bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Drugs in bone: Detectability of substances of toxicological interest in different states of preservation
Authors: Franceschetti Lorenzo , Di Candia Domenico , Giordano Gaia , Carabelli Irene , Vignali Giulia , Cattaneo Cristina 
Published: November 2020

AbstractIn forensic contexts of advanced decomposition, when conventional matrices are no longer available for toxicological analyses, finding alternative matrices is necessary. The skeleton, which is fundamental for anthropologists and geneticists, could be useful also for toxicological purposes. The present study aims to examine what kind of information toxicological analysis performed on bones (the cranium and the ribs) in different states of preservation could provide to the forensic practitioner. Thirty cadavers with known pharmacological history, subjected to forensic autopsy at the Institute of Legal Medicine of Milan, were selected. Rib and cranium samples were collected from each body and separated into two parts in order to create two different states of preservation: One was cleaned from soft tissues and analyzed as a well‐preserved bone sample; the other was submitted to a long maceration process, simulating complete skeletonization. All specimens were then processed with accelerated solvent extraction and the eluates analyzed using Q‐Exactive™ Orbitrap™ Mass Spectrometer. The analysis of blood and skeletal matrices showed positive results for the tested substances in 63% of cases, mainly benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and drug abuse. Significant Pearson correlations were observed between non‐macerated vs. macerated bone samples: r = 0.79 for rib samples, r = 0.61 for cranium samples, and r = 0.69 for all bone samples. As a consequence, the positive results confirm the potential of the bone tissue as an alternative matrix in forensic toxicology, even in cases of extremely decomposed bodies. This study also highlighted important elements for reconstructing the biological profile in cases of forensic anthropological concern.
COVID‐19 risk in elective surgery during a second wave: a prospective cohort study
Authors: Myles Paul S. , Wallace Sophie , Story David A. , Brown Wendy , Cheng Allen C. , Forbes Andrew , Sidiropoulos Sofia , Davidson Andrew , Tan Niki , Jeffreys Andrew , Hodgson Russell , Scott David A. , Radnor Jade 
Published: November 2020

AbstractBackgroundThe COVID‐19 pandemic has greatly affected access to elective surgery, largely because of concerns for patients and healthcare workers. A return to normal surgery workflow depends on the prevalence and transmission of coronavirus in elective surgical patients. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of active SARS‐coronavirus‐2 infection during a second wave among patients admitted to hospital for elective surgery in Victoria.MethodsProspective cohort study across eight hospitals in Victoria during July–August 2020 was conducted enrolling adults and children admitted to hospital for elective surgery or interventional procedure requiring general anaesthesia. Study outcomes included a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for SARS‐CoV‐2 in the preoperative period (primary outcome), and for those with a negative test preoperatively, the incidence of a positive PCR test for SARS‐CoV‐2 in the post‐operative period.ResultsWe enrolled 4965 elective adult and paediatric surgical patients from 15 July to 31 August 2020. Four patients screened negative on questionnaire but had a positive PCR test for coronavirus, resulting in a Bayesian estimated prevalence of 0.12% (95% probability interval 0–0.26%). There were no reports of healthcare worker infections linked to elective surgery during and up to 2 weeks after the study period.ConclusionThe prevalence of SARS‐CoV‐2 in asymptomatic elective surgical patients during a second wave was approximately 1 in 833. Given the very low likelihood of coronavirus transmission, and with existing current hospital capacity, recommencement of elective surgery should be considered. A coronavirus screening checklist should be mandated for surgical patients.
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

AbstractIntroductionIn 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 methodsNIPT 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.ResultsA 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.ConclusionsThe 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

AbstractAimsReduced 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.MethodsCKD 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.ResultsHigher 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.ConclusionsAcute 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

AbstractInverse 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

AbstractWe 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

AbstractIn 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

AbstractThe 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

AbstractRod‐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

AbstractIn 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

AbstractMonte‐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

AbstractMost 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

AbstractProcedural 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

Abstract3D 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.