bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Liver Parenchyma Transection‐First Approach for Laparoscopic Left Hemihepatectomy: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis
Authors: Liu Qinqin , Li Jing , Zhou Ledu , Gu Huiying , Wu Ke , You Nan , Wang Zheng , Wang Liang , Zhu Yinan , Gan Hui , Zheng Lu 
Published: November 2020

AbstractBackgroundLaparoscopic major liver resection, such as laparoscopic left hemihepatectomy (LLH), is still perceived as a complicated procedure due to technical difficulties and slow learning curve. The study introduced an optimized procedure using the liver parenchyma transection‐first approach and investigated its advantages on surgical outcomes by comparison with the conventional hilar dissection approach for LLH.MethodsBetween January 2015 and May 2019, 96 patients who underwent laparoscopic left hemihepatectomy for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were enrolled in the study. Among these, 41 patients underwent the liver parenchyma transection‐first approach (LP‐first group) and the other 55 underwent the conventional hilar dissection approach (conventional group). A 1:1 propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to compare the perioperative and long‐term oncological outcomes of the two groups.ResultsAfter 1:1 PSM, 37 patients in each group were selected for further analysis. The LP‐first group was associated with shorter median operative time (210 vs 235 min, P = 0.035) and less blood loss (200 vs 300 mL, P = 0.410). In addition, no statistical differences were found in overall complications between the two groups (8.1% vs 24.3%, P = 0.058). There were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of 1‐year and 3‐year disease‐free survival (DFS, P = 0.608) and overall survival (OS, P = 0.414).ConclusionThe prior liver parenchyma approach for LLH is safe and reproducible in selected patients, which showed improved perioperative outcomes and comparable long‐term oncological outcomes compared with the conventional approach.
A drug-induced hypotensive challenge to verify catheter-based radiofrequency renal denervation in an obese hypertensive swine model
Authors: Lauder Lucas , Moon L. Boyce , Pipenhagen Catherine A. , Ewen Sebastian , Fish Jeffrey M. , Virmani Renu , Jensen James A. , Böhm Michael , Mahfoud Felix 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Objective
Sham-controlled trials provided proof-of-principle for the blood pressure-lowering effect of catheter-based renal denervation (RDN). However, indicators for the immediate assessment of treatment success are lacking. This study sought to investigate the impact of RDN on renal renin arteriovenous difference (renal renin AV-Δ) following a hypotensive challenge (HC).

Methods
Twelve hypertensive Ossabaw swine underwent either combined surgical and chemical (n = 3) or catheter-based RDN (n = 9). A telemetry monitor was implanted to acquire hemodynamic data continuously. Before and after RDN, a sodium nitroprusside-induced HC was performed. Renal renin AV-Δ was calculated as the difference of plasma renin concentrations drawn from the renal artery and vein.

Results
In total, complete renal renin AV data were obtained in eight animals at baseline and six animals at baseline and 3 months of follow-up. Baseline renal renin AV-Δ correlated inversely with change in 24-h minimum systolic (− 0.764, p = 0.02), diastolic (r = − 0.679, p = 0.04), and mean (r = − 0.663, p = 0.05) blood pressure. In the animals with complete renin secretion data at baseline and follow-up, the HC increased renal renin AV-Δ at baseline, while this effect was attenuated following RDN (0.55 ± 0.34 pg/ml versus − 0.10 ± 0.16 pg/ml, p = 0.003). Renin urinary excretion remained unchanged throughout the study (baseline 0.286 ± 0.187 pg/ml versus termination 0.305 ± 0.072 pg/ml, p = 0.789).

Conclusion
Renin secretion induced by HC was attenuated following RDN and may serve as an indicator for patient selection and guide successful RDN procedures.
A Blueprint for Inclusion: Talcott Parsons, the Societal Community and the Future of Universalistic Solidarities
Authors: Sciortino Giuseppe 
Published: November 2020

AbstractIn the last decades of his life, Talcott Parsons was often indicted as conservative. More recently, his analyses of contemporary society have been perceived as obsolete. In the present paper, I argue that both these accounts are wrong. Parsons’s biographical and intellectual profile is clearly – and rather consistently – that of a New Deal liberal. His “ate” works, moreover, articulate an original view of the integrative processes in modern societies that is still both theoretically compelling and politically relevant. Parsons’s view of modernity has made possible the development of a sophisticated theory of societal pluralism, able to deal analytically with the astonishing variety of structural strains (and resources) arising from an increasingly diverse – in racial, religious, ethnic, sexual and moral terms - membership in contemporary societies. His sociological enthusiasm for inclusion has never been blind to the likelihood of backlashes and the strength of discontent such inclusion may bring. His work provides thus some important directions in the current storm.
Effectiveness of a Brief Teaching Scenario in a Phantom-Based Learning Model for Students to Achieve Ultrasound-Guided Vascular Access—a Prospective Study
Authors: Jagoda Philippe , Stroeder Jonas , Buecker Arno , Gawlitza Joshua , Frenzel Felix , Raczeck Paul 
Published: November 2020

AbstractFor students, early hands-on experience is very limited and often non-existent during study time. Thus, we aimed to evaluate the progress of inexperienced medical students in successfully establishing an ultrasound-guided vessel access. One brief, condensed single teaching lesson in a prior to post-teaching scenario was performed using an inexpensive, self-made phantom model. In this prospective study, medical students (n = 11) with no experience in ultrasound imaging performed an ultrasound-guided vessel access simulated by a gelatin-based phantom model. Success rates and time of procedures were measured. Afterwards, participants underwent dedicated supervised teaching in a single lesson (duration 30 min) with both theoretical information given and practical training skills shown. Then, every student performed the very same procedure again and results were compared with paired t test. Success rate of guide wire placement rose from 36.4 (4/11) to 100%. Mean number of attempts significantly decreased with 2.5 SD1.3 before and 1.2 SD0.4 after teaching (p < 0.05). Overall time to successful guide wire placement improved from 291 SD8 to 151 SD37 s (p < 0.05). With already limited training time and opportunities available during medical education, short and simple, but highly effective training tools are invaluable. With the help of an inexpensive, self-made gelatin-based phantom model for ultrasound-guided vascular access, medical students demonstrate significantly improved practical puncture skills after only one brief, condensed teaching lesson and thus an important progress with regard to their future clinical routine. The performance of ultrasound-guided vascular access can be highly improved for inexperienced medical students by applying one short teaching session using an inexpensive, self-made phantom model.
Total Umwelten Create Shared Meaning the Emergent Properties of Animal Groups as a Result of Social Signalling
Authors: Lewis Amelia 
Published: November 2020

AbstractIn this paper, I discuss the concept of ‘shared meaning’, and the relationship between a shared understanding of signs within an animal social group and the Umwelten of individuals within the group. I explore the concept of the ‘Total Umwelt’, as described by Tønnesen, (2003), and use examples from the traditional ethology literature to demonstrate how semiotic principles can not only be applied, but underpin the observations made in animal social biology. Traditionally, neo-Darwinian theories of evolution concentrate on ‘fitness’ or an organism’s capacity to survive and reproduce in its own environmental niche. However, this process also relies on underlying signs and sign processes, which are often over-looked in traditional ethology and behavioural ecology. Biosemiotics, however, places the emphasis on sign process, with signs and signals comprising a semiosphere. Significantly, whilst the semiosphere is formulated as physical phenomena, specifically energetic and material signs which can be detected and transmitted as signals from one individual to another, it is the Umwelten of living organisms which give those signals meaning. Further, two or more Umwelten can merge, giving rise to a ‘Total Umwelt’, which facilitates shared meaning of signs between two or more individuals. Across and within generations, this gives rise to cultural interpretation of signs within populations. I argue this is the fundamental basis for emergent group properties in social species, or indeed in solitary living species where individuals interact to mate, defend territories or resources, or in raising altricial young. I therefore discuss a fusion of traditional behavioural ecology- based theory with semiotics, to examine the phenomenon of ‘shared meaning’ in animal social groups.
Applying software-defined networking to support telemedicine health consultation during and post Covid-19 era
Authors: Jnr. Bokolo Anthony , Nweke Livinus Obiora , Al-Sharafi Mohammed A. 
Published: November 2020

AbstractThe novel coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) infection has altered the society, economy, and entire healthcare system. Whilst this pandemic has presented the healthcare system with unprecedented challenges, it has rapidly promoted the adoption of telemedicine to deliver healthcare at a distance. Telemedicine is the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for collecting, organizing, storing, retrieving, and exchanging medical information. But it is faced with the limitations of conventional IP-based protocols which makes it challenging to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for telemedicine due to issues arising from network congestion. Likewise, medical professionals adopting telemedicine are affected with low QoS during health consultations with outpatients due to increased internet usage. Therefore, this study proposes a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based telemedicine architecture to provide QoS during telemedicine health consultations. This study utilizes secondary data from existing research works in the literature to provide a roadmap for the application of SDN to improve QoS in telemedicine during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from this study present a practical approach for applying SDN in telemedicine to provide appropriate bandwidth and facilitate real time transmission of medical data.
Overcoming Fear by Recollecting the Buddha: His Role in Early Buddhist Texts
Authors: Anālayo Bhikkhu 
Published: November 2020

AbstractThe employment of mindfulness in a traditional setting includes the practice of recollection, which can serve to counter fear. In the early discourses, the role of the Buddha as the object of such recollection is not to embody some kind of cosmic principle, as has recently been suggested by Eviatar Shulman. Instead, the inspiration to be gained from recollecting the Buddha springs in particular from his having become totally free from defilements and teaching others how to do the same.
Drilling data quality improvement and information extraction with case studies
Authors: Geekiyanage Suranga C. H. , Tunkiel Andrzej , Sui Dan 
Published: November 2020

AbstractData analytics is a process of data acquiring, transforming, interpreting, modelling, displaying and storing data with an aim of extracting useful information, so that decision-making, actions executing, events detecting and incidents managing can be handled in an efficient and certain manner. However, data analytics also meets some challenges, for instance, data corruption due to noises, time delays, missing and external disturbances, etc. This paper focuses on data quality improvement to cleanse, improve and interpret the post-well or real-time data to preserve and enhance data features, like accuracy, consistency, reliability and validity. In this study, laboratory data and field data are used to illustrate data issues and show data quality improvements with using different data processing methods. Case study clearly demonstrates that the proper data quality management process and information extraction methods are essential to carry out an intelligent digitalization in oil and gas industry.
Utility of phrenic nerve ultrasound in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Authors: Suratos Cezar Thomas , Takamatsu Naoko , Yamazaki Hiroki , Osaki Yusuke , Fukumoto Tatsuya , Nodera Hiroyuki , Izumi Yuishin 
Published: November 2020

AbstractAmyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting the upper and lower motor neurons causing progressive weakness. It eventually involves the diaphragm which leads to respiratory paralysis and subsequently death. Phrenic nerve (PN) conduction studies and diaphragm ultrasound has been studied and correlated with pulmonary function tests in ALS patients. However, PN ultrasonography has not been employed in ALS. This study aims to sonographically evaluate the morphologic appearance of the PN of ALS patients. Thirty-eight ALS patients and 28 normal controls referred to the neurophysiology laboratory of two institutions were retrospectively included in the study. Baseline demographic and clinical variables such as disease duration, ALS Functional Rating Scale-Revised score, and ALS region of onset were collected. Ultrasound was used to evaluate the PN cross-sectional area (CSA) of ALS and control subjects. The mean PN CSA of ALS patients were 1.08 ± 0.39 mm on the right and 1.02 ± 0.34 mm on the left. The PN CSA of ALS patients were significantly decreased compared to controls (p value < 0.00001). The PN CSA of ALS patients was not correlated to any of the demographic and clinical parameters tested. This study demonstrates that ALS patients have a smaller PN size compared to controls using ultrasonography.
A pareto ensemble based spectral clustering framework
Authors: Luo Juanjuan , Ma Huadong , Zhou Dongqing 
Published: November 2020

AbstractSimilarity matrix has a significant effect on the performance of the spectral clustering, and how to determine the neighborhood in the similarity matrix effectively is one of its main difficulties. In this paper, a “divide and conquer” strategy is proposed to model the similarity matrix construction task by adopting Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). The whole procedure is divided into two phases, phase I aims to determine the nonzero entries of the similarity matrix, and Phase II aims to determine the value of the nonzero entries of the similarity matrix. In phase I, the main contribution is that we model the task as a biobjective dynamic optimization problem, which optimizes the diversity and the similarity at the same time. It makes each individual determine one nonzero entry for each sample, and the encoding length decreases toO(N) in contrast with the non-ensemble multiobjective spectral clustering. In addition, a specific initialization operator and diversity preservation strategy are proposed during this phase. In phase II, three ensemble strategies are designed to determine the value of the nonzero value of the similarity matrix. Furthermore, this Pareto ensemble framework is extended to semi-supervised clustering by transforming the semi-supervised information to constraints. In contrast with the previous multiobjective evolutionary-based spectral clustering algorithms, the proposed Pareto ensemble-based framework makes a balance between time cost and the clustering accuracy, which is demonstrated in the experiments section.
Investigating the flexural strength of recycled cast glass
Authors: Bristogianni Telesilla , Oikonomopoulou Faidra , Yu Rong , Veer Fred A. , Nijsse Rob 
Published: November 2020

AbstractCurrently, tons of high quality commercial glass are down-cycled or landfilled due to contaminants that prevent close-loop recycling. Yet, this glass is potentially a valuable resource for casting robust and aesthetically unique building components. Exploring the potential of this idea, different types of non-recyclable silicate glasses are kiln-cast into$$30\times 30\times 240$$30×30×240 mm beams, at relatively low temperatures (820–1120$$\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}$$∘C). The defects occurring in the glass specimens due to cullet contamination and the high viscosity of the glass melt, are documented and correlated to the casting parameters. Then, the kiln-cast specimens and industrially manufactured reference beams are tested in four-point bending, obtaining a flexural strength range of 9–72 MPa. The results are analysed according to the role of the chemical composition, level of contamination and followed casting parameters, in determining the flexural strength, the Young’s modulus and the prevailing strength-limiting flaw. Chemical compositions of favourable performance are highlighted, so as critical flaws responsible for a dramatic decrease in strength, up to 75%. The defects situated in the glass bulk, however, are tolerated by the glass network and have minor impact on flexural strength and Young’s modulus. The prerequisites for good quality recycled cast glass building components are identified and an outline for future research is provided.
In vitro vs in vivo: does the study’s interface design influence crowdsourced video QoE?
Authors: Borchert Kathrin , Seufert Anika , Gamboa Edwin , Hirth Matthias , Hoßfeld Tobias 
Published: November 2020

AbstractEvaluating the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video streaming and its influence factors has become paramount for streaming providers, as they want to maintain high satisfaction for their customers. In this context, crowdsourced user studies became a valuable tool to evaluate different factors which can affect the perceived user experience on a large scale. In general, most of these crowdsourcing studies either use, what we refer to, as an in vivo or an in vitro interface design. In vivo design means that the study participant has to rate the QoE of a video that is embedded in an application similar to a real streaming service, e.g., YouTube or Netflix. In vitro design refers to a setting, in which the video stream is separated from a specific service and thus, the video plays on a plain background. Although these interface designs vary widely, the results are often compared and generalized. In this work, we use a crowdsourcing study to investigate the influence of three interface design alternatives, an in vitro and two in vivo designs with different levels of interactiveness, on the perceived video QoE. Contrary to our expectations, the results indicate that there is no significant influence of the study’s interface design in general on the video experience. Furthermore, we found that the in vivo design does not reduce the test takers’ attentiveness. However, we observed that participants who interacted with the test interface reported a higher video QoE than other groups.
A systematic review of the physical activity levels of acutely ill older adults in Hospital At Home settings: an under-researched field
Authors: Scott Jennifer , Abaraogu Ukachukwu O. , Ellis Graham , Giné-Garriga Maria , Skelton Dawn A. 
Published: November 2020

Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this review was to identify, evaluate and synthesise existing evidence reporting the physical activity levels of acutely ill older patients in a ‘Hospital At Home’ setting and compare this to patients with similar characteristics treated in a traditional hospital inpatient setting. Functional changes and any adverse outcomes due to physical activity (e.g. falls) in both settings where PA was reported or recorded were also evaluated as secondary outcomes.

Methods
A search strategy was devised for the MEDLINE, CINAHL, AMed, PEDRO, OT Seeker and Cochrane databases. Search results were title, abstract and full-text reviewed by two independent researchers. Data were extracted from included articles using a custom form and assessed for quality and risk of bias using the Appraisal Tool for Cross-Sectional Studies.

Results
No studies set in the Hospital at Home environments were identified. 16 hospital inpatient studies met the criteria for inclusion. Older patients managed in inpatient settings that would be eligible for Hospital at Home services spent 6.6% of their day active and undertook only 881.8 daily steps. Functional change was reported in four studies with both improvement and decline during admission reported.

Conclusion
There is a lack of published research on the physical activity levels of acutely-ill older adults in Hospital at Home settings. This review has identified a baseline level of activity for older acutely ill patients that would be suitable for Hospital at Home treatment. This data could be used as a basis of comparison in future hospital at home studies, which should also include functional change outcomes to further explore the relationship between physical inactivity and functional decline.
Inference and Search on Graph-Structured Spaces
Authors: Wu Charley M. , Schulz Eric , Gershman Samuel J. 
Published: November 2020

AbstractHow do people learn functions on structured spaces? And how do they use this knowledge to guide their search for rewards in situations where the number of options is large? We study human behavior on structures with graph-correlated values and propose a Bayesian model of function learning to describe and predict their behavior. Across two experiments, one assessing function learning and one assessing the search for rewards, we find that our model captures human predictions and sampling behavior better than several alternatives, generates human-like learning curves, and also captures participants’ confidence judgements. Our results extend past models of human function learning and reward learning to more complex, graph-structured domains.
Structural and functional characterization of proteins from the fire blight pathogen Erwinia amylovora. A review on the state of the art
Authors: Benini Stefano 
Published: November 2020

AbstractTogether with genome analysis and knock-out mutants, structural and functional characterization of proteins provide valuable hints on the biology of the organism under investigation. Structural characterization can be achieved by techniques such as X-ray crystallography, NMR, Cryo-EM. The information derived from the structure are a good starting point to comprehend the details of the proteins molecular function for a better understanding of their biological role. This review aims at describing the progress in the structural and functional characterization of proteins from the plant pathogen Erwinia amylovora obtained by structural biology and currently deposited in the Protein Data Bank.