Preliminaries to artificial consciousness: A multidimensional heuristic approach.

The pursuit of artificial consciousness requires conceptual clarity to navigate its theoretical and empirical challenges. This paper introduces a composite, multilevel, and multidimensional model of consciousness as a heuristic framework to guide research in this field. Consciousness is treated as a complex phenomenon, with distinct constituents and dimensions that can be operationalized for study and for evaluating their replication.

Exploring the knowledge and attitudes towards metabolic dysfunction associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD): Validation and correlations of MAFLD-knowledge questionnaire and MAFLD-attitude questionnaire.

Background: Metabolic dysfunction associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) is a highly prevalent non-communicable disease whose prevalence is reaching pandemic proportions. Its implications constitute a major public health concern. To date, no validated tool measures knowledge and attitudes towards MAFLD in young adults in the Middle East and North Africa region.

The relationship between self-determination and burnout: Mental health outcomes in medical residents.

Background: Burnout is a pervasively increasing threat to personal and professional wellbeing and performance. It is yet understudied in relation to basic psychological needs (BPN), especially in at-risk population such as medical residents. This study intends to explore the differential relationship between various aspects of burnout including depersonalization (DP), emotional exhaustion (EE) and lack of personal achievement (PA) and subsets of BPN satisfaction or frustration namely autonomy, relatedness, and competence, with the framework of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) in healthcare.

Strong and weak alignment of large language models with human values.

Minimizing negative impacts of Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems on human societies without human supervision requires them to be able to align with human values. However, most current work only addresses this issue from a technical point of view, e.g.

Gender and sex bias in COVID-19 epidemiological data through the lens of causality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a large amount of experimental and observational studies reporting clear correlation between the risk of developing severe COVID-19 (or dying from it) and whether the individual is male or female. This paper is an attempt to explain the supposed male vulnerability to COVID-19 using a causal approach. We proceed by identifying a set of confounding and mediating factors, based on the review of epidemiological literature and analysis of sex-dis-aggregated data.

SARS-CoV-2-mediated liver injury: pathophysiology and mechanisms of disease.

Background: SARS-CoV-2-induced severe inflammatory response can be associated with severe medical consequences leading to multi-organ failure, including the liver. The main mechanism behind this assault is the aggressive cytokine storm that induces cytotoxicity in various organs. Of interest, hepatic stellate cells (HSC) respond acutely to liver injury through several molecular mechanisms, hence furthering the perpetuation of the cytokine storm and its resultant tissue damage.

Epidemiology and Survival of Colorectal Cancer in Lebanon: A Sub-National Retrospective Analysis.

Background: Scarce data exist about colorectal cancer (CRC) presentation and outcomes in Lebanon. The aim of this study is to describe the characteristics of Lebanese patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer, particularly the method of detection, age of onset, stage at presentation, treatment modalities, and survival.

Methods: This is a retrospective study of a cohort of patients with CRC, diagnosed between 2005 and 2010, admitted to 6 major university-affiliated medical centers in Lebanon.

Ethical Decision Making in Autonomous Vehicles: The AV Ethics Project.

The ethics of autonomous vehicles (AV) has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. Starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable, many authors have developed differing accounts of what morality requires in these situations. In this article, a strategy for AV decision-making is proposed, the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation: different road users hold different moral claims on the vehicle's behavior, and the vehicle must mitigate these claims as it makes decisions about its environment.

Assessment of bleeding in chronic liver disease and coagulopathy using the IMPROVE bleeding criteria.

Background: In this study, the authors utilized the IMPROVE (International Medical Prevention Registry on Venous Thromboembolism) bleeding definition to explore the safety profile of pharmacologic venous thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis in patients with chronic liver disease (CLD) and concurrent coagulopathy (INR ≥1.5).

Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on 193 adult patient admissions with a diagnosis of CLD and INR ≥1.

Toward Self-Aware Robots.

Despite major progress in Robotics and AI, robots are still basically "zombies" repeatedly achieving actions and tasks without understanding what they are doing. Deep-Learning AI programs classify tremendous amounts of data without grasping the meaning of their inputs or outputs. We still lack a genuine theory of the underlying principles and methods that would enable robots to understand their environment, to be cognizant of what they do, to take appropriate and timely initiatives, to learn from their own experience and to show that they know that they have learned and how.

Affordance Equivalences in Robotics: A Formalism.

Automatic knowledge grounding is still an open problem in cognitive robotics. Recent research in developmental robotics suggests that a robot's interaction with its environment is a valuable source for collecting such knowledge about the effects of robot's actions. A useful concept for this process is that of an affordance, defined as a relationship between an actor, an action performed by this actor, an object on which the action is performed, and the resulting effect.

AI4People-An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations.

This article reports the findings of AI4People, an Atomium-EISMD initiative designed to lay the foundations for a "Good AI Society". We introduce the core opportunities and risks of AI for society; present a synthesis of five ethical principles that should undergird its development and adoption; and offer 20 concrete recommendations-to assess, to develop, to incentivise, and to support good AI-which in some cases may be undertaken directly by national or supranational policy makers, while in others may be led by other stakeholders. If adopted, these recommendations would serve as a firm foundation for the establishment of a Good AI Society.

Irritable bowel syndrome: prevalence, risk factors in an adult Lebanese population.

Background: Very few studies report on the prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and its correlates in the Middle East. This study investigated Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) prevalence in a sample of Lebanese adult individuals and associated demographic and behavioral lifestyle factors.

Methods: This is an observational population-based study.

An optimized xylene-free protein extraction method adapted to formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue sections for western blot analysis.

Deparaffinization of formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissues with xylene currently remains a major challenge to the biomedical community. We developed an efficient xylene-free protocol to isolate proteins from archived FFPE human tissue sections. A total of 79 different types of FFPE tissue sections of 8 µm thickness were obtained from various archived FFPE specimens.

Surprise! Infants consider possible bases of generalization for a single input example.

Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization. One is via a process of noting similarities shared by several examples.

A novel xylene-free deparaffinization method for the extraction of proteins from human derived formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) archival tissue blocks.

Protein detection methods in formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue blocks are widely used in research and clinical setting in order to diagnose or to confirm a diagnosis of various types of diseases. Therefore, multiple protein extraction methods from FFPE tissue sections have been developed in this regard. However, the yield and the quality of proteins extracted from FFPE tissues are significantly reduced in blocks stored for longer periods of time.

The pattern of self-poisoning among Lebanese children and adolescents in two tertiary care centres in Lebanon.

Aim: Self-poisoning in childhood and adolescence is a major problem for health authorities all over the world. The objective of this study was to determine the pattern of self-poisoning in Lebanese children and adolescents.

Materials And Methods: This prospective study included all cases of poisoning in individuals aged 0-18 years who presented to the emergency department of two major hospitals in Beirut, Lebanon over a period of 1 year.

Personalized versus non-personalized computerized decision support system to increase therapeutic quality control of oral anticoagulant therapy: an alternating time series analysis.

The quality control of oral anticoagulant therapy (OAT) during the initiation and maintenance treatment is generally poor. Physicians' ordering of OAT (especially fluindione and warfarin) can be improved by dose adjustment algorithms, taking into account the results of International Normalized Ratio (INR). Reminders at the point of care, computerized or not, have been demonstrated to be effective in changing physicians prescription behavior.

Portal hypertension. Update on pathophysiology and management.

A lot has been learned about the pathophysiology of portal hypertension and its complications. This knowledge has led to vast advancements in therapy for this serious disease. I believe the future will carry more breakthroughs in therapy intercepting earlier steps in the disease process such as arresting fibrogenesis, inducing fibrinolysis or possibly targeting vascular remodeling and neovessel formation or employing hepatocytes transplantation.

Local arterial vasoconstriction induced by octreotide in patients with cirrhosis.

Peripheral vasodilation initiates the hyperdynamic circulation in cirrhosis. Somatostatin and its analogues, such as octreotide, have a vasoconstrictive effect in cirrhotic patients and experimental animals with portal hypertension. The exact mechanism of octreotide-induced vasoconstriction remains unknown.

Differential diagnosis of bile duct injury and ductopenia.

Injury and loss of intrahepatic bile ducts are relatively common manifestations of liver disease in both adults and children. They occur in a wide variety of conditions ranging from developmental abnormalities and errors of metabolism to autoimmune disorders, infections, and iatrogenic states. Consequently the differential diagnosis is often complex.