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Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant popularity in recent years for specialized tasks using prompts due to their low computational cost. Standard methods like prefix tuning utilize special, modifiable tokens that lack semantic meaning and require extensive training for best performance, often falling short. In this context, we propose a novel method called Semantic Knowledge Tuning (SK-Tuning) for prompt and prefix tuning that employs meaningful words instead of random tokens. This method involves using a fixed LLM to understand and process the semantic content of the prompt through zero-shot capabilities. Following this, it integrates the processed prompt with the input text to improve the model’s performance on particular tasks. Our experimental results show that SK-Tuning exhibits faster training times, fewer parameters, and superior performance on tasks such as text classification and understanding compared to other tuning methods. This approach offers a promising method for optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of LLMs in processing language tasks.

Resumo Fundamento O estresse surge em resposta a ameaças ou desafios, afetando a saúde física e mental. Embora seus efeitos nocivos ao coração sejam amplamente reconhecidos, as investigações em nível celular permanecem limitadas. Antidepressivos, incluindo vortioxetina (VOR), são conhecidos por impactar o sistema cardiovascular. VOR, usado para tratar transtorno depressivo maior, é considerado uma opção promissora para pacientes com doença cardíaca devido às suas propriedades anti-inflamatórias e antioxidantes, que podem reduzir danos cardíacos. Objetivos Este estudo teve como objetivo avaliar os efeitos do estresse crônico moderado imprevisível (ECMI) em corações de ratos e avaliar os potenciais efeitos protetores do VOR contra danos cardíacos induzidos por estresse. Métodos Vinte e oito ratos Wistar Albino machos foram divididos em quatro grupos. O grupo ECMI experimentou estresse diário aleatório por 6 semanas, enquanto o grupo ECMI+VOR recebeu tratamento VOR junto com estresse. Os grupos VOR e controle não foram expostos ao estresse. Amostras de coração foram examinadas histopatologicamente e imuno-histoquimicamente. Resultados O grupo ECMI apresentou aumento de hemorragia, edema, degeneração vacuolar e infiltrações de células mononucleares, com redução de troponina e IL-10 e aumento de expressões de caspase-3 e NF-κB em comparação ao grupo controle (p≤0,001). O tratamento com VOR melhorou esses achados, normalizando os resultados histopatológicos e imuno-histoquímicos. Conclusões O ECMI causou danos cardíacos significativos em ratos, enquanto o tratamento com VOR mostrou efeitos protetores ao aliviar essas alterações patológicas.

Abstract This study investigated the effects on growth performance, intestinal histomorphology, blood parameters, gonadal development, antioxidant activity, and disease resistance against Aeromonas hydrophila of carp fed with cumin. Fish were fed diets containing 0, 1.0, and 3.0 mL kg−1 cumin for 60 days. At the end of the experiment, the use of cumin oil did not affect growth performances and survival rate after challenge with A. hydrophila (p > 0.05). However, villi length and goblet cells increased in carp fed with cumin diets. In addition, no pathological findings were observed in the hepatopancreas, gonad, and intestine tissues of carp fed with cumin. Total protein; albumin; aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, and alkaline phosphatase levels; superoxide dismutase; and catalase activity were similar in cumin oil supplemented groups compared with the control. Both male and female fecundity increased with the addition of 1.0 mL kg−1 cumin, whereas the addition of 3.0 mL kg−1 cumin caused a slight decrease in fertility. As a result, the use of cumin essential oil at 1 mL kg−1 concentration can be recommended to improve fish health and increase fertility in carp culture.

Abstract Background Acrometastases are accounted for a very small proportion of bone metastases. Lung cancer is the most common acrometastasis origin, and it often has a poor prognosis. The aim of the present cases is to describe the probability of an acrometastasis in the differential diagnosis of finger lesions and to emphasize the importance of taking local views of extremity of complaint for proper interpretation in such patients. Case presentation Here we reported two patients with metastases to the fingers with occult primary lung carcinoma and a history of prior lung malignancy, respectively. First case was a 58-year-old man with history of pain and swelling in the fourth finger of his left hand. He underwent an amputation from the metacarpophalangeal level and the pathological diagnosis was metastatic NSCLC. The second case was a 65-year-old ex-smoker man with a history of prior lung cancer (adenocarcinoma) suffered from a swollen, erythematous, painful tip of the right third finger. Phalangectomy was performed and the histological examination of the amputated part revealed the presence of a metastatic differentiated carcinoma of pulmonary origin. Conclusions When assessing the masses located at fingers, possibility of a solitary metastatic lung lesion should be considered.

Background The prevalence of inflammatory bowel diseases is increasing, especially in developing countries, with adoption of Western-style diet. This study aimed to investigate the effects of two emulsifiers including lecithin and carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) on the gut microbiota, intestinal inflammation and the potential of inulin as a means to protect against the harmful effects of emulsifiers. Methods In this study, male C57Bl/6 mice were divided into five groups (n:6/group) (control, CMC, lecithin, CMC+inulin, and lecithin+inulin). Lecithin and CMC were diluted in drinking water (1% w/v) and inulin was administered daily at 5 g/kg for 12 weeks. Histological examination of the ileum and colon, serum IL-10, IL-6, and fecal lipocalin-2 levels were analyzed. 16S rRNA gene V3-V4 region amplicon sequencing was performed on stool samples. Results In the CMC and lecithin groups, shortening of the villus and a decrease in goblet cells were observed in the ileum and colon, whereas inulin reversed this effect. The lipocalin level, which was 9.7 ± 3.29 ng in the CMC group, decreased to 4.1 ± 2.98 ng with the administration of inulin. Bifidobacteria and Akkermansia were lower in the CMC group than the control, while they were higher in the CMC+inulin group. In conclusion, emulsifiers affect intestinal health negatively by disrupting the epithelial integrity and altering the composition of the microbiota. Inulin is protective on their harmful effects. In addition, it was found that CMC was more detrimental to microbiota composition than lecithin.

Objective(s): We investigated the harmful effects of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) on learning and memory in the hippocampus and the ameliorative effects of melatonin (Mel). Materials and Methods: Thirty-six adult male Sprague Dawley rats were divided into three groups: Group I, control; Group II, HFCS; and Group III, HFCS+Mel. HFCS form F55 was prepared as a 20% fructose syrup solution. Rats in HFCS and HFCS+Mel groups were given drinking water for 10 weeks. Rats in the HFCS+Mel group have been given 10 mg/kg/day melatonin orally for the 6 weeks, in addition to HFCS 55. The Morris water maze (MWM) test was applied to all animals for 5 days to determine their learning and memory levels. After decapitation, one-half of the hippocampus samples were collected for western blot analysis, and another half of the tissues were collected for histopathological and immunohistochemical analyses. Results: In the HFCS group, there was a significant difference between the time to find the platform in the MWM test and time spent in the quadrant between days 1 and 5 (P=0.037 and P=0.001, respectively). In addition, a decreased level of MT1A receptor, TNF-α, iNOS, osteopontin (OPN), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) expressions were significantly increased in the HFCS group. Melatonin treatment reversed MT1A receptor levels and TNF-α, iNOS, OPN, and IL-6 expressions. During the histopathological examination, increased neuronal degenerations were observed in the HFCS group. Melatonin ameliorated these changes.Conclusion: Consumption of HFCS caused deterioration of learning and memory in adult rats. We suggest that melatonin is effective against learning and memory disorders.

In an increasingly innovation-driven economic environment, universities serve as engines of economic growth by igniting innovation, fueling entrepreneurship, and inspiring the next generation of scientists and professionals. While universities are committed to enhancing their economic impact, university 'economic engagement' is in many ways an emerging field. This research investigates key strategies used by US research universities to drive economic engagement by analysing 55 successful applications for the Innovation and Economic Prosperity (IEP) University designation, which consist of extensive self-study exercises, using a grounded theory approach. Six key strategies emerge from this corpus: forming mutually beneficial partnerships with industry, developing collaboration networks with relevant communities, building an innovation culture, supporting researchers in bringing research outcomes to market, promoting the transfer of new technologies to industry, and encouraging entrepreneurial activities. These results can serve as a guide for universities seeking the best-practices to advance their economic engagement.

With the increasing reliance on automated decision making, the issue of algorithmic fairness has gained increasing importance. In this paper, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network for tabular data generation. The model includes two phases of training. In the first phase, the model is trained to accurately generate synthetic data similar to the reference dataset. In the second phase we modify the value function to add fairness constraint, and continue training the network to generate data that is both accurate and fair. We test our results in both cases of unconstrained, and constrained fair data generation. We show that using a fairly simple architecture and applying quantile transformation of numerical attributes the model achieves promising performance. In the unconstrained case, i.e., when the model is only trained in the first phase and is only meant to generate accurate data following the same joint probability distribution of the real data, the results show that the model beats the state-of-the-art GANs proposed in the literature to produce synthetic tabular data. Furthermore, in the constrained case in which the first phase of training is followed by the second phase, we train the network and test it on four datasets studied in the fairness literature and compare our results with another state-of-the-art pre-processing method, and present the promising results that it achieves. Comparing to other studies utilizing GANs for fair data generation, our model is comparably more stable by using only one critic, and also by avoiding major problems of original GAN model, such as mode-dropping and non-convergence.

Objective(s): The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of moderate-intensity swimming exercise on learning and memory by the Morris water maze test. Changes in the expressions of cyclic AMP-response element-binding protein (CREB) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) proteins alternative pathway which were activated by sirtuin-1 (SIRT-1) were investigated. Materials and Methods: The study included thirty-two male Sprague-Dawley rats (350-500 g, 11-12 and 15–16 months old). The rats were randomly divided into four groups with 8 rats in each group. The groups were designed as follows: Control-1 (11-12 months), Exercise-1 (11-12 months), Control-2 (15-16 months), Exercise-2 (15-16 months). Moderate-intensity exercise was assigned for 30 min/day, 5 days/week, for the whole training period of 8 weeks. Results: There were statistically significant differences between the groups on the third day (P=0.005) when swim speeds increased in the exercise groups. There was a statistically significant difference between Exercise 1 and Exercise 2 groups, the entries in the platform zone decreased in Exercise 2 group (P=0.026). While there were no histopathological findings observed in any group, increased SIRT-1, BNDF, and CREB expressions were seen in exercise groups compared with control groups.Conclusion: In aged rats exercising at moderate intensity, increased expression of CREB and BDNF, and SIRT-1 could improve hippocampal-dependent memory.

BACKGROUNDS: Diseases affecting the respiratory tract of sheep and goats are one of the most important factors which limit production of these species on a world-wide basis. OBJECTIVES: The main goal of this study was to determine Adenovirus (AdV) antigen in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded lung tissue of pneumonic goats, using immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining method. METHODS: For this purpose, the lungs of 402 goats, which were raised in various farms in the Garmsar district and surrounding areas and were brought to the local abattoir for slaughtering between April and September 2016, were examined. RESULTS: Macroscopic pneumonia findings were detected in different lobes particularly in the apical and cardiac lobes of the lungs of 26 goats (%6.46). The rates of mild, moderate and severe consolidations observed in the pneumonic lungs were 59.8%, 26.3% and 11.6%, respectively. Pneumonias were microscopically classified in goats as interstitial pneumonia (n=15) (57.69%), suppurative bronchopneumonia (n=4) (15.38%), bronchointerstitial pneumonia (n=3) (11.53%), and parasitic pneumonia (n=4) (15.38%). A total of 22 pneumonic lungs, excluding parasitic pneumonia, examination with immunohistochemistry (IH) in terms of AdV antigen, were considered. AdV antigen was determined to be (13.63 %) (n=3) by the immunohistochemistry (IHC) method. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, the presence of viral antigen in lung tissues of goats may indicate that natural pneumonia may be induced by AdV or possibly other species-specific AdVs. Moreover, it is suggested that AdV might have a role in predisposing this species to secondary bacterial infections.

At the time of this study, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has spread significantly across the world. Considering the uncertainty about policies, health risks, financial difficulties, etc. the online media, especially the Twitter platform, is experiencing a high volume of activity related to this pandemic. Among the hot topics, the polarized debates about unconfirmed medicines for the treatment and prevention of the disease have attracted significant attention from online media users. In this work, we present a stance data set, COVID-CQ, of user-generated content on Twitter in the context of COVID-19. We investigated more than 14 thousand tweets and manually annotated the tweet initiators’ opinions regarding the use of “chloroquine” and “hydroxychloroquine” for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. To the best of our knowledge, COVID-CQ is the first data set of Twitter users’ stances in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the largest Twitter data set on users’ stances towards a claim, in any domain. We have made this data set available to the research community via the Mendeley Data repository. We expect this data set to be useful for many research purposes, including stance detection, evolution and dynamics of opinions regarding this outbreak, and changes in opinions in response to the exogenous shocks such as policy decisions and events.

Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction through in vitro methods is expensive and time-consuming. On the other hand, computational methods can save time and money while enhancing drug discovery efficiency. Most of the computational methods frame DTI prediction as a binary classification task. One important challenge is that the number of negative interactions in all DTI-related datasets is far greater than the number of positive interactions, leading to the class imbalance problem. As a result, a classifier is trained biased towards the majority class (negative class), whereas the minority class (interacting pairs) is of interest. This class imbalance problem is not widely taken into account in DTI prediction studies, and the few previous studies considering balancing in DTI do not focus on the imbalance issue itself. Additionally, they do not benefit from deep learning models and experimental validation. In this study, we propose a computational framework along with experimental validations to predict drug-target interaction using an ensemble of deep learning models to address the class imbalance problem in the DTI domain. The objective of this paper is to mitigate the bias in the prediction of DTI by focusing on the impact of balancing and maintaining other involved parameters at a constant value. Our analysis shows that the proposed model outperforms unbalanced models with the same architecture trained on the BindingDB both computationally and experimentally. These findings demonstrate the significance of balancing, which reduces the bias towards the negative class and leads to better performance. It is important to note that leaning on computational results without experimentally validating them and by relying solely on AUROC and AUPRC metrics is not credible, particularly when the testing set remains unbalanced.

Background: Respiratory tract infections caused by some viruses with cattle origin have been demonstrated in sheep and goats. OBJECTIVES: The main goal of this study was to determine Bovine Herpes virus type 1 BHV1antigen in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded lung tissue of pneumonic sheep, using immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining method. METHODS: For this purpose, the lungs of 4079 sheep, which were raised in various farms in the Garmsar district and surrounding areas and were brought to the local abattoir for slaughtering between April and September 2016, were examined. RESULTS: Macroscopic pneumonia findings were detected in different lobes particularly in the apical and cardiac lobes of the lungs of259 sheep (6.35%). The rates of mild, moderate and severe consolidations observed in the pneumonic lungs were 59.8%, 26.3 % and 11.6 %, respectively. Pneumonias were microscopically classified in sheep as interstitial pneumonia (49.8%), suppurative bronchopneumonia (15.7%), bronchointerstitial pneumonia (11.1 %), and parasitic pneumonia (14.3%). A total of 220 pneumonic lungs, excluding parasitic pneumonia, examination with immunohistochemistry (IH) in terms of BHV1 antigen, were considered. BHV1 antigen was determined to be 8.63 % by the immunohistochemistry (IHC) method. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, the presence of viral antigen in lung tissues of sheep may indicate that natural pneumonia may be induced by BHV1 or possibly other species-specific herpesviruses. Moreover, it is suggested that sheep might have a role in the transmission of this virus to cattle.

Deep pectoral myopathy (DPM) is a disease characterized by focal necrosis, hemorrhages, and green discoloration in the pectoral muscle of broilers and turkeys. The lesions of the affected muscles are usually detected during dissection after slaughter. DPM causes significant economic losses in the poultry meat industry. The purpose of this study was to investigate the gross and microscopic findings in a housereared broiler flock with DPM. In this study, the pathological findings of 12 house reared 100-120-day-old broilers with DPM were examined. All birds were clinically healthy but hemorrhages and green discoloration were detected on the pectoral muscle mass during dissection. Samples were collected from the lesioned muscles for a histopathological examination, which revealed necrosis, hyalinization, and hemorrhage. Inflammatory cell infiltration and atrophy of breast muscles was present in some cases. DPM was diagnosed based on gross characteristics and microscopic findings.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) on the pancreas tissue of young rats and the ameliorative effect of Gallic acid (GA). Six-week-old, 48 male rats were equally divided into four groups: Sham group, EMR group (2.45 GHz), EMR (2.45 GHz)+GA group (30 mg/kg/daily) orally and GA group (30 mg/kg/daily). After 30 days, serum and pancreatic tissue samples were harvested for biochemical, histopathological and immunohistochemical analysis. Serum amylase, lipase, glucose, and tissue malondialdehyde, total oxidant status and oxidative stress index were increased, whereas total antioxidant status decreased in the EMR group. The histopathological examination of the pancreases indicated slight degenerative changes in some pancreatic endocrine and exocrine cells and slight inflammatory cell infiltrations in the EMR group. At the immunohistochemical examination, marked increase was observed in calcitonin gene related protein and Prostaglandin E2 expressions in pancreatic cells in this group. There were no changes in interleukin-6 expirations. GA ameliorated biochemical and pathological findings in the EMR+GA group. These findings clearly demonstrate that EMR can cause degenerative changes in both endocrine and exocrine pancreas cells in rats during the developmental period and GA has an ameliorative effect.

Modeling the information of social contagion processes has recently attracted a substantial amount of interest from researchers due to its wide applicability in network science, multi-agent-systems, information science, and marketing. Unlike in biological spreading, the existence of a reinforcement effect in social contagion necessitates considering the complexity of individuals in the systems. Although many studies acknowledged the heterogeneity of the individuals in their adoption of information, there are no studies that take into account the individuals’ uncertainty during their adoption decision-making. This resulted in less than optimal modeling of social contagion dynamics in the existence of phase transition in the final adoption size versus transmission probability. We employed the Inverse Born Problem (IBP) to represent probabilistic entities as complex probability amplitudes in edge-based compartmental theory, and demonstrated that our novel approach performs better in the prediction of social contagion dynamics through extensive simulations on random regular networks.

Paclitaxel is frequently used for the treatment of patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer. Hypersensitivity reactions (HSRs) have been one of the toxicities observed with administration of paclitaxel. Here, we presented a case of a 49-year-old man with a history of right lung mass proven by biopsy to be a nonsmall cell lung cancer (squamous cell carcinoma) who developed HSR during therapy. In addition to the hypermetabolic primary malignancy, a positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scan showed multiple hypermetabolic skin lesions at several parts of the body. These cutaneous lesions were resolved in the restaging PET/CT scan performed after completion of the six cycles of chemotherapy. This is the first documented case of comparative PET/CT findings of a paclitaxel-induced hypersensitivity.