Search Criteria Research Articles

Effects of systemic lupus erythematosus on the brain: a systematic review of structural MRI findings and their relationships with cognitive dysfunction

BackgroundCognitive dysfunction (CD) is highly prevalent in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Neuroimaging utilising advanced MRI metrics may yield mechanistic insights. We conducted a...

Improved Physical Performance Parameters in Patients Taking Nicotinamide Mononucleotide (NMN): A Systematic Review of Randomized Control Trials.

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is essential in the proper function of many essential cellular processes in the human body.The purpose of this review is to investigate the effect of nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), a NAD+ precursor, on physical performance and evaluate the safety profile of supplementation.A systematic review search criteria following the guidelines from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was performed in four databases for randomized controlled trials on NMN supplementation. Study variables included title, author, publication date, study year, number of patients, dosage, mean age, mean follow-up time, pre- and post-intervention reported outcomes, and rates of complications. Ten studies, including 437 patients, with a mean age of 58.0years (35.1 to 81.1 years) and a mean follow-up time of 9.6 weeks (4 to 12 weeks) were included in this study. NMN dosages ranged from 150 to 1200 mg/day. Mean pre-intervention grip strength (two studies) and skeletal mass index (two studies) were 29.9 kilograms (kg) (range: 21.4-40.1 kg) and 7.4 kg/m2 (range: 6.9-7.65 kg/m2), respectively. Mean post-intervention grip strength and skeletal mass index were 30.5 kg (range: 21.7-41.9 kg) and 7.4 kg/m2 (6.8-7.64 kg/m2), respectively. There were no serious adverse effects observed. Moreover, of the reported side effects, they were determined to be independent of NMN supplementation. Therefore, patients taking NMN supplementation demonstrated non-significantly improved physical performance parameters.NMN is well tolerated with no serious adverse effects observed.

A Comparative Analysis of the Advances in Stem Cell Therapy in Plastic Surgery: A Systematic Review of Current Applications and Future Directions.

Stem cell (SC) therapy is revolutionizing the field of plastic surgery by harnessing the regenerative abilities of SCs derived from adipose tissue and bone marrow to boost tissue repair and enhance aesthetic outcomes. This groundbreaking method enhances results in procedures such as fat grafting, facial rejuvenation, and wound healing. As studies advance, SC therapy shows potential for more sophisticated uses in both reconstructive and cosmetic surgery. The objective of this review is to comprehensively examine the advances in SC therapy within the field of plastic surgery, highlighting its current applications and exploring future directions. The systematic review was conducted on SC therapy in plastic surgery adhering to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and specific search criteria. This systematic review highlights these main outcomes, and SC therapy in plastic surgery enhances tissue repair and aesthetic outcomes by utilizing mesenchymal SCs such as adipose-derived SCs (ADSCs) and bone marrow-derived SCs (BMSCs), with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) providing additional support. Techniques such as scaffolds and cellular reprogramming are employed to guide SC growth, enabling tailored tissue engineering for complex regenerative procedures. This innovative approach accelerates healing, reduces scarring in reconstructive surgeries, improves skin texture, and ensures the natural integration of treated areas, ultimately yielding enhanced aesthetic results and transforming facial rejuvenation processes. SC therapy in plastic surgery holds great promise, but challenges such as protocol standardization, cost, and regulations still need to be addressed. SC therapy is leading innovative advancements in plastic surgery, offering superior outcomes and improved quality of life for patients. Interestingly, the future of plastic surgery is focused on integrating SC therapy for personalized and transformative treatments. Furthermore, interdisciplinary collaboration among bioengineers, clinicians, and regulatory bodies is essential for overcoming challenges and advancing SC research into clinical practice.

Performance enhancement of classifiers through Bio inspired feature selection methods for early detection of lung cancer from microarray genes

Gene expression in the microarray is assimilated with redundant and high-dimensional information. Moreover, the information in the microarray genes mostly correlates with background noise. This paper uses dimensionality reduction and feature selection methods to employ a classification methodology for high-dimensional lung cancer microarray data. The approach is enforced in two phases; initially, the genes are dimensionally reduced through Hilbert Transform, Detrend Fluctuation Analysis and Least Square Linear Regression methods. The dimensionally reduced data is further optimized in the next phase using Elephant Herd optimization (EHO) and Cuckoo Search Feature selection methods. The classifiers used here are Bayesian Linear Discriminant, Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Decision Tree, SVM (Linear), SVM (Polynomial), and SVM (RBF). The classifier's performances are analysed with and without feature selection methods. The SVM (Linear) classifier with the DFA Dimensionality Reduction method and EHO feature selection achieved the highest accuracy of 92.26 % compared to other classifiers.

Optimizing avian translocation success: A systematic review of the effect of release age on survival, dispersal, and productivity

AbstractThe success of avian translocations depends on many factors. Release age is often cited as an influential factor that warrants further study, yet no general guidelines exist to improve the outcome of translocations. We conducted a systematic review of literature on captive‐reared or wild‐caught birds that incorporated >1 age class in their analyses of post‐release survival, dispersal, or reproduction. Fifty‐two studies met our search criteria, and 39 were retained for an evaluation of post‐release survival. For studies reporting at least one trend, more reported higher post‐release survival when birds were translocated at younger ages (68%) than at older ages (32%). This pattern was most pronounced for wild‐caught birds and for captive‐reared birds released within their first year of life. Captive‐reared birds of prey were an exception, with birds released at older ages often having higher survival than birds released at younger ages. We review the authors' hypotheses for why birds released at younger ages are more likely to settle, survive, and breed. More research is needed on the potential effects of release age on dispersal and reproduction. We recommend that future studies incorporate age of release as a covariate and control for the effect of season of release in experiments.

The color-flavor incongruency effect elicited by flavor stimuli and words

Previous research has shown that consumers associate specific packaging colors with flavors to generate the color-flavor associations for packaging. Previous studies have also demonstrated that people search more slowly for a product when its color is incongruent with its flavor label than when it is congruent with this flavor, indicative of a packaging color-flavor incongruency effect. Here we report a behavioral study designed to investigate whether actual flavor stimuli can also elicit this effect, and if so, how the effect differs when flavor cues are presented as flavor words versus flavor stimuli. Participants were asked to search for a beverage product labeled with a specific flavor after either tasting flavor stimuli or viewing a flavor word. The results showed that the participants responded faster and more accurately when they were cued by flavor words than flavor stimuli. Moreover, we also found that both flavor stimuli and flavor words could elicit the packaging color-flavor incongruency effect, and the effect elicited by flavor stimuli was greater than that elicited by flavor words. The findings of the present study provide empirical evidence of the crossmodal influence of flavor information on visual search, and also have direct implications for using sensory marketing strategies to enhance consumers’ product search efficiency.

Understanding bank lending and its relationship with profitability and non-performing loans: a meta-analysis

PurposeThis study is a meta-analysis of the relationship between bank lending, profitability and non-performing loans (NPLs), and the purpose is to identify a research gap in studying this very crucial triad.Design/methodology/approachFirstly, relevant keywords are used to pull the studies from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The initial result is then narrowed down using relevant search criteria by manually filtering the studies based on the title and abstracts, out of which meta-analysis has been done of the findings of the top 200 papers (citation-based).FindingsThe literature in this field of study indicates heterogeneous results for relationships between bank lending and NPLs, bank lending and profitability and also NPLs and profitability. The meta-analysis of the results also reveals that the behaviour of these variables shows heterogeneity, which, based on the literature review, can be attributed to the different economic conditions during the study period and thus indicates nonlinearity in the behaviour of these variables.Originality/valueThis review explores the interrelationship of three variables, as they are very important to strike a proper balance between growth and safety in the banking industry, but the same has been inadequately researched in past studies.

Spiral-refraction mutation prairie dog algorithm: Optimization framework for engineering design of interconnected multimachine power system

Many real-world engineering problems, characterized by high-dimensionality, nonlinearity, nonconvexity, and multi-modality, demand advanced optimization methods. Traditional algorithms may struggle with these challenges. Prairie dog optimization (PDO) was proposed for function optimization but faces limitations in balancing exploration and exploitation due to two reasons. The first one is related to diversity features which may not be efficient, and the second one is related to having no leading mechanism for direct search feature towards the promising regions. With that in mind, this study introduces an enhanced PDO variant, improved PDO (IPDO), addressing PDO's drawbacks through two key strategies: refraction-based learning (RBL) and spiral search learning (SSL). RBL enhances exploration by generating refraction solutions, while SSL conducts deep local searches around the best solution, strengthening exploitation. IPDO's performance is evaluated on benchmarks, IEEE CEC2017/CEC2020 test suites, and real-world constraint engineering optimization problems. Comparative analyses, including statistical measures, convergence analysis, and boxplot analysis, demonstrate IPDO's superiority. Besides, the IPDO is applied to estimate more promising parameters of power system stabilizer utilized in an interconnected multimachine power system using Western System Coordinating Council three-machine, nine-bus power system. Results illustrate that the IPDO harvests the better estimation among the other methods, making it to be an efficient and powerful tool for dealing with the efficient operation of an interconnected multimachine power system which is a challenging real-world engineering problem.

Bibliographic coupling of documents: An analysis of articles published in the derivative market

This article gives a bibliographic analysis of relevant publications in the area of the derivative market. The goal of this study is to scientifically assess research trends in the area of the derivative market using bibliometric analysis. Using the themes generated here, the direction for the future scope of research work has also been discussed. The data were collected from the Scopus database using specified search criteria. In this study, VOS Viewer and Microsoft Excel were used to assess co-authorship and citation patterns. To give an in-depth comprehension of the bibliographic pattern of literature in the derivative market, bibliometric coupling of documents, journals, and countries was also incorporated in this study. This is the first research to investigate the bibliometric relationships between pieces of literature in the derivative market.

Exploring Salivary Biomarkers for Tumor Diagnosis: A Narrative Review.

A promising method for non-invasive cancer diagnosis and prognosis is through salivary biomarkers. By utilizing the distinct characteristics of saliva and the progress made in biomarker studies, these markers provide more accurate diagnoses for a wider range of malignancies. An attempt was made to thoroughly investigate the field of salivary biomarkers for tumor prognosis and diagnosis, with an emphasis on their use in various cancer forms. Predetermined search criteria were utilized for a systematic search across numerous databases for peer-reviewed papers from 2009 to 2021. Studies concentrating on the detection, validation, and clinical use of salivary biomarkers for different types of cancers were included in the inclusion criteria. Initially, 238 articles were found, of which 15 relevant articles satisfied the inclusion requirements. Information on study aims, methodology, findings, and conclusions were gathered for data extraction. We identified recurrent themes, patterns, and contradictions by a thematic analysis. We also assessedstate-of-the-art salivary biomarkers for tumor diagnosis and prognosis. One major finding is the identification of biomolecules in saliva linked to several cancer forms, including pancreatic, oral, breast, lung, and stomach cancers. There is an increasing amount of evidence demonstrating the value of saliva-based diagnostics in oncology. This is due to new detection methodsand developments in salivary proteomics and genomics. Identification of exosomes and microvesicles as salivary biomarker profiles offered molecular understandings of the etiology and evolution of cancer, thereby opening new avenues for diagnosis and treatment. Salivary biomarkers are a non-invasive approach for the early detection and prediction of cancer, thanks to the unique properties of saliva and advancements in biomarker research. This potential revolution could enhance patient outcomes and reduce cancer-related deaths.

Hierarchical multi-task deep learning-assisted construction of human gut microbiota reactive oxygen species-scavenging enzymes database.

In the process of oxygen reduction, reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated as intermediates, including superoxide anion (O2-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and hydroxyl radicals (OH-). ROS can be destructive, and an imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants in the body can lead to pathological inflammation. Inappropriate ROS production can cause oxidative damage, disrupting the balance in the body and potentially leading to DNA damage in intestinal epithelial cells and beneficial bacteria. Microorganisms have evolved various enzymes to mitigate the harmful effects of ROS. Accurately predicting the types of ROS-scavenging enzymes (ROSes) is crucial for understanding the oxidative stress mechanisms and formulating strategies to combat diseases related to the "gut-organ axis." Currently, there are no available ROSes databases (DBs). In this study, we propose a systematic workflow comprising three modules and employ a hierarchical multi-task deep learning approach to collect, expand, and explore ROSes-related entries. Based on this, we have developed the human gut microbiota ROSes DB (http://39.101.72.186/), which includes 7,689 entries. This DB provides user-friendly browsing and search features to support various applications. With the assistance of ROSes DB, various communication-based microbial interactions can be explored, further enabling the construction and analysis of the evolutionary and complex networks of ROSes DB in human gut microbiota species.IMPORTANCEReactive oxygen species (ROS) is generated during the process of oxygen reduction, including superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radicals. ROS can potentially cause damage to cells and DNA, leading to pathological inflammation within the body. Microorganisms have evolved various enzymes to mitigate the harmful effects of ROS, thereby maintaining a balance of microorganisms within the host. The study highlights the current absence of a ROSes DB, emphasizing the crucial importance of accurately predicting the types of ROSes for understanding oxidative stress mechanisms and developing strategies for diseases related to the "gut-organ axis." This research proposes a systematic workflow and employs a multi-task deep learning approach to establish the human gut microbiota ROSes DB. This DB comprises 7,689 entries and serves as a valuable tool for researchers to delve into the role of ROSes in the human gut microbiota.

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Developing Android Based Ambulance Emergency Application in Sleman Region

The population of Sleman Regency is 1,318,086 and the death rate is very high. This study searches for people who have difficulty finding ambulance assistance. That’s why an application was created to help sick people arrive on the scene. This app is equipped with LBS (Location-Based Services). This app also uses Firebase as data, a form of Google providing various data services to develop mobile apps like this one in real-time. This app is created in the Java programming language running in Android Studio. Furthermore, this application connects journalists and medical staff directly without the need for intermediaries or other people. In addition to knowing where the ambulance is when it arrives, the app is designed to overcome the problem of doctors determining routes and searching for hard-to-reach victims in an emergency provided with a mobile phone. This application was created to get an ambulance more comfortably and efficiently. The driver will know the exact location of the incident without having to search the incident. He will also get a lot of information. In addition, this application further accelerates quick evacuation of the injured or sick for quick medical assistance. So, this application is practical to use in critical situations. Current technological developments also include many innovations, so this research aims to help people use today’s developing technology more efficiently.

STRATEGI OPTIMALISASI LAYANAN DIFABEL PADA DINAS PERPUSTAKAAN DAN KEARSIPAN KOTA YOGYAKARTA

Disability services are an obligation mandated by Indonesian Constitution to ensure equal access to public services for all citizens without exception, including for citizens who have physical, mental, intellectual and sensory limitations (disabled). However, in practice, the provision of disability-friendly public services is still not optimal, in terms of utilization and provision of existing facilities. It is this urgency that directs research towards the aim of knowing the factors that cause less optimal services for people with disabilities to formulate effective strategies in order to optimize services. This research belongs to the type of qualitative research with descriptive analysis. The analytical tool used to formulate effective strategies is SOAR analysis. SOAR Analysis is a development of SWOT Analysis which focuses on leveraging organizational strengths and opportunities to realize aspirations and results that are explored together to present more optimistic strategies, rather than focusing on weaknesses and threats. It is very much suitable for the organizational form of government agencies; those prioritize public trust. The results of the study show that factors causing the non-optimal disability services in Office of Yogyakarta City Library and Archives are facilities and infrastructures, human resources (HR), and policies. The strategy for optimizing DPK Yogyakarta City disability services consists SA Strategy (operating disabled service attendants), SR Strategy (development of voice book search feature and voice archive search feature), OA Strategy (installation of induction loop system in service areas, providing wheelchairs, educational film collections with sign language, adding PCs, media transfer tools, talking books, and also replacing damaged mobile fleets to re-function mobile library for Special Needs Schools), and OR Strategy (organizing Applied Literacy activities involving disabled and launching archival search services and special archive restoration services for disabled in near future).

Target switch costs in visual search arise during the preparatory activation of target templates.

Prior research on task switching has shown that the reconfiguration of stimulus-response mappings across trials is associated with behavioral switch costs. Here, we investigated the effects of switching representations of target-defining features in visual search (attentional templates). Participants searched for one of two color-defined target objects that changed predictably every two trials (Experiment 1) or every four trials (Experiment 2). Substantial costs were observed for search performance on target switch relative to target repeat trials. Preparatory target template activation processes were tracked by measuring N2pc components (indicative of attentional capture) to a rapid series of task-irrelevant color singleton probes that appeared during the interval between search displays, and either matched the currently relevant or the other target color. N2pcs to relevant target color probes emerged from 800 ms before search display onset on target repetition trials, reflecting the activation of a corresponding color template. Crucially, probe N2pcs only emerged immediately before target onset on target switch trials, indicating that preparatory template activation was strongly delayed. In contrast, irrelevant color singleton probes did not trigger N2pcs on either repeat or switch trials, suggesting the absence of any target template inertia across trials. These results show that switching the identity of search targets delays preparatory target template activation and impairs subsequent attentional guidance processes. They suggest that performance costs on switch versus repeat trials are associated with differences in the time course of task preparation.

The Effectiveness Of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) In Marketing: A Meta-Anlysis Study

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of the use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in digital marketing strategies through a comprehensive meta-analysis study. By collecting and analyzing data from previous studies involving SEO as a marketing tool, this study evaluated the extent to which SEO can improve online visibility, website traffic, and ultimately sales conversions. The results of a meta-analysis of 10 studies conducted between 2022 and 2024 show that the implementation of SEO is consistently associated with a significant increase in organic search rankings and website traffic with an effect size (d) value of 1.049 in the high effect size category. Further analysis revealed that variables such as content quality, keyword optimization, and backlinks have a significant influence on SEO effectiveness. This research provides empirical evidence that supports the implementation of SEO as a crucial component of digital marketing strategies, while also offering insights into best practices and factors that influence SEO success. With these results, practitioners and academics can better understand how SEO strategies can be optimized to achieve maximum results in an increasingly competitive digital environment.

Query-Based Object Visual Tracking with Parallel Sequence Generation.

Query decoders have been shown to achieve good performance in object detection. However, they suffer from insufficient object tracking performance. Sequence-to-sequence learning in this context has recently been explored, with the idea of describing a target as a sequence of discrete tokens. In this study, we experimentally determine that, with appropriate representation, a parallel approach for predicting a target coordinate sequence with a query decoder can achieve good performance and speed. We propose a concise query-based tracking framework for predicting a target coordinate sequence in a parallel manner, named QPSTrack. A set of queries are designed to be responsible for different coordinates of the tracked target. All the queries jointly represent a target rather than a traditional one-to-one matching pattern between the query and target. Moreover, we adopt an adaptive decoding scheme including a one-layer adaptive decoder and learnable adaptive inputs for the decoder. This decoding scheme assists the queries in decoding the template-guided search features better. Furthermore, we explore the use of the plain ViT-Base, ViT-Large, and lightweight hierarchical LeViT architectures as the encoder backbone, providing a family of three variants in total. All the trackers are found to obtain a good trade-off between speed and performance; for instance, our tracker QPSTrack-B256 with the ViT-Base encoder achieves a 69.1% AUC on the LaSOT benchmark at 104.8 FPS.

Analysis of Impact and Sustainability in Chronic Diseases Prevention Program in XXX Highschool Balikpapan (Systematic Review)

A healthy lifestyle requires discipline. It's not easy, particularly adolescent who feel free and are looking for their existence. Its implementaiton needs to be applied to adolescent due to many cases of chronic diseases developing among them, following their lifestyle. Sedentary/lazy to move, smoking, alcohol, lack of rest and not being able to manage mental health. Generally, adolesecent at the educational level of Junior and Senior High School. The objective of this study is to analyze aspects of the impact and sustainability of chronic disease prevention programs for adolescents. This study is a systematic review using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews & Meta Analyses) method combined with open-source search engine. The database used for searching data and information is PubMed. The keywords used during the search process are "Prevention of Chronic Disease" AND "Chronic Disease" OR "Non-communicable Disease" OR "Infectious Disease" AND “Impact of Chronic Diseases” AND “Teenagers” OR “Adolescents” AND “School”. The most variable aspects of disease prevention are more information related to chronic diseases, knowledge, attitudes and stakeholder support. The CERDIK program provides knowledge, education and information among adolescents. These factors must be taken into consideration to improve lifestyle, maintain health so that you are not vulnerable to health problems during the teenage period

Finding Missing Calcifications.

Mammographic identification of microcalcifications may result in biopsy because many calcifications serve as markers for breast pathology. Absence of these calcifications in histologic sections may indicate that an area of concern has not been adequately sampled. To determine the optimal cutting protocols to identify mammary calcifications. Our standard protocol for breast biopsies with suspected mircocalcifications is to cut 2 levels separated by 30 µm and if no microcalcifications are detected, an additional 10 levels are obtained. An electronic search of surgical pathology records was performed for cases with microcalcifications identified between January 1, 2022, and March 30, 2023. For each case, slides designated by the radiologist as containing microcalcifications were retrieved. The level at which microcalcifications were first detected was recorded. The search revealed 431 specimens meeting the search criteria, of which 415 contained microcalcifications. Probability of finding microcalcifications in the initial level was 0.629 and the probability of detecting microcalcifications in the first 4 levels was 0.905. Four hundred three of 415 microcalcifications documented by mammographic imaging (97%) were detected histologically in the first 6 levels. A 6-level approach appears optimal for the detection of microcalcifications. This study may have implications for other specimen types where a strong suspicion exists for a pathologic lesion, but examination reveals no lesions in the initial sections. Protocols using 6-level-deep cuts may represent optimal sampling.

Foraging Educators as Vectors of Environmental Knowledge in Europe

Widely accessible education on edible wild plants is increasingly in demand as more people search for ways to explore wild culinary uses. Despite this growing trend of nature exploration, few scholars have investigated the contribution of this new mode of engagement to human–nature connection and pro-environmental attitudes. Therefore, this research aims to explore the societal role of such foraging educators. Through convenience and snowball sampling, we recruited 31 foraging educators across Europe. Through semi-structured interviews, we inquired about their sources of knowledge, modalities of transmission and their roles as educators. The interviews revealed individuals who convey ethnobotanical knowledge to improve human–nature connection through experiences within nature. The educators gained their knowledge through written sources, vertical and horizontal sharing. Finally, foraging educators consider themselves social bridges of ecological knowledge, bringing scientific ethnobotanical information to a varied audience in an experiential way. Foraging stimulates the sharing of ecological knowledge, and it could be seen as a broader agroecological practice, enhancing the benefits of nature's contribution to people. There is great potential for emerging environmental education platforms and, correspondingly, for rethinking the food system.