bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
National data on the early clinical use of non‐invasive prenatal testing in public and private healthcare in Denmark 2013–2017
Authors: Lund Ida C. B. , Petersen Olav B. , Becher Naja H. , Lildballe Dorte L. , Jørgensen Finn S. , Ambye Louise , Skibsted Lillian , Ernst Anja , Jensen Ann N. , Fagerberg Christina , Brasch‐Andersen Charlotte , Tabor Ann , Zingenberg Helle J. , Nørgaard Pernille , Almind Gitte J. , Vestergaard Else Marie , Vogel Ida
Published: November 2020

Introduction

In Denmark, non‐invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has been used since 2013. We aimed to evaluate the early clinical use of NIPT in Danish public and private healthcare settings before NIPT became an integrated part of the national guidelines on prenatal screening and diagnosis in 2017.

Material and methods

NIPT data were collected between March 2013 and June 2017 from national public registries and private providers. Results from follow‐up samples (chorionic villi, amniotic fluid, postnatal blood or fetal tissue) were included from The Danish Cytogenetics Central Registry and indications and outcome from The Danish Fetal Medicine Database.

Results

A total of 3936 NIPT results were included in the study from public hospitals (n = 3463, 88.0%) and private clinics (n = 473, 12.0%). The total number of prenatal tests was 19 713 during the study period: 20% were NIPT analyses (n = 3936) and 80% invasive procedures (n = 15 777). Twenty‐five percent of NIPTs in the private clinics were performed before gestational week 11+0, whereas NIPT in public settings was used only after combined first trimester screening (P < .001). Regardless of indication, the national public sensitivity was 96.9% (95% CI 82.0%‐99.8%) for trisomy 21, 100% (95% CI 46.3%‐100%) for trisomy 18, 100% (95% CI 5.5%‐100%) for trisomy 13, and 87.0% (95% CI 74.5%‐92.4%) for any fetal chromosomal aberration. Forty‐seven true‐positive NIPT results included cases of common aneuplodies (trisomy 21, n = 31; trisomy 18, n = 5; and trisomy 13, n = 1), sex chromosomal aberrations (n = 7) and atypical chromosomal aberrations (n = 3). One false‐negative NIPT result occurred (trisomy 21). Of 47 cases, 21 (45%) cases with a true‐positive NIPT result resulted in live births by choice; 11 of these children had Down and 4 had Edwards syndrome.

Conclusions

The total number of NIPT analyses was low compared with the number of invasive procedures in the implementation period. In contrast to the generally high termination rate after a positive result following invasive testing in Denmark, a high proportion of true‐positive NIPT results from the public setting resulted in live births. NIPT may be an important risk‐free alternative to invasive testing for a minority of women in the public setting who wish to use prenatal genetic testing for information only and not for reproductive decision‐making.
ADAMTS13 inhibits oxidative stress and ameliorates progressive chronic kidney disease following ischaemia/reperfusion injury
Authors: Zhou Suhan , Guo Jie , Zhao Liang , Liao Yixin , Zhou Qin , Cui Yu , Hu Weipeng , Chen Jianghua , Ren Xiaoqiu , Wei Qichun , Jiang Shan , Zheng Yali , Li Lingli , Wilcox Christopher S. , Persson Pontus B. , Patzak Andreas , Tian Jiong , Yin Lai En
Published: November 2020

Aims

Reduced A Disintegrin And Metalloproteinase with a ThromboSpondin type 1 motif member 13 (ADAMTS13) levels are observed in kidney disease. We test whether recombinant human ADAMTS13 (rhADAMTS13) mitigates renal injury in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and the potential mechanisms.

Methods

CKD was established 3 months after ischaemia/reperfusion (IR). ADAMTS13 and von Willebrand factor (vWF) levels, renal function and morphological changes were analysed. Afferent arteriolar responses to angiotensin II (Ang II) and acetylcholine (ACh) were measured. Oxidative stress‐related molecules were detected.

Results

Higher vWF and lower ADAMTS13 levels were observed in CKD mice, which were markedly attenuated by rhADAMTS13. rhADAMTS13 alleviated renal dysfunction, as documented by decreased blood urea nitrogen (BUN), serum creatinine, kidney injury molecule‐1 (KIM‐1) and neutrophil gelatinase‐associated lipocalin (NGAL) levels in CKD mice. Moreover, rhADAMTS13 attenuated transforming growth factor (TGF)‐β1/Smad3 activation. Plasma vWF: ADAMTS13 ratio showed positive correlations with malondialdehyde (MDA), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and proteinuria, and correlated inversely with superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT). Finally, rhADAMTS13 inhibited reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels and improved microvascular functional disorders, accompanied by the inhibition of glycogen synthase kinase (GSK) 3β hyperactivity and upregulation of nuclear factor erythroid 2‐related factor 2 (Nrf2) expression.

Conclusions

Acute kidney injury (AKI) reduces the expression of ADAMTS13 that contributes to progressive CKD, microvascular dysfunction, oxidative stress, inhibition of Nrf2 activity and renal histopathological damage. All of which can be alleviated by administration of rhADAMTS13.
Human rhinovirus 16 induces antiviral and inflammatory response in the human vascular endothelium
Authors: Chałubiński Maciej , Szulc Aleksandra , Pawełczyk Małgorzata , Gajewski Adrian , Gawrysiak Mateusz , Likońska Aleksandra , Kowalski Marek L.
Published: November 2020

The effect of rhinovirus on airway epithelium is very well described. However, its influence on the vascular endothelium is unknown. The current study assesses the effect of rhinovirus HRV16 on the antiviral and inflammatory response in the human vascular endothelial cells (ECs). HRV16 increased IFN‐β, RANTES, and IP‐10 mRNA expression and protein release. HRV16 copy number in ECs reached maximal value 10 h after incubation. Increase in virus copies was accompanied by the enhancement of Toll‐ and RIG‐I‐like receptors: TLR3, RIG‐I, and MDA5. Additionally, HRV16 increased OAS‐1 and PKR mRNA expression, enzymes responsible for virus degradation and inhibition of replication. ICAM‐1 blockade decreased HRV16 copy number in ECs and inhibited IFN‐β, RANTES, IP‐10, OAS1, PKR, TLR3, RIG‐I, and MDA5 mRNA expression increase upon subsequent induction with HRV16. The vascular endothelium may be infected by human rhinovirus and generate antiviral and inflammatory innate response. Results of the study indicate the possible involvement of the vascular endothelium in the immunopathology of rhinoviral airway infections.
Power and sample size for observational studies of point exposure effects
Authors: Shook‐Sa Bonnie E. , Hudgens Michael G.
Published: November 2020

Inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTWs) are commonly used to control for confounding when estimating causal effects of point exposures from observational data. When planning a study that will be analyzed with IPTWs, determining the required sample size for a given level of statistical power is challenging because of the effect of weighting on the variance of the estimated causal means. This paper considers the utility of the design effect to quantify the effect of weighting on the precision of causal estimates. The design effect is defined as the ratio of the variance of the causal mean estimator divided by the variance of a naïve estimator if, counter to fact, no confounding had been present and weights were not needed. A simple, closed‐form approximation of the design effect is derived that is outcome invariant and can be estimated during the study design phase. Once the design effect is approximated for each treatment group, sample size calculations are conducted as for a randomized trial, but with variances inflated by the design effects to account for weighting. Simulations demonstrate the accuracy of the design effect approximation, and practical considerations are discussed.
Practical Fabrication of Discrete Chebyshev Nets
Authors: Liu Hao‐Yu , Liu Zhong‐Yuan , Zhao Zheng‐Yu , Liu Ligang , Fu Xiao‐Ming
Published: November 2020

We propose a computational and practical technique to allow home users to fabricate discrete Chebyshev nets for various 3D models. The success of our method relies on two key components. The first one is a novel and simple method to approximate discrete integrable, unit‐length, and angle‐bounded frame fields, used to model discrete Chebyshev nets. Central to our field generation process is an alternating algorithm that takes turns executing one pass to enforce integrability and another pass to approach unit length while bounding angles. The second is a practical fabrication specification. The discrete Chebyshev net is first partitioned into a set of patches to facilitate manufacturing. Then, each patch is assigned a specification on pulling, bend, and fold to fit the nets. We demonstrate the capability and feasibility of our method in various complex models.
A Novel Plastic Phase‐Field Method for Ductile Fracture with GPU Optimization
Authors: Zhao Zipeng , Huang Kemeng , Li Chen , Wang Changbo , Qin Hong
Published: November 2020

In this paper, we articulate a novel plastic phase‐field (PPF) method that can tightly couple the phase‐field with plastic treatment to efficiently simulate ductile fracture with GPU optimization. At the theoretical level of physically‐based modeling and simulation, our PPF approach assumes the fracture sensitivity of the material increases with the plastic strain accumulation. As a result, we first develop a hardening‐related fracture toughness function towards phase‐field evolution. Second, we follow the associative flow rule and adopt a novel degraded von Mises yield criterion. In this way, we establish the tight coupling of the phase‐field and plastic treatment, with which our PPF method can present distinct elastoplasticity, necking, and fracture characteristics during ductile fracture simulation. At the numerical level towards GPU optimization, we further devise an advanced parallel framework, which takes the full advantages of hierarchical architecture. Our strategy dramatically enhances the computational efficiency of preprocessing and phase‐field evolution for our PPF with the material point method (MPM). Based on our extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks, our novel method's performance gain can reach 1.56× speedup of the primary GPU MPM. Finally, our comprehensive simulation results have confirmed that this new PPF method can efficiently and realistically simulate complex ductile fracture phenomena in 3D interactive graphics and animation.
Semi‐analytical Solid Boundary Conditions for Free Surface Flows
Authors: Chang Yue , Liu Shusen , He Xiaowei , Li Sheng , Wang Guoping
Published: November 2020

The treatment of solid boundary conditions remains one of the most challenging parts in the SPH method. We present a semi‐analytical approach to handle complex solid boundaries of arbitrary shape. Instead of calculating a renormalizing factor for the particle near the boundary, we propose to calculate the volume integral inside the solid boundary under the local spherical frame of a particle. By converting the volume integral into a surface integral, a computer aided design (CAD) mesh file representing the boundary can be naturally integrated for particle simulations. To accelerate the search for a particle's neighboring triangles, a uniform grid is applied to store indices of intersecting triangles. The new semi‐analytical solid boundary handling approach is integrated into a position‐based method [MM13] as well as a projection‐based [HWW*20] to demonstrate its effectiveness in handling complex boundaries. Experiments show that our method is able to achieve comparable results with those simulated using ghost particles. In addition, since our method requires no boundary particles for deforming surfaces, our method is flexible enough to handle complex solid boundaries, including sharp corners and shells.
Cosserat Rod with rh‐Adaptive Discretization
Authors: Wen Jiahao , Chen Jiong , Umetani Nobuyuki , Bao Hujun , Huang Jin
Published: November 2020

Rod‐like one‐dimensional elastic objects often exhibit complex behaviors which pose great challenges to the discretization method for pursuing a faithful simulation. By only moving a small portion of material points, the Eulerian‐on‐Lagrangian (EoL) method already shows great adaptivity to handle sharp contact, but it is still far from enough to reproduce rich and complex geometry details arising in simulations. In this paper, we extend the discrete configuration space by unifying all Lagrangian and EoL nodes in representation for even more adaptivity with every sample being assigned with a dynamic material coordinate. However, this great extension will immediately bring in much more redundancy in the dynamic system. Therefore, we propose additional energy to control the spatial distribution of all material points, seeking to equally space them with respect to a curvature‐based density field as a monitor. This flexible approach can effectively constrain the motion of material points to resolve numerical degeneracy, while simultaneously enables them to notably slide inside the parametric domain to account for the shape parameterization. Besides, to accurately respond to sharp contact, our method can also insert or remove nodes online and adjust the energy stiffness to suppress possible jittering artifacts that could be excited in a stiff system. As a result of this hybrid rh‐adaption, our proposed method is capable of reproducing many realistic rod dynamics, such as excessive bending, twisting and knotting while only using a limited number of elements.
Automatic Band‐Limited Approximation of Shaders Using Mean‐Variance Statistics in Clamped Domain
Authors: Li Shi , Wang Rui , Huo Yuchi , Zheng Wenting , Hua Wei , Bao Hujun
Published: November 2020

In this paper, we present a new shader smoothing method to improve the quality and generality of band‐limiting shader programs. Previous work [YB18] treats intermediate values in the program as random variables, and utilizes mean and variance statistics to smooth shader programs. In this work, we extend such a band‐limiting framework by exploring the observation that one intermediate value in the program is usually computed by a complex composition of functions, where the domain and range of composited functions heavily impact the statistics of smoothed programs. Accordingly, we propose three new shader smoothing rules for specific composition of functions by considering the domain and range, enabling better mean and variance statistics of approximations. Aside from continuous functions, the texture, such as color texture or normal map, is treated as a discrete function with limited domain and range, thereby can be processed similarly in the newly proposed framework. Experiments show that compared with previous work, our method is capable of generating better smoothness of shader programs as well as handling a broader set of shader programs.
Next Event Estimation++: Visibility Mapping for Efficient Light Transport Simulation
Authors: Guo Jerry Jinfeng , Eisemann Martin , Eisemann Elmar
Published: November 2020

Monte‐Carlo rendering requires determining the visibility between scene points as the most common and compute intense operation to establish paths between camera and light source. Unfortunately, many tests reveal occlusions and the corresponding paths do not contribute to the final image. In this work, we present next event estimation++ (NEE++): a visibility mapping technique to perform visibility tests in a more informed way by caching voxel to voxel visibility probabilities. We show two scenarios: Russian roulette style rejection of visibility tests and direct importance sampling of the visibility. We show applications to next event estimation and light sampling in a uni‐directional path tracer, and light‐subpath sampling in Bi‐Directional Path Tracing. The technique is simple to implement, easy to add to existing rendering systems, and comes at almost no cost, as the required information can be directly extracted from the rendering process itself. It discards up to 80% of visibility tests on average, while reducing variance by ∼20% compared to other state‐of‐the‐art light sampling techniques with the same number of samples. It gracefully handles complex scenes with efficiency similar to Metropolis light transport techniques but with a more uniform convergence.
Computing the Bidirectional Scattering of a Microstructure Using Scalar Diffraction Theory and Path Tracing
Authors: Falster V. , Jarabo A. , Frisvad J. R.
Published: November 2020

Most models for bidirectional surface scattering by arbitrary explicitly defined microgeometry are either based on geometric optics and include multiple scattering but no diffraction effects or based on wave optics and include diffraction but no multiple scattering effects. The few exceptions to this tendency are based on rigorous solution of Maxwell's equations and are computationally intractable for surface microgeometries that are tens or hundreds of microns wide. We set up a measurement equation for combining results from single scattering scalar diffraction theory with multiple scattering geometric optics using Monte Carlo integration. Since we consider an arbitrary surface microgeometry, our method enables us to compute expected bidirectional scattering of the metasurfaces with increasingly smaller details seen more and more often in production. In addition, we can take a measured microstructure as input and, for example, compute the difference in bidirectional scattering between a desired surface and a produced surface. In effect, our model can account for both diffraction colors due to wavelength‐sized features in the microgeometry and brightening due to multiple scattering. We include scalar diffraction for refraction, and we verify that our model is reasonable by comparing with the rigorous solution for a microsurface with half ellipsoids.
A Bayesian Inference Framework for Procedural Material Parameter Estimation
Authors: Guo Y. , Hašan M. , Yan L. , Zhao S.
Published: November 2020

Procedural material models have been gaining traction in many applications thanks to their flexibility, compactness, and easy editability. We explore the inverse rendering problem of procedural material parameter estimation from photographs, presenting a unified view of the problem in a Bayesian framework. In addition to computing point estimates of the parameters by optimization, our framework uses a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to sample the space of plausible material parameters, providing a collection of plausible matches that a user can choose from, and efficiently handling both discrete and continuous model parameters. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we fit procedural models of a range of materials—wall plaster, leather, wood, anisotropic brushed metals and layered metallic paints—to both synthetic and real target images.
SRF‐Net: Spatial Relationship Feature Network for Tooth Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Ma Qian , Wei Guangshun , Zhou Yuanfeng , Pan Xiao , Xin Shiqing , Wang Wenping
Published: November 2020

3D scanned point cloud data of teeth is popular used in digital orthodontics. The classification and semantic labelling for point cloud of each tooth is a key and challenging task for planning dental treatment. Utilizing the priori ordered position information of tooth arrangement, we propose an effective network for tooth model classification in this paper. The relative position and the adjacency similarity feature vectors are calculated for tooth 3D model, and combine the geometric feature into the fully connected layers of the classification training task. For the classification of dental anomalies, we present a dental anomalies processing method to improve the classification accuracy. We also use FocalLoss as the loss function to solve the sample imbalance of wisdom teeth. The extensive evaluations, ablation studies and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed network can classify tooth models accurately and automatically and outperforms state‐of‐the‐art point cloud classification methods.
Semi‐Supervised 3D Shape Recognition via Multimodal Deep Co‐training
Authors: Song Mofei , Liu Yu , Liu Xiao Fan
Published: November 2020

3D shape recognition has been actively investigated in the field of computer graphics. With the rapid development of deep learning, various deep models have been introduced and achieved remarkable results. Most 3D shape recognition methods are supervised and learn only from the large amount of labeled shapes. However, it is expensive and time consuming to obtain such a large training set. In contrast to these methods, this paper studies a semi‐supervised learning framework to train a deep model for 3D shape recognition by using both labeled and unlabeled shapes. Inspired by the co‐training algorithm, our method iterates between model training and pseudo‐label generation phases. In the model training phase, we train two deep networks based on the point cloud and multi‐view representation simultaneously. In the pseudo‐label generation phase, we generate the pseudo‐labels of the unlabeled shapes using the joint prediction of two networks, which augments the labeled set for the next iteration. To extract more reliable consensus information from multiple representations, we propose an uncertainty‐aware consistency loss function to combine the two networks into a multimodal network. This not only encourages the two networks to give similar predictions on the unlabeled set, but also eliminates the negative influence of the large performance gap between the two networks. Experiments on the benchmark ModelNet40 demonstrate that, with only 10% labeled training data, our approach achieves competitive performance to the results reported by supervised methods.
FAKIR: An algorithm for revealing the anatomy and pose of statues from raw point sets
Authors: Fu Tong , Chaine Raphaëlle , Digne Julie
Published: November 2020

3D acquisition of archaeological artefacts has become an essential part of cultural heritage research for preservation or restoration purpose. Statues, in particular, have been at the center of many projects. In this paper, we introduce a way to improve the understanding of acquired statues representing real or imaginary creatures by registering a simple and pliable articulated model to the raw point set data. Our approach performs a Forward And bacKward Iterative Registration (FAKIR) which proceeds joint by joint, needing only a few iterations to converge. We are thus able to detect the pose and elementary anatomy of sculptures, with possibly non realistic body proportions. By adapting our simple skeleton, our method can work on animals and imaginary creatures.
An Occlusion‐aware Edge‐Based Method for Monocular 3D Object Tracking using Edge Confidence
Authors: Huang Hong , Zhong Fan , Sun Yuqing , Qin Xueying
Published: November 2020

We propose an edge‐based method for 6DOF pose tracking of rigid objects using a monocular RGB camera. One of the critical problem for edge‐based methods is to search the object contour points in the image corresponding to the known 3D model points. However, previous methods often produce false object contour points in case of cluttered backgrounds and partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel edge‐based 3D objects tracking method to tackle this problem. To search the object contour points, foreground and background clutter points are first filtered out using edge color cue, then object contour points are searched by maximizing their edge confidence which combines edge color and distance cues. Furthermore, the edge confidence is integrated into the edge‐based energy function to reduce the influence of false contour points caused by cluttered backgrounds and partial occlusions. We also extend our method to multi‐object tracking which can handle mutual occlusions. We compare our method with the recent state‐of‐art methods on challenging public datasets. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves robustness and accuracy against cluttered backgrounds and partial occlusions.
Coarse to Fine: Weak Feature Boosting Network for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Zhang Chenhao , Gao Shanshan , Pan Xiao , Wang Yuting , Zhou Yuanfeng
Published: November 2020

Salient object detection is to identify objects or regions with maximum visual recognition in an image, which brings significant help and improvement to many computer visual processing tasks. Although lots of methods have occurred for salient object detection, the problem is still not perfectly solved especially when the background scene is complex or the salient object is small. In this paper, we propose a novel Weak Feature Boosting Network (WFBNet) for the salient object detection task. In the WFBNet, we extract the unpredictable regions (low confidence regions) of the image via a polynomial function and enhance the features of these regions through a well‐designed weak feature boosting module (WFBM). Starting from a coarse saliency map, we gradually refine it according to the boosted features to obtain the final saliency map, and our network does not need any post‐processing step. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets using comprehensive evaluation metrics. The results show that our algorithm has considerable advantages over the existing state‐of‐the‐art methods.
Generating High‐quality Superpixels in Textured Images
Authors: Zhang Zhe , Xu Panpan , Chang Jian , Wang Wencheng , Zhao Chong , Zhang Jian Jun
Published: November 2020

Superpixel segmentation is important for promoting various image processing tasks. However, existing methods still have difficulties in generating high‐quality superpixels in textured images, because they cannot separate textures from structures well. Though texture filtering can be adopted for smoothing textures before superpixel segmentation, the filtering would also smooth the object boundaries, and thus weaken the quality of generated superpixels. In this paper, we propose to use the adaptive scale box smoothing instead of the texture filtering to obtain more high‐quality texture and boundary information. Based on this, we design a novel distance metric to measure the distance between different pixels, which considers boundary, color and Euclidean distance simultaneously. As a result, our method can achieve high‐quality superpixel segmentation in textured images without texture filtering. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods, even the learning‐based methods. Benefited from using boundaries to guide superpixel segmentation, our method can also suppress noise to generate high‐quality superpixels in non‐textured images.
Not All Areas Are Equal: A Novel Separation‐Restoration‐Fusion Network for Image Raindrop Removal
Authors: Ren Dongdong , Li Jinbao , Han Meng , Shu Minglei
Published: November 2020

Detecting and removing raindrops from an image while keeping the high quality of image details has attracted tremendous studies, but remains a challenging task due to the inhomogeneity of the degraded region and the complexity of the degraded intensity. In this paper, we get rid of the dependence of deep learning on image‐to‐image translation and propose a separation‐restoration‐fusion network for raindrops removal. Our key idea is to recover regions of different damage levels individually, so that each region achieves the optimal recovery result, and finally fuse the recovered areas. In the region restoration module, to complete the restoration of a specific area, we propose a multi‐scale feature fusion global information aggregation attention network to achieve global to local information aggregation. Besides, we also design an inside and outside dense connection dilated network, to ensure the fusion of the separated regions and the fine restoration of the image. The qualitatively and quantitatively evaluations are conducted to evaluate our method with the latest existing methods. The result demonstrates that our method outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods by a large margin on the benchmark datasets in extensive experiments.
SCGA‐Net: Skip Connections Global Attention Network for Image Restoration
Authors: Ren Dongdong , Li Jinbao , Han Meng , Shu Minglei
Published: November 2020

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) have shown their advantages in the image restoration tasks. But most existing DCNN‐based methods still suffer from the residual corruptions and coarse textures. In this paper, we propose a general framework “Skip Connections Global Attention Network” to focus on the semantics delivery from shallow layers to deep layers for low‐level vision tasks including image dehazing, image denoising, and low‐light image enhancement. First of all, by applying dense dilated convolution and multi‐scale feature fusion mechanism, we establish a novel encoder‐decoder network framework to aggregate large‐scale spatial context and enhance feature reuse. Secondly, the solution we proposed for skipping connection uses attention mechanism to constraint information, thereby enhancing the high‐frequency details of feature maps and suppressing the output of corruptions. Finally, we also present a novel attention module dubbed global constraint attention, which could effectively captures the relationship between pixels on the entire feature maps, to obtain the subtle differences among pixels and produce an overall optimal 3D attention maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state‐of‐the‐art methods in image dehazing, image denoising, and low‐light image enhancement.
A Multi‐Person Selfie System via Augmented Reality
Authors: Lin Jie , Yang Chuan‐Kai
Published: November 2020

The limited length of a selfie stick always poses the problem of distortion in a selfie, in spite of the prevalence of selfie stick in recent years. We propose a technique, based on modifying existing augmented reality technology, to support the selfie of multiple persons, through properly aligning different photographing processes. It can be shown that our technique helps avoiding the common distortion drawback of using a selfie stick, and facilitates the composition process of a group photo. It can also be used to create some special effects, including creating an illusion of having multiple appearances of a person.
StyleProp: Real‐time Example‐based Stylization of 3D Models
Authors: Hauptfleisch F. , Texler O. , Texler A. , Krivánek J. , Sýkora D.
Published: November 2020

We present a novel approach to the real‐time non‐photorealistic rendering of 3D models in which a single hand‐drawn exemplar specifies its appearance. We employ guided patch‐based synthesis to achieve high visual quality as well as temporal coherence. However, unlike previous techniques that maintain consistency in one dimension (temporal domain), in our approach, multiple dimensions are taken into account to cover all degrees of freedom given by the available space of interactions (e.g., camera rotations). To enable interactive experience, we precalculate a sparse latent representation of the entire interaction space, which allows rendering of a stylized image in real‐time, even on a mobile device. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed system is the first that enables interactive example‐based stylization of 3D models with full temporal coherence in predefined interaction space.
RadEx: Integrated Visual Exploration of Multiparametric Studies for Radiomic Tumor Profiling
Authors: Mörth E. , Wagner‐Larsen K. , Hodneland E. , Krakstad C. , Haldorsen I. S. , Bruckner S. , Smit N. N.
Published: November 2020

Better understanding of the complex processes driving tumor growth and metastases is critical for developing targeted treatment strategies in cancer. Radiomics extracts large amounts of features from medical images which enables radiomic tumor profiling in combination with clinical markers. However, analyzing complex imaging data in combination with clinical data is not trivial and supporting tools aiding in these exploratory analyses are presently missing. In this paper, we present an approach that aims to enable the analysis of multiparametric medical imaging data in combination with numerical, ordinal, and categorical clinical parameters to validate established and unravel novel biomarkers. We propose a hybrid approach where dimensionality reduction to a single axis is combined with multiple linked views allowing clinical experts to formulate hypotheses based on all available imaging data and clinical parameters. This may help to reveal novel tumor characteristics in relation to molecular targets for treatment, thus providing better tools for enabling more personalized targeted treatment strategies. To confirm the utility of our approach, we closely collaborate with experts from the field of gynecological cancer imaging and conducted an evaluation with six experts in this field.
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
Authors: Garlen Julie C. , Chang‐Kredl Sandra , Farley Lisa , Sonu Debbie
Published: November 2020

This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a deficit perspective of childhood. These findings contribute to teacher education and childhood studies by highlighting the importance of interrogating adult memories in order to disrupt normative assumptions about children.
Coasting along to a wider range: niche conservatism in the recent range expansion of the Tawny Coster, Acraea terpsicore (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)
Authors: Chowdhury Shawan , Braby Michael F. , Fuller Richard A. , Zalucki Myron P.
Published: November 2020

Aim

The Tawny Coster Acraea terpsicore is a highly mobile butterfly that has recently expanded its spatial distribution from South Asia to South‐East Asia and Australia. Here, we determine if the realized climatic niche has changed during the expansion and analyse the geographic pattern of spread in Australia.

Location

Asia and Australia.

Methods

We collated occurrence records, divided the geographic range into three spatio‐temporal phases (pre‐expansion, early‐expansion and late‐expansion) and then developed ecological niche models for each phase. To determine whether the realized niche has changed during the range expansion, we performed a principal component analyses and niche overlap analysis. Finally, we calculated the annual rate of range expansion to estimate the speed and pattern of geographic spread.

Results

The climatic niche of A. terpsicore differs only slightly in the pre‐expansion and late‐expansion ranges and was most distinct in the early‐expansion range. The species' range in Australia expanded at an average rate of ~ 135 km/year (range: 34–359 km/year). Female‐biased migration occurred in north‐eastern Queensland at the leading edge of the range, the first documentation of this phenomenon in butterflies.

Main Conclusions

Acraea terpsicore represents one of the fastest documented geographic range expansions of any species, highlighting how rapidly butterflies can colonize new areas, even where environmental conditions are substantially different to those in their original distribution. However, we found little evidence of climatic niche shift, and only a minor niche shift is apparent in the early‐expansion and late‐expansion ranges. It remains unclear what triggered the sudden expansion, but it has been hypothesized that tropical deforestation provided conditions that initiated local range expansion, and further work on the possible mechanisms involved is required.
Characterization of impressions created by turfgrass arthropods on clay models
Authors: Khan Fawad Z. A. , Joseph Shimat V.
Published: November 2020

Lepidopteran pests such as fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (JE Smith), and black cutworm, Agrotis ipsilon Hufnagel (both Noctuidae), are serious problems of turfgrass (Poaceae) in the USA. Several predators in turfgrass systems attack lepidopteran larvae; however, their predaceous activity is rarely recorded, as they leave hardly any evidence. Predaceous activity can be studied using clay models, an approach still rarely employed in turfgrass. Thus, assays were conducted to determine the types of impressions that common turfgrass arthropods leave on clay models simulating lepidopteran larvae. Nine impression types were characterized after exposing 16 arthropod taxa in enclosed arenas in the laboratory and one taxon in the field to two sizes of clay models, including scratches, paired marks, pricks, deep distortions, disturbed surfaces, detached segments, granulated surfaces, dents, and elongated scratches. Most arthropods produced scratches and paired marks, whereas granulated surfaces and elongated scratches were produced by only a few of the selected arthropods. To ensure that the impressions were correctly identified, non‐expert volunteers reviewed the impressions, and they were accurately identified in >85% of the responses. Video recordings of arthropod interactions were captured to determine the behavior of the arthropods during their first interaction with the clay models. Most arthropods first interacted with the terminal rather than the middle regions of the models. There were no differences between their interactions with the large or small models, and they used their mouthparts as often as their legs. Knowledge of the impression types caused by common arthropods will improve the utilization of the clay model technique for field studies in turfgrass. This could contribute to improved management of natural enemies as part of an integrated pest management approach.
Characterization and prognostic implication of delayed complete response in AL amyloidosis
Authors: Muchtar Eli , Gertz Morie A. , Kumar Shaji K. , Lacy Martha Q. , Leung Nelson , Buadi Francis K. , Dingli David , Hayman Suzanne R. , Go Ronald S. , Kapoor Prashant , Gonsalves Wilson , Kourelis Taxiarchis V. , Warsame Rahma , Lisa Hwa Yi , Fonder Amie , Hobbs Miriam , Russell Stephen , Lust John A. , Siddiqui Mustaqueem , Vincent Rajkumar S. , Kyle Robert A. , Dispenzieri Angela
Published: November 2020

Introduction

Little is known on continued response following completion of therapy in light chain (AL) amyloidosis.

Methods

We studied 373 AL amyloidosis patients who achieved complete response (CR) or very good partial response (VGPR) to first‐line therapy.

Results

By end of therapy (EOT), 46% of patients achieved a CR and 54% a VGPR. With no further therapy, 17.5% of patients were upstaged from VGPR to CR (delayed CR), with a median of 9 months. Compared with CR and VGPR at EOT, patients with a delayed CR were characterized by higher proportion of t(11;14) and lower rate of trisomies. Autologous stem cell transplant was more frequent in the delayed CR group. Patients with a delayed CR were characterized by minimal residual disease negativity and organ response rates similar to patients with CR at EOT and higher than patients achieving VGPR at EOT. Patients with a delayed CR had a longer PFS/OS compared to patients with CR or VGPR by EOT (median PFS 149 vs 92 vs 52 months, P < .001; 10‐year OS 87% vs 71% vs 56%, P < .001).

Conclusions

This study characterizes delayed CR in AL amyloidosis, highlights its prognostic impact which is at least similar to those who achieved CR at EOT, and underlines another aspect of response monitoring.
Human immunodeficiency virus–related peripheral neuropathy: A systematic review and meta‐analysis
Authors: Julian Thomas , Rekatsina Martina , Shafique Faiza , Zis Panagiotis
Published: November 2020

Background and purpose

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)‐associated neurological syndromes occur in affected individuals as a consequence of primary HIV infection, opportunistic infections, inflammation and as an adverse effect of some forms of antiretroviral treatment (ART). The aim of this systematic review was to establish the epidemiological characteristics, clinical features, pathogenetic mechanisms and risk factors of HIV‐related peripheral neuropathy (PN).

Methods

A systematic, computer‐based search was conducted using the PubMed database. Data regarding the above parameters were extracted. Ninety‐four articles were included in this review.

Results

The most commonly described clinical presentation of HIV neuropathy is the distal predominantly sensory polyneuropathy. The primary pathology in HIVPN appears to be axonal rather than demyelinating. Age and treatment with medications belonging in the nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase class are risk factors for developing HIV‐related neuropathy. The pooled prevalence of PN in patients naïve to ARTs was established to be 29% (95% CI: 9%–62%) and increased to 38% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 29%–48%) when looking into patients at various stages of their disease. More than half of patients with HIV‐related neuropathy are symptomatic (53%, 95% CI: 41%–63%). Management of HIV‐related neuropathy is mainly symptomatic, although there is evidence that discontinuation of some types of ART, such as didanosine, can improve or resolve symptoms.

Conclusions

Human immunodeficiency virus–related neuropathy is common and represents a significant burden in patients’ lives. Our understanding of the disease has grown over the last years, but there are unexplored areas requiring further study.
Inhibitory effects of climate change on the growth and extracellular enzyme activities of a widespread Antarctic soil fungus
Authors: Misiak Marta , Goodall‐Copestake William P. , Sparks Tim H. , Worland M. Roger , Boddy Lynne , Magan Naresh , Convey Peter , Hopkins David W. , Newsham Kevin K.
Published: November 2020

Temperatures approaching or exceeding 20°C have been measured during summer in polar regions at the surfaces of barren fellfield soils under cloudless skies around solar noon. However, despite the upper temperature limit for the growth of cold‐adapted microbes—which are abundant in polar soils and have pivotal roles in nutrient cycling—typically being close to this temperature, previous studies have not addressed the consequences of climate change for the metabolism of these organisms in the natural environment. Here in a 5‐year field experiment on Alexander Island in the southern maritime Antarctic, we show that the abundance ofPseudogymnoascus roseus, the most widespread decomposer fungus in maritime Antarctic fellfield soils, is reduced by 1–2 orders of magnitude when irrigated and nutrient‐amended soils are warmed to >20°C during summer. Laboratory experiments under conditions mimicking those during midsummer in the natural environment indicated that the hyphal extension rates ofP. roseusisolates and the activities of five extracellular enzymes are reduced by 54%–96% at high water availability after exposure to temperatures cycling daily from 2 to 21°C and 2 to 24°C, relative to temperatures cycling from 2 to 18°C. Given that the temperatures of surface soils at the study site already reach 19°C during midsummer, the observations reported here suggest that, at predicted rates of warming arising from moderate greenhouse gas emissions, inhibitory effects of climate change on the metabolism ofP. roseuscould manifest themselves within the next few decades. Furthermore, with peak temperatures at the surfaces of fellfield soils at other maritime Antarctic locations and in High Arctic and alpine regions already exceeding 20°C during summer, the observations suggest that climate warming has the potential to inhibit the growth of other cold‐adapted microbes, with negative effects on soils as the Earth's climate continues to warm.
Empirical Measures of Park Use in American Cities, and the Demographic Biases of Spatial Models
Authors: Saxon James
Published: November 2020

City planners have a professional and ethical responsibility to provide public goods equitably. Parks improve mental and physical health by nurturing social cohesion and enabling physical activity. So who gets parks? Park access has traditionally been evaluated using constructed variables of potential access: distances, buffers, and gravity models. These models have major limitations: they ignore commutes and other more intricate mobility behaviors. To address these issues, I propose a nationally scalable, empirical measure of realized use. Using a dataset of smartphone locations, I identify visits to parks in the 20 largest American cities. I use these data to calibrate existing models, and then contrast the models with realized use. The spatial models are not simply imprecise; they systematically over‐estimate realized access by minority populations. In other words, they understate inequity.
Editorial: Grass and Forage Science – 75 years of impact and service to the science of grasslands
Authors: Smith Kevin F. , Elgersma Anjo
Published: November 2020

The year 2020 marks the 75th edition of Grass and Forage Science. From its beginnings as the Journal of the British Grassland Society, the journal has grown to be the major international journal with a primary emphasis on grasslands society. In this paper, to mark this anniversary we note the contributions of the editorial team, past and present, and the legacy of the journal by noting some of the highly cited papers published over the years and discuss the changing trends in science published in recent years. This includes an emphasis on the changing role of grasslands across the globe and the challenges that changing climate and altered production systems place on grazing agriculture. It is through the adoption of science that is being published now that the industries that we serve will be able to respond to these challenges.
Effect of pasture cover and height on nutrient concentrations in diverse swards in the UK
Authors: Bell Matt J. , J. Huggett Zoë , Slinger Kimberley R. , Roos Felicity
Published: November 2020

A total of 445 pasture samples were collected from six fields representing a wide range of dry grass content (0–100%), and grass, legume, herb, flower and weed species. Fields were located in the grass‐dominated and temperate regions of western UK and monitored monthly for 9 months during late summer, autumn and winter months. The pasture properties assessed included measurements of percentage of grass content, height (in centimeters), pasture cover (fresh weight (FW) and dry matter (DM) in kg /ha) and pasture density (FW and DM in kg ha−1cm−1) and nutrient concentrations (DM, crude protein, acid detergent fiber (ADF), neutral detergent fiber (NDF), sugars, ash, digestible organic matter in the DM (DOMD), oil, nitrate nitrogen and metabolizable energy (ME)). This study showed that across the pastures studied, increasing both pasture height and DM cover brought a desirable increase in crude protein, sugars, DOMD, oil and ME for grazing systems. Seasonal changes in nutrient concentrations of diverse swards will occur; however, differences in nutrient concentrations among swards can be minimized by the grass species present and/or mix with broadleaf plants, and management of grass maturity.