bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
CT-defined visceral adipose tissue thresholds for identifying metabolic complications: a cross-sectional study in the United Arab Emirates
Authors: Yoo Sunmi , Sung Myung-Whun , Kim Hongdae 
Published: August 2020

ObjectivesVisceral adipose tissue (VAT) is closely related to obesity complications. We aimed to determine the optimal sex-specific and age-specific VAT thresholds for predicting metabolic complications among individuals living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).DesignRetrospective cross-sectional study.SettingWe reviewed medical records of adults who visited a hospital in the UAE.ParticipantsA total of 369 subjects were included in the final analysis after application of inclusion and exclusion criteria.Primary outcome measuresThe prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MES).ResultsMES measures excluding waist circumference were present in 73.4% of women and 78.5% of men. VAT areas adjusted for age were significantly greater in the MES group compared with the non-MES group regardless of sex (p<0.05 for all relations); however, subcutaneous adipose tissue areas adjusted for age were not significantly different. Areas under the curve used to predict MES were statistically significant for VAT and visceral to subcutaneous fat ratios among both men and women. Identified cut-off values of VAT to predict MES were 132.0 cm2 in both sexes for individuals under the age of 50 years. For those over 50 years of age, VAT thresholds were greater in women compared with men (173 cm2 vs 124.3 cm2, respectively).ConclusionsOptimal VAT cut-offs to predict MES were 132 cm2 for individuals under 50 years old living in the UAE. These measures are potential target visceral fat values that could be used to reduce obesity-related morbidity in populations with pre-existing metabolic complications.
Interventions to improve the quality of cataract services: protocol for a global scoping review
Authors: Yoshizaki Miho , Ramke Jacqueline , Furtado João M , Burn Helen , Gichuhi Stephen , Gordon Iris , Aghaji Ada , Marques Ana P , Dean William H , Congdon Nathan , Buchan John , Burton Matthew J 
Published: August 2020

IntroductionCataract is the leading cause of blindness globally and a major cause of vision impairment. Cataract surgery is an efficacious intervention that usually restores vision. Although it is one of the most commonly conducted surgical interventions worldwide, good quality services (from being detected with operable cataract to undergoing surgery and receiving postoperative care) are not universally accessible. Poor quality understandably reduces the willingness of people with operable cataract to undergo surgery. Therefore, it is critical to improve the quality of care to subsequently reduce vision loss from cataract. This scoping review aims to summarise the nature and extent of the published literature on interventions to improve the quality of services for primary age-related cataract globally.Methods and analysisWe will search MEDLINE, Embase and Global Health for peer-reviewed manuscripts published since 1990, with no language, geographic or study design restrictions. To define quality, we have used the elements adopted by the WHO—effectiveness, safety, people-centredness, timeliness, equity, integration and efficiency—to which we have added the element of planetary health. We will exclude studies focused on the technical aspects of the surgical procedure and studies that only involve children (<18 years). Two reviewers will screen all titles/abstracts independently, followed by a full-text review of potentially relevant articles. For included articles, data regarding publication characteristics, study details and quality-related outcomes will be extracted by two reviewers independently. Results will be synthesised narratively and presented visually using a spider chart.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval was not sought, as our review will only include published and publicly accessible information. We will publish our findings in an open-access peer-reviewed journal and develop an accessible summary of the results for website posting. A summary of the results will be included in the ongoing Lancet Global Health Commission on Global Eye Health.Registration detailsOpen Science Framework (https://osf.io/8gktz).
Transmission reduction and prevention with HPV vaccination (TRAP-HPV) study protocol: a randomised controlled trial of the efficacy of HPV vaccination in preventing transmission of HPV infection in heterosexual couples
Authors: MacCosham Aaron , El-Zein Mariam , Burchell Ann N , Tellier Pierre-Paul , Coutlée François , Franco Eduardo L 
Published: August 2020

IntroductionHuman papillomavirus (HPV) is a causal agent of malignancies including cervical, vulvar, vaginal, penile, anal and oropharyngeal cancer, as well as benign conditions such as anogenital warts. HPV vaccination protects individuals against infections with the target HPV types and their clinical outcomes. However, little is known about the protection an immunised individual confers to their sexual partner or its impact on HPV transmission dynamics. In this context, the Transmission Reduction and Prevention with HPV vaccination (TRAP-HPV) study was designed to determine the efficacy of an HPV vaccine in reducing transmission of genital and oral HPV infection in sexual partners of vaccinated individuals.Methods and analysisThe TRAP-HPV study is an ongoing randomised controlled trial among heterosexual couples living in Montreal, Canada. Sexually active couples, aged between 18 and 45 years, who have been in a relationship no longer than 6 months are considered eligible. Participants are independently randomised to receive either the intervention HPV vaccine, Gardasil 9, or a placebo hepatitis A vaccine, Avaxim, creating four vaccination groups among couples: intervention–intervention, intervention–placebo, placebo–intervention and the placebo–placebo. Participants provide genital (vaginal/penile) and oral samples at baseline and five follow-up visits over a 1-year duration. Linear Array HPV genotyping is used to detect 36 HPV types. Cox proportional hazard regression models will be used to estimate the effect of vaccination on HPV transmission.Ethics and disseminationThe TRAP-HPV study received ethical approval by institutional review boards McGill University, Concordia University and Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal. Before enrolment, all participants provide informed written consent. Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences. The generated empirical evidence could be used in mathematical models of vaccination to inform policymakers in Canada and elsewhere.Trial registration numberNCT01824537.
Implementation of vaginal preparation prior to caesarean section
Authors: Jakes Adam D , Bell Annie , Chiwera Lilian , Lloyd Jilly 
Published: August 2020

IntroductionSurgical site infections following caesarean section are associated with significant morbidity. Vaginal preparation is the cleansing of the vaginal epithelium with an antibacterial solution to reduce the bacterial load and therefore reduce ascending genital tract infection. It is recommended by the WHO and a Cochrane review in 2018 concluded that vaginal preparation immediately before caesarean section probably reduces the rates of postoperative endometritis.ObjectiveTo implement vaginal preparation prior to caesarean section at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and reduce rates of deep surgical site infections.MethodsThe protocol (included within the appendices) for vaginal preparation prior to caesarean section was developed after reviewing the available evidence. Two vaginal preparation champions, a midwife and a scrub nurse, were selected to help promote and assist in the implementation. The first implementation cycle included elective and category II and III caesarean sections. To ensure acceptability, 20 women were asked to complete a questionnaire following vaginal preparation. Once the intervention was being performed in >85% of eligible women, the inclusion criteria was expanded to include category I caesarean sections.ResultsTwelve months following implementation, vaginal preparation was still being performed in 89% of eligible women. The deep surgical site infection rate is now the lowest recorded in the last 6 years. Vaginal preparation prior to caesarean section was acceptable to pregnant women and no adverse effects were reported.ConclusionsVaginal preparation prior to caesarean section has been successfully implemented at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. This simple, cheap intervention, performed with readily available materials, is still being performed in a high number of caesarean sections 12 months post-implementation. It has resulted in a reduction in deep surgical site infections. Involvement of key stakeholders and the recruitment of vaginal preparation champions were key to success.
Academic performance, subsequent socioeconomic status and suicide attempt in adulthood: path analyses on Swedish cohort data
Authors: Sörberg Wallin Alma , Sorjonen Kimmo , Lager Anton , Falkstedt Daniel 
Published: August 2020

BackgroundPoor academic performance in childhood is associated with suicide attempt in adulthood, but the mechanisms are not known. We investigated educational attainment as a possible pathway.MethodsWe followed two sets of cohorts, born around 1950/1970, respectively, in the Swedish population-representative ‘Evaluation Through Follow-up’ study for a first suicide attempt in national records up to 2013. Data on grade point average (GPA) at age 13/16 and educational attainment (years of schooling) in adulthood were used. The path models included linear and Cox proportional hazards regressions. A model with matched age range during follow-up was used to compare the cohorts.ResultsIn the 1970 cohort, the association between GPA and suicide attempt between age 26 and 46 was partly mediated by attained education (total association, β=−0.82; via education: −0.29, per SD increase in GPA), but GPA also had a direct path to suicide attempt (β=−0.53). There was no evidence of such a pathway in the 1950 cohort between age 41 and 65. In the age-matched analysis, at age 26–46, the association between GPA and suicide attempt was stronger in the 1970 cohort compared to the 1950 cohort (β=−0.72 and −0.24, respectively).ConclusionsDifferences in attained education seem to partly explain the associations of academic performance with suicide attempt up to middle age. Furthermore, there is some indication that academic performance may have become more important for young people’s mental health than it was in previous generations.
Horizontal and vertical tracing: a cognitive forcing strategy to improve diagnostic accuracy
Authors: Shimizu Taro 
Published: August 2020

AbstractReducing diagnostic error is a major issue in medical care. Various strategies have been proposed to prevent diagnostic error. The most prevalent factor for the diagnostic error is a cognitive error by physicians; reducing the cognitive error should lead to a substantial reduction in diagnostic error. That said, few studies have described new strategies to increase diagnostic accuracy that focuses on the cognitive processes of physicians. The current study describes new diagnostic strategies using cognitive forcing. Horizontal tracing is a strategy to identify comorbidities reliably, and vertical tracing identifies an underlying condition.
The impact of planting buckwheat strips along lowbush blueberry fields on beneficial insects
Authors: McCallum Robyn S. , McLean Nancy L. , Cutler G. Christopher 
Published: August 2020

Pollination and pest control are important in many agroecosystems. Beneficial insects that provide these services (e.g., bees and natural enemies) often require floral resources beyond crop bloom. Planting floral resources along crop field margins may be a useful tactic to support communities of beneficial insects in agroecosystems. We examined the effect of planting buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) along lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium Aiton) field margins on beneficial insect abundance and generic richness. We found that bee abundance was higher in buckwheat transects than control transects in 2014 and 2015, but not 2016, and that bee generic richness was higher in buckwheat transects than in control transects in 2015 only. High variability occurred across years. All bee genera recorded during blueberry bloom were also collected in buckwheat transects, suggesting buckwheat is a useful resource for the bee community involved in blueberry pollination. The effect of buckwheat on natural enemies was variable and inconsistent. We conclude that buckwheat influenced bee and natural enemy communities during certain years, but field edges in the lowbush blueberry fields studied may already adequately support beneficial insects. Thus, not all habitat management efforts with augmentative floral plantings may consistently boost communities of beneficial insects.
Generalized entropies and corresponding holographic dark energy models
Authors: Moradpour H. , Ziaie A. H. , Zangeneh M. Kord 
Published: August 2020

AbstractUsing Tsallis statistics and its relation with Boltzmann entropy, the Tsallis entropy content of black holes is achieved, a result in full agreement with a recent study (Mejrhit and Ennadifi in Phys Lett B 794:24, 2019). In addition, employing Kaniadakis statistics and its relation with that of Tsallis, the Kaniadakis entropy of black holes is obtained. The Sharma-Mittal and Rényi entropy contents of black holes are also addressed by employing their relations with Tsallis entropy. Thereinafter, relying on the holographic dark energy hypothesis and the obtained entropies, two new holographic dark energy models are introduced and their implications on the dynamics of a flat FRW universe are studied when there is also a pressureless fluid in background. In our setup, the apparent horizon is considered as the IR cutoff, and there is not any mutual interaction between the cosmic fluids. The results indicate that the obtained cosmological models have (i) notable powers to describe the cosmic evolution from the matter-dominated era to the current accelerating universe, and (ii) suitable predictions for the universe age.
Heavy quark energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma in the Moller theory
Authors: Blok B. 
Published: August 2020

AbstractWe study the energy loss of a heavy quark propagating in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in the framework of the Moller theory, including possible large Coulomb logarithms as a perturbation to BDMPSZ bremsstrahlung, described in the harmonic oscillator (HO) approximation. We derive the analytical expression that describes the energy loss in the entire emitted gluon frequency region. In the small frequencies region, for angles larger than the dead cone angle, the energy loss is controlled by the BDMPSZ mechanism, while for larger frequencies it is described by N = 1 term in the GLV opacity expansion. We estimate corresponding quenching rates for different values of the heavy quark path length and different m/E ratios.
Transverse-momentum-dependent gluon distribution functions in a spectator model
Authors: Bacchetta Alessandro , Celiberto Francesco Giovanni , Radici Marco , Taels Pieter 
Published: August 2020

AbstractWe present a model calculation of transverse-momentum-dependent distributions (TMDs) of gluons in the nucleon. The model is based on the assumption that a nucleon can emit a gluon, and what remains after the emission is treated as a single spectator particle. This spectator particle is considered to be on-shell, but its mass is allowed to take a continuous range of values, described by a spectral function. The nucleon-gluon-spectator coupling is described by an effective vertex containing two form factors. We fix the model parameters to obtain the best agreement with collinear gluon distributions extracted from global fits. We study the tomography in momentum space of gluons inside nucleons for various combinations of their polarizations. These can be used to make predictions of observables relevant for gluon TMD studies at current and future collider facilities.
High resolution étendue expansion for holographic displays
Authors: Kuo Grace , Waller Laura , Ng Ren , Maimone Andrew 
Published: August 2020

Holographic displays can create high quality 3D images while maintaining a small form factor suitable for head-mounted virtual and augmented reality systems. However, holographic displays have limited étendue based on the number of pixels in their spatial light modulators, creating a tradeoff between the eyebox size and the field-of-view. Scattering-based étendue expansion, in which coherent light is focused into an image after being scattered by a static mask, is a promising avenue to break this tradeoff. However, to date, this approach has been limited to very sparse content consisting of, for example, only tens of spots.
In this work, we introduce new algorithms to scattering-based étendue expansion that support dense, photorealistic imagery at the native resolution of the spatial light modulator, offering up to a 20 dB improvement in peak signal to noise ratio over baseline methods. We propose spatial and frequency constraints to optimize performance for human perception, and performance is characterized both through simulation and a preliminary benchtop prototype. We further demonstrate the ability to generate content at multiple depths, and we provide a path for the miniaturization of our benchtop prototype into a sunglasses-like form factor.
Massively parallel rendering of complex closed-form implicit surfaces
Authors: Keeter Matthew J. 
Published: August 2020

We present a new method for directly rendering complex closed-form implicit surfaces on modern GPUs, taking advantage of their massive parallelism. Our model representation is unambiguously solid, can be sampled at arbitrary resolution, and supports both constructive solid geometry (CSG) and more unusual modeling operations (e.g. smooth blending of shapes). The rendering strategy scales to large-scale models with thousands of arithmetic operations in their underlying mathematical expressions. Our method only requires
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continuity, allowing for warping and blending operations which break Lipshitz continuity.

To render a model, its underlying expression is evaluated in a shallow hierarchy of spatial regions, using a high branching factor for efficient parallelization. Interval arithmetic is used to both skip empty regions and construct reduced versions of the expression. The latter is the optimization that makes our algorithm practical: in one benchmark, expression complexity decreases by two orders of magnitude between the original and reduced expressions. Similar algorithms exist in the literature, but tend to be deeply recursive with heterogeneous workloads in each branch, which makes them GPU-unfriendly; our evaluation and expression reduction both run efficiently as massively parallel algorithms, entirely on the GPU.
The resulting system renders complex implicit surfaces in high resolution and at interactive speeds. We examine how performance scales with computing power, presenting performance results on hardware ranging from older laptops to modern data-center GPUs, and showing significant improvements at each stage.
An implicit compressible SPH solver for snow simulation
Authors: Gissler Christoph , Henne Andreas , Band Stefan , Peer Andreas , Teschner Matthias 
Published: August 2020

Snow is a complex material. It resists elastic normal and shear deformations, while some deformations are plastic. Snow can deform and break. It can be significantly compressed and gets harder under compression. Existing snow solvers produce impressive results. E.g., hybrid Lagrangian/Eulerian techniques have been used to capture all material properties of snow. The auxiliary grid, however, makes it challenging to handle small volumes. In particular, snow fall and accumulation on surfaces have not been demonstrated with these solvers yet. Existing particle-based snow solvers, on the other hand, can naturally handle small snow volumes. However, existing solutions consider simplified material properties. In particular, shear deformation and the hardening effect are typically omitted.
We present a novel Lagrangian snow approach based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). Snow is modeled as an elastoplastic continuous material that captures all above-mentioned effects. The compression of snow is handled by a novel compressible pressure solver, where the typically employed state equation is replaced by an implicit formulation. Acceleration due to shear stress is computed using a second implicit formulation. The linear solvers of the two implicit formulations for accelerations due to shear and normal stress are realized with matrix-free implementations. Using implicit formulations and solving them with matrix-free solvers allows to couple the snow to other phases and is beneficial to the stability and the time step size, i.e., performance of the approach. Solid boundaries are represented with particles and a novel implicit formulation is used to handle friction at solid boundaries. We show that our approach can simulate accumulation, deformation, breaking, compression and hardening of snow. Furthermore, we demonstrate two-way coupling with rigid bodies, interaction with incompressible and highly viscous fluids and phase change from fluid to snow.