The effects of owning a pet on self-esteem and self-efficacy of Malaysian per owners

In this research, 200 pet owners and non-pet owners were studied to ascertain the effects of owning a pet on the self-esteem and self-efficacy of the pet owners. All the respondents completed self-reported questionnaires. While the results showed no significant differences, it was noted that there was a tendency for people with pets to generally have slightly higher self-esteem and self-efficacy as compared to people without pets. The study also showed that higher self-esteem contributed towards predicting higher self-efficacy

Transcriptomic analyses of regenerating adult feathers in chicken

Transcriptome Expression Data. Table of mapped reads to Galgal4 transcripts for all 15 data sets. FPKM (Fragments per kilobase of exon per million fragments mapped): normalized transcript abundance values for each gene in the indicated tissues. (CSV 1314 kb

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Impact of primary kidney disease on the effects of empagliflozin in patients with chronic kidney disease: secondary analyses of the EMPA-KIDNEY trial

Background: The EMPA KIDNEY trial showed that empagliflozin reduced the risk of the primary composite outcome of kidney disease progression or cardiovascular death in patients with chronic kidney disease mainly through slowing progression. We aimed to assess how effects of empagliflozin might differ by primary kidney disease across its broad population. Methods: EMPA-KIDNEY, a randomised, controlled, phase 3 trial, was conducted at 241 centres in eight countries (Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the UK, and the USA). Patients were eligible if their estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was 20 to less than 45 mL/min per 1·73 m2, or 45 to less than 90 mL/min per 1·73 m2 with a urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (uACR) of 200 mg/g or higher at screening. They were randomly assigned (1:1) to 10 mg oral empagliflozin once daily or matching placebo. Effects on kidney disease progression (defined as a sustained ≥40% eGFR decline from randomisation, end-stage kidney disease, a sustained eGFR below 10 mL/min per 1·73 m2, or death from kidney failure) were assessed using prespecified Cox models, and eGFR slope analyses used shared parameter models. Subgroup comparisons were performed by including relevant interaction terms in models. EMPA-KIDNEY is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03594110. Findings: Between May 15, 2019, and April 16, 2021, 6609 participants were randomly assigned and followed up for a median of 2·0 years (IQR 1·5–2·4). Prespecified subgroupings by primary kidney disease included 2057 (31·1%) participants with diabetic kidney disease, 1669 (25·3%) with glomerular disease, 1445 (21·9%) with hypertensive or renovascular disease, and 1438 (21·8%) with other or unknown causes. Kidney disease progression occurred in 384 (11·6%) of 3304 patients in the empagliflozin group and 504 (15·2%) of 3305 patients in the placebo group (hazard ratio 0·71 [95% CI 0·62–0·81]), with no evidence that the relative effect size varied significantly by primary kidney disease (pheterogeneity=0·62). The between-group difference in chronic eGFR slopes (ie, from 2 months to final follow-up) was 1·37 mL/min per 1·73 m2 per year (95% CI 1·16–1·59), representing a 50% (42–58) reduction in the rate of chronic eGFR decline. This relative effect of empagliflozin on chronic eGFR slope was similar in analyses by different primary kidney diseases, including in explorations by type of glomerular disease and diabetes (p values for heterogeneity all >0·1). Interpretation: In a broad range of patients with chronic kidney disease at risk of progression, including a wide range of non-diabetic causes of chronic kidney disease, empagliflozin reduced risk of kidney disease progression. Relative effect sizes were broadly similar irrespective of the cause of primary kidney disease, suggesting that SGLT2 inhibitors should be part of a standard of care to minimise risk of kidney failure in chronic kidney disease. Funding: Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, and UK Medical Research Council

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Statistical process control charts for monitoring next- generation sequencing and bioinformatics turnaround in precision medicine initiatives

Frontiers in Oncolog

Pic2PolyArt: Transforming a photograph into polygon-based geometric art

Geometric art, an artwork that is structured by geometric shapes, was first made popular by the introduction of Cubism paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early-20th-century. With the recent advancement in digital imaging technology coupled with the rising popularity of social media such as Instagram, automatic geometric abstraction that can automatically transform a photograph into a piece of geometric art starts to gain research attention. Several state-of-the-art works have been proposed. Notably, despite the fact that Cubism artworks by renown artists illustrate the importance of the main subject in a painting to be recognizable and should be given more detailed representation, most of the state-of-the-art abstraction algorithms are not subject-focused. In this paper, we present Pic2PolyArt, a unified subject-focused geometric abstraction framework that can support both triangle-based and polygon-based abstraction. Given an input photograph, our proposed algorithm first identifies the main subject and important features of an image with a combination of saliency, edge, and face detection techniques. It then generates a set of seed points that are used by Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellation to generate triangle-based and polygon-based geometric abstraction respectively. Results from qualitative evaluation on benchmark dataset and empirical user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed abstraction framework in generating pleasant geometric abstraction from photographs and provide insightful knowledge on users preference with regards to the type of polygons and the level of abstraction used to represent the resulting geometric art

DECOVID-CT: Lightweight 3D CNN for COVID-19 Infection Prediction

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a critical threat to global health and the economy since its first outbreak in 2019. The standard diagnosis for COVID-19, Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is time consuming, and has lower sensitivity compared to CT-scans. Therefore, CT-scans can be used as a complementary method, alongside RT-PCR tests for COVID-19 infection prediction. However, manually reviewing CT scans is time consuming. In this paper, we propose DECOVID-CT, a deep learning model based on 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for the detection of COVID-19 infection with CT images. The model is trained and tested on the RICORD dataset, a multinational dataset, for higher robustness. Our model achieved an accuracy of 100%, for predicting COVID-19 positive images