a challenging due to different its geometry and channel. This paper aims at evaluating the performance of a pilot based channel estimation for uplink LTE using SC FDMA over Ricean HAPS communication channel. Pilot based channel estimation is used to estimate an uplink channel of LTE users who transmit the data to HAPS as a base transceiver station (BTS) Analysis is performed to determine the effect of user's elevation angle with respect to user position inside HAPS coverage, LTE channel bandwidth, modulation type, and the Doppler frequency shift effect. We found that user's elevation angle contribute major effect to the pilot based channel estimation of LTE SC FDMA performance. System capability to overcome fading effect that users with low elevation angle would be needed to increase the performance. In particular to keep an acceptable performance, in this paper we compensate the channel bandwidth, changing modulation type, and limit the Doppler Effect through vehicle speed limitation.
Pilot based LS channel estimation for downlink HAPS channel
Venue: 2016 International Symposium on Electronics and Smart Devices (ISESD)

In real wireless communication system nowadays, accurate channel estimations are required since the performances at the receiver affect the whole system. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of pilot based channel estimation. In this study, we use Least Square (LS) technique to evaluate the performances of downlink Long Term Evolution (LTE) deployed via High Altitude Platforms (HAPS) LTE and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna become one of important parts in high data rate wireless telecommunication lately. While HAPs is new non ground terrestrial technology that using air baloon as the platform that located in stratosphere make it an interesting technology to be investigating. By its position high above the earth's surface the link transmission need to be good and reliable. So that, in this study, Single Input Single Output (SISO) and MIMO Space Time Block Code (STBC) Alamouti is used as the MIMO antenna. As performance's indicator, BER (Bit Error Rate) to SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) is used in this simulation.
Improved LMS predictive link triggering for handover in HAPS communication system
Venue: 2016 8th International Conference on Wireless Communications Signal Processing (WCSP)

In stratosphere, the cell handover performances of high altitude platform station (HAPS) communication system was affected by the quasi stationary state of platform. The traditional handover algorithms based on the fixed thresholds usually can effectively deal with the handover issue caused by terminals' mobility. However given the platform disturbances, these algorithms show poor handover. At this point, the adaptive handover algorithm was proposed to trigger handover based on signal strength predicted by improved least mean square (LMS) Firstly the power model of quasi stationary HAPS was established. Secondly the period of handover detection can be set appropriate value according to the speed of user terminals. Then the handover triggering is determined by the relationship between predicted signal strength and confidence level. Simulation results show that compared with traditional fixed thresholds, the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the number of unnecessary handover, and keeps the ratio of radio link failure less than 1% for different speed terminals.
Supervised machine learning for the detection of troll profiles in twitter social network: application to a real case of cyberbullying
Venue: Log. J. IGPL

The use of new technologies along with the popularity of social networks has given the power of anonymity to the users. The ability to create an alter ego with no relation to the actual user, creates a situation in which no one can certify the match between a profile and a real person. This problem generates situations, repeated daily, in which users with fake accounts, or at least not related to their real identity, publish news, reviews or multimedia material trying to discredit or attack other people who may or may not be aware of the attack. These acts can have great impact on the affected victims' environment generating situations in which virtual attacks escalate into fatal consequences in real life. In this paper, we present a methodology to detect and associate fake profiles on Twitter social network which are employed for defamatory activities to a real profile within the same network by analysing the content of comments generated by both profiles. Accompanying this approach we also present a successful real life use case in which this methodology was applied to detect and stop a cyberbullying situation in a real elementary school.
ARTE PUBLICO. RETOS Y OPORTUNIDADES (II) LA CONSOLIDACION DE LOS LENGUAJES

II. This is an article on public art, city and urban governance. It is structured as historical narrative initiated in Rotterdam when the reconstruction of the city started. It is both a written and a visual narrative story. For deliveries, with a hypertext structure. I recommend reading on screen and with a good search engine to link lecura and images with the expansion of information. It is not a history, is the summary of stories. Conceptual, cognitive and personal. We jump from city to city. Most of the images who join us have been taken by the author. Public art and urban design creates a mapping and a temporality in contrast with the literature on the topic, chosen personally and with an interdisciplinary vocation. The reader can follow the text or stopping at the tables. Combine text with pictures. Using the possibilities of augmented reality. The work concludes with a case study dedicated to Josep M. Subirachs.