11,470 research outputs found
APOL1 CKD Risk Alleles in New Mexico African American and American Indian Populations: Racial Disparity
Purpose/Background: Two haplotypes of human apolipoprotein L1 gene (gene: APOL1; protein: ApoL1) harboring three coding sequence mutations have been demonstrated as risk variants associated with non-diabetic chronic kidney diseases (CKD) in African Americans. The first one, termed G1, is a two non-synonymous SNP haplotype (rs73885319 (A\u3eG; p.S342G) and rs60910145 (G\u3eT; p.I384M). The second one, termed G2, is a two codon deletion haplotype rs71785313 (6-bp in frame deletion) These two coding-sequence variants have been discovered in CKD patients of African ancestry and linked to the pathogenesis of primary focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), hypertension-attributed kidney disease, and HIV-associated nephropathy (HIVAN), under a recessive inheritance pattern. Marked disparities exist in races, rates, and etiological classifications of CDK between African Americans (AAs) and European Americans. Sequencing and genotyping analysis of known APOL1 SNPs showed that only APOL1 G1 and G2 confer kidney risk, and other common and rare APOL1 missense variants, including the G3 haplotype, do not contribute to FSGS and HIVAN in the US population.
According to the report of US census bureau, African American and American Indian (AI) citizens in New Mexico make up nearly 2.5% and 10.9% of the state\u27s entire population in 2018 (2). However, whether APOL1 G1 and G2 kidney-risk alleles are linked with hypertension-attributed CKD in AAs and AIs in New Mexico has not been investigated.
Materials & Methods: We analyzed the published results of a retrospective analysis of inpatient and discharge data from hospitals across the state of New Mexico, known as Hospital Inpatient and Discharge Dataset (HIDD; 3).
Results: A pattern persisted for all three years (2012-2014) that AAs had the highest rate of CKD followed by AIs per 10,000 population in New Mexico. AAs had the highest age adjusted rate of CKD with hypertension at 102.6 per 10,000 population (29.7% (102.6/345.7) of all CKD with hypertension patients) followed by American Indians at 91.9 (26.6% (91.9/345.7) of all CKD with hypertension patients). Interestingly, in terms of CKD with diabetes, AIs had the highest age adjusted rate at 79.9 per 10,000 followed by AAs at 66.5.
Discussion/Conclusion: The prevalence of CKD with hypertension in AA and AI populations is significantly high in New Mexico, To understand the etiology of CKD in AAs and AIs in New Mexico, genotyping the APOL1 G1 and G2 risk alleles in these two populations is warranted. Detection of APOL1 associations with CKD and delineation of injury pathways (autophagy, necroptosis and ferroptosis) would bring hope for effective treatment for these kidney diseases. In addition, modifier loci can influence APOL1 risk for the development of CKD. âSecond hitsâ, for example viral and environmental, may alter the outcome of APOL1 risk variants
Role of Expiration Dates in Grocery Shopping Behavior: An Eye Tracking Perspective
When consumers search for and check expiration dates, the risk of purchasing a stale and diminishing quality product reduces. The authors use a simulated eye tracking enabled IT mediated environment to understand the underlying motivation of consumers for checking expiration dates while purchasing groceries. Preliminary findings suggest that expiration date plays an important role in consumers\u27 grocery shopping decision making. This research provides evidence that IT mediated test environments enabled with eye tracking can provide a powerful tool for studying consumer behavior and decision making in regard to expiration dates. The findings from this research have the potential to provide several implications to theory and practice
Global Adversarial Attacks for Assessing Deep Learning Robustness
It has been shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) may be vulnerable to
adversarial attacks, raising the concern on their robustness particularly for
safety-critical applications. Recognizing the local nature and limitations of
existing adversarial attacks, we present a new type of global adversarial
attacks for assessing global DNN robustness. More specifically, we propose a
novel concept of global adversarial example pairs in which each pair of two
examples are close to each other but have different class labels predicted by
the DNN. We further propose two families of global attack methods and show that
our methods are able to generate diverse and intriguing adversarial example
pairs at locations far from the training or testing data. Moreover, we
demonstrate that DNNs hardened using the strong projected gradient descent
(PGD) based (local) adversarial training are vulnerable to the proposed global
adversarial example pairs, suggesting that global robustness must be considered
while training robust deep learning networks.Comment: Submitted to NeurIPS 201
Energy relaxation of an excited electron gas in quantum wires: many-body electron LO-phonon coupling
We theoretically study energy relaxation via LO-phonon emission in an excited
one-dimensional electron gas confined in a GaAs quantum wire structure. We find
that the inclusion of phonon renormalization effects in the theory extends the
LO-phonon dominated loss regime down to substantially lower temperatures. We
show that a simple plasmon-pole approximation works well for this problem, and
discuss implications of our results for low temperature electron heating
experiments in quantum wires.Comment: 10 pages, RevTex, 4 figures included. Also available at
http://www-cmg.physics.umd.edu/~lzheng
Monitoring of atopic dermatitis using leaky coaxial cable
In our daily life, inadvertent scratching may increase the severity of skin diseases (such as atopic dermatitis, etc.). However, people
rarely pay attention to this matter, so the known measurement behavior of the movement is also very little. Nevertheless, the behavior and
frequency of scratching represent the degree of itching, and the analysis of scratching frequency is helpful to the doctor's clinical dosage. In this
paper, a novel system is proposed to monitor the scratching motion of a sleeping human body at night. The core device of the system are just a
Leaky coaxial cable (LCX) and a router. Commonly, LCX is used in the blind field or semi blind field in wireless communication. The new idea is
that the leaky cable is placed on the bed, then the state information of physical layer of wireless communication channels is acquired to identify the
scratching motion and other small body movements in the human sleep process. The results show that it can be used to detect the movement and its
duration. Channel state information (CSI) packet is collected by card installed in the computer based on the 802.11n protocol. The characterization
of the scratch motion in the collected channel state information is unique, so it can be distinguished from the wireless channel amplitude variation
trend
MLPInit: Embarrassingly Simple GNN Training Acceleration with MLP Initialization
Training graph neural networks (GNNs) on large graphs is complex and
extremely time consuming. This is attributed to overheads caused by sparse
matrix multiplication, which are sidestepped when training multi-layer
perceptrons (MLPs) with only node features. MLPs, by ignoring graph context,
are simple and faster for graph data, however they usually sacrifice prediction
accuracy, limiting their applications for graph data. We observe that for most
message passing-based GNNs, we can trivially derive an analog MLP (we call this
a PeerMLP) with an equivalent weight space, by setting the trainable parameters
with the same shapes, making us curious about \textbf{\emph{how do GNNs using
weights from a fully trained PeerMLP perform?}} Surprisingly, we find that GNNs
initialized with such weights significantly outperform their PeerMLPs,
motivating us to use PeerMLP training as a precursor, initialization step to
GNN training. To this end, we propose an embarrassingly simple, yet hugely
effective initialization method for GNN training acceleration, called MLPInit.
Our extensive experiments on multiple large-scale graph datasets with diverse
GNN architectures validate that MLPInit can accelerate the training of GNNs (up
to 33X speedup on OGB-Products) and often improve prediction performance (e.g.,
up to improvement for GraphSAGE across datasets for node
classification, and up to improvement across datasets for link
prediction on metric Hits@10). The code is available at
\href{https://github.com/snap-research/MLPInit-for-GNNs}.Comment: Accepted by ICLR202
Cluster consistency: Simple yet effect robust learning algorithm on large-scale photoplethysmography for atrial fibrillation detection in the presence of real-world label noise
Obtaining large-scale well-annotated is always a daunting challenge,
especially in the medical research domain because of the shortage of domain
expert. Instead of human annotation, in this work, we use the alarm information
generated from bed-side monitor to get the pseudo label for the co-current
photoplethysmography (PPG) signal. Based on this strategy, we end up with over
8 million 30-second PPG segment. To solve the label noise caused by false
alarms, we propose the cluster consistency, which use an unsupervised
auto-encoder (hence not subject to label noise) approach to cluster training
samples into a finite number of clusters. Then the learned cluster membership
is used in the subsequent supervised learning phase to force the distance in
the latent space of samples in the same cluster to be small while that of
samples in different clusters to be big. In the experiment, we compare with the
state-of-the-art algorithms and test on external datasets. The results show the
superiority of our method in both classification performance and efficiency
Ab interno trabecular bypass surgery with Schlemm´s canal microstent (Hydrus) for open angle glaucoma
Background:
Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness. A number of minimallyâinvasive surgical techniques have been introduced as a treatment to prevent glaucoma from progressing; ab interno trabecular bypass surgery with the Schlemm's canal Hydrus microstent is one of them.
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Objectives:
To evaluate the efficacy and safety of ab interno trabecular bypass surgery with the Hydrus microstent in treating people with open angle glaucoma (OAG).
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Search methods:
On 7 May 2019, we searched CENTRAL (2019, Issue 5), which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Trials Register; Ovid MEDLINE; Ovid Embase; the ISRCTN registry; ClinicalTrials.gov; and the WHO ICTRP.
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Selection criteria:
We searched for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of the Hydrus microstent, alone or with cataract surgery, compared to other surgical treatments (cataract surgery alone, other minimallyâinvasive glaucoma device techniques, trabeculectomy), laser treatment, or medical treatment.
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Data collection and analysis:
A minimum of three authors independently extracted data from reports of included studies, using a data collection form and analysed data, based on standard Cochrane methods.
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Main results:
We included three published studies, with 808 people randomised. Two studies had multiple international recruitment centres in the USA and other countries. The third study had several sites based in Europe. All three studies were sponsored by the Hydrus manufacturer Ivantis Inc. All studies included participants with mainly mild or moderate OAG (mean deviation between â3.6 dB (decibel) and â8.4 dB in all study arms), which was controlled with medication in many participants (mean medicated intraocular pressure (IOP) 17.9 mmHg to 19.1 mmHg). There were no concerns regarding allocation concealment bias, but masking of outcome assessors was high or unclear risk in all studies; masking of participants was achieved, and losses to followâup were not a concern.
Two studies compared the Hydrus microstent combined with cataract surgery to cataract surgery alone, in participants with visually significant cataracts and OAG.
We found moderateâcertainty evidence that adding the Hydrus microstent to cataract surgery increased the proportion of participants who were medicationâfree from about half to more than three quarters at 12âmonth, shortâterm followâup (risk ratio (RR) 1.59, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.39 to 1.83; 2 studies, 639 participants; I² = 0%; and 24âmonth, mediumâterm followâup (RR 1.63, 95% CI 1.40 to 1.88; 2 studies, 619 participants; I² = 0%).
The Hydrus microstent combined with cataract surgery reduced the mediumâterm mean change in unmedicated IOP (after washout) by 2 mmHg more compared to cataract surgery alone (mean difference (MD) â2.00, 95% CI â2.69 to â1.31; 2 studies, 619 participants; I² = 0%; moderateâcertainty evidence), and the mean change in IOPâlowering drops (MD â0.41, 95% CI â0.56 to â0.27; 2 studies, 619 participants; I² = 0%; lowâcertainty evidence). We also found lowâcertainty evidence that adding a Hydrus microstent to cataract surgery reduced the need for secondary glaucoma surgery from about 2.5% to less than 1% (RR 0.17, 95% CI 0.03 to 0.86; 2 studies, 653 participants; I² = 27%; lowâcertainty evidence).
Intraocular bleeding, loss of 2 or more visual acuity (VA) lines, and IOP spikes of 10 mmHg or more were rare in both groups; estimates were imprecise, and included both beneficial and harmful effects. There were no cases of endophthalmitis in either group.
No data were available on the proportion of participants achieving IOP less than 21 mmHg, 17 mmHg, or 14 mmHg; healthârelated quality of life (HRQOL), or visual field progression.
One study provided shortâterm data for the Hydrus microstent compared with the iStent trabecular microâbypass stent (iStent: implantation of two devices in a single procedure) in 152 participants with OAG (148 in analyses). Use of the Hydrus increased the proportion of medicationâfree participants from about a quarter to about half compared to those who received iStent, but this estimate was imprecise (RR 1.94, 95% CI 1.21 to 3.11; lowâcertainty evidence). Use of the Hydrus microstent reduced unmedicated IOP (after washout) by about 3 mmHg more than the iStent (MD â3.10, 95% CI â4.17 to â2.03; moderateâcertainty evidence), and the use of IOPâlowering medication (MD â0.60, 95% CI â0.99 to â0.21; lowâcertainty evidence). Both devices achieved a final IOP < 21 mmHg in most participants (Hydrus microstent: 91.8%; iStent: 84%; RR 1.09, 95% CI 0.97 to 1.23; lowâcertainty evidence).
None of the participants who received the Hydrus microstent (N = 74) required additional glaucoma surgery; two participants who received the iStent (N = 76) did.
Few adverse events were found in either group.
No data were available on the proportion of participants achieving IOP less than 17 mmHg or 14 mmHg, or on HRQOL.
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Authors' conclusions:
In people with cataracts and generally mild to moderate OAG, there is moderateâcertainty evidence that the Hydrus microstent with cataract surgery compared to cataract surgery alone, likely increases the proportion of participants who do not require IOP lowering medication, and may further reduce IOP at shortâ and mediumâterm followâup.
There is moderateâcertainty evidence that the Hydrus microstent is probably more effective than the iStent in lowering IOP of people with OAG in the shortâterm.
Few studies were available on the effects of the Hydrus microstent, therefore the results of this review may not be applicable to all people with OAG, particularly in selected people with medically uncontrolled glaucoma, since IOP was controlled with medication in many participants in the included studies. Complications may be rare using the Hydrus microstent, as well as the comparator iStent, but larger studies are needed to investigate its safety
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