bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Systematic review: hepatitis C viraemic allografts to hepatitis C‐negative recipients in solid organ transplantation
Authors: Raasikh Taaj , Jamali Taher , Flores Avegail , Cotton Ronald T. , Ramanathan Venkat , Tan Henkie P. , Hernaez Ruben 
Published: July 2021

SummaryBackgroundGiven the success of direct‐acting antivirals (DAAs) in treating hepatitis C (HCV), interest is growing in utilizing solid organs from allografts with active HCV to expand donor availability.AimTo review post‐transplant outcomes and patient survival in HCV‐negative recipients receiving solid organ transplants (SOT) from viraemic, that is, HCV+/NAT+ (nucleic acid testing) allografts.MethodsA literature search was conducted on PubMed and EMBASE from 01/01/2007 to 4/17/2021 for articles matching eligibility criteria. Two authors independently screened titles and abstracts. Disagreements were solved by a third independent reviewer. Methodological quality assessment was done using a modified Newcastle‐Ottawa scale (NOS). Data synthesis was done qualitatively using median, ranges and percentages.ResultsThirty‐five studies were included (or 852 SOTs): 343 kidney, 233 heart, 204 liver, and 72 lung transplants from viraemic allografts. Of the recipients eligible for sustained virological response at 12 weeks (SVR12) calculation, 100% achieved cure from HCV. No deaths/graft failures were reported to be related to HCV transmission. Seven SOT recipients had viral relapse, with all seven patients treated successfully. Four patients developed fibrosing cholestatic hepatitis with complete resolution post‐treatment.ConclusionsTransplanting viraemic organs into uninfected individuals can become the standard of care for patients who do not have contraindications to DAAs.
Inhibition of heat shock protein (HSP) 90 reverses signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 3‐mediated muscle wasting in cancer cachexia mice
Authors: Niu Mengyuan , Song Shiyu , Su Zhonglan , Wei Lulu , Li Li , Pu Wenyuan , Zhao Chen , Ding Yibing , Wang Jinglin , Cao Wangsen , Gao Qian , Wang Hongwei 
Published: July 2021

Background and PurposeCancer cachexia is a common cause of death among cancer patients with no currently effective treatment available. In animal models, aberrant activation of STAT3 in skeletal muscle contributes to muscle wasting. However, clinically the factors regulating STAT3 activation and the molecular mechanisms involved remain incompletely understood.Experimental ApproachThe expression of HSP90 and the activation of STAT3 were detected in muscle from the patients with cancer cachexia or the tumour‐bearing cachectic mice. HSP90 inhibitors, including 17DMAG (alvespimycin) and PU‐H71, were administered to cachexic mice and cachexia parameters, weight loss, food intake, survival rate, body composition, serum metabolites, muscle wasting pathology and catabolic activation were analysed. The co‐culture of C2C12 myotube cells with C26 conditioned media was performed to investigate the pathological mechanism involved in catabolic muscle wasting. The roles of HSP90, STAT3 and FOXO1 in myotube atrophy were explored via overexpression or knockdown.ResultsAn enhanced interaction between activated STAT3 and HSP90 in the skeletal muscle of cancer cachexia patients, is a crucial for the development of cachectic muscle wasting. HSP90 inhibitors 17DMAG and PU‐H71 alleviated the muscle wasting in C26 and models or the myotube atrophy of C2C12 cells induced by C26 conditional medium. Prolonged STAT3 activation transactivated FOXO1 by binding directly to its promoter and triggered the muscle wasting in a FOXO1‐dependent manner in muscle cells.Conclusion and ImplicationsThe HSP90/STAT3/FOXO1 axis plays a critical role in cachectic muscle wasting, which might be a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of cancer cachexia.
Detecting ecological thresholds for biodiversity in tropical forests: Knowledge gaps and future directions
Authors: Shennan‐Farpón Yara , Visconti Piero , Norris Ken 
Published: July 2021

AbstractProtecting tropical forests and their biological diversity is a global priority. Understanding if thresholds of forest cover exist beyond which biodiversity displays non‐linear declines is key to developing appropriate conservation strategies and policies, but uncertainty remains around the identification and characteristics of these thresholds. We performed a global systematic review of studies using forest cover gradient to identify an ecological threshold across tropical forest ecosystems. Our systematic review finds 68 ecological thresholds reported in 33 peer‐reviewed publications. Three main conclusions emerged: first, we show clear geographical gaps in ecological thresholds studies, with 72% of reported thresholds found in South America, over half in Brazil; second, we see ecological threshold studies follow taxonomic biases in line with wider conservation research; and third, there is a lack of homogeneity and comparability in the metrics and sampling designs used to identify a threshold. This global review shows interest in ecological thresholds continues to grow, but further evidence is needed to understand their application in tropical forest management. We identify the main gaps in knowledge and provide guidance to focus research efforts on six key aspects to better understand their potential as a policy‐making tool for tropical forest conservation.Abstract in Spanish is available with online material.
99mTc‐labeled antibiotics for infection diagnosis: Mechanism, action, and progress
Authors: Naqvi Syed Ali Raza 
Published: July 2021

AbstractDiscovery of penicillin marked a turning point in the history of infection therapy which also led to the emergence of bacterial resistance. It is now 100 years to fight with ever‐muted variants of pathogens by developing more and more antibiotics. Since 1987 to todate, no successful class of antibiotic was introduced; this three decade period is known as “the discovery void” period. While, the clinically approved antibiotics are gradually dying in front of bacterial resistance due to which bacterial infections are appearing leading cause of death and disability. Nuclear medicine imaging technique is the strongest modality to diagnose and follow‐up of deep‐seated and complicated infections. However, the selection of radiolabeled antimicrobial agents plays critical role in gaining sensitivity and specificity of the imaging results. This review comprises of two main sections; first section explains antibiotic targets, and second section explains the imaging efficacy of 99mTc‐labeled antimicrobial agents against bacterial infection along with the emphasis on progress and update of 99mTc‐labeled antibiotics as infection imaging probes. The review, in conclusion, could be an acceleration for radiopharmaceutical chemists for designing and developing 99mTc‐labeled antimicrobial agents to improve infection imaging quality.
Children with cerebral palsy: A cross‐sectional study of their sleep and their caregiver's sleep quality, psychological health and well‐being
Authors: Lang Cathryne P. , Boucaut Amanda , Guppy Max , Johnston Leanne M. 
Published: July 2021

AbstractBackgroundChildren with cerebral palsy (CP) are more likely to experience sleep problems. Their sleep difficulties have been shown to be related to poorer sleep quality for their parents and caregivers. While poor sleep has been linked with poorer psychological health in other populations, few studies have focused on the potential effects of children's and caregivers' sleep disturbance on caregivers' psychological health and well‐being in families of children with CP. This study investigated the association between caregivers' psychological health and well‐being and their sleep quality and the sleep of their children with CP.MethodNinety‐four caregivers (86% mothers; age range = 29–76 years) of children with CP aged 4 to 14 years of varying physical abilities (Gross Motor Function Classification Scale expanded and revised—level I (24), II (20), III (16), IV (10), V (24)) were recruited from a state‐wide rehabilitation service. Caregivers completed the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale‐21, Warwick‐Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, Resilience Scale, Pediatric Sleep Questionnaire, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and a demographic questionnaire.ResultsSleep problems were reported for 55% of children. Poor sleep quality was reported by 71% of caregivers. While 25% of caregivers reported positive well‐being and 86% reported high to very high levels of resilience, 44% reported poor psychological health. Child sleep problems were related to poorer caregiver sleep quality (r = 0.47, p < 0.001). Poorer caregiver sleep quality was related to poorer caregiver psychological health (r = 0.43–0.51, all p < 0.001) and well‐being (r = −0.48, p < 0.001), but not resilience (r = 0.18, p = 0.11).ConclusionsHigh numbers of children with CP and their caregivers experience poor sleep that extends far past infancy. Poor sleep quality is associated with poorer psychological health and well‐being for caregivers. Further development of responsive support services that address caregivers' sleep is essential.
The feasibility of family‐centred early intervention for children with disabilities in mainland China: Practitioners' perceptions
Authors: Su Hui , Llewellyn Gwynnyth , Yi Yali , Gao Yaqian , Liu Jinxia 
Published: July 2021

AbstractBackgroundFamily‐centred practice (FCP) has become a recommended practice for early intervention services for children with disabilities in many countries. However, its feasibility in Chinese context has been unclear. This study is the first to explore the perceptions of early intervention service practitioners about the implementation of FCP in mainland China.MethodsFocus groups were employed to collect data from 37 early intervention practitioners who attended a workshop about FCP in Wuhan, China and two officers from the provincial disabled persons' federation. The data were analysed thematically.ResultsFour themes were identified: (a) family‐centred early intervention is possible, (b) traditional concepts are not friendly towards FCP, (c) parents do not collaborate and (d) financing and personal resources are not sufficient to implement FCP. Chinese practitioners agreed with the philosophies of FCP; however, there was concern that widespread implementation may meet conceptual and practical challenges.ConclusionsThe results highlighted practitioners were optimistic and keen for FCP implementation in the Chinese context, but to do so across China may still be some way in the future.
Deep Compositional Denoising for High‐quality Monte Carlo Rendering
Authors: Zhang Xianyao , Manzi Marco , Vogels Thijs , Dahlberg Henrik , Gross Markus , Papas Marios 
Published: July 2021

AbstractWe propose a deep‐learning method for automatically decomposing noisy Monte Carlo renderings into components that kernel‐predicting denoisers can denoise more effectively. In our model, a neural decomposition module learns to predict noisy components and corresponding feature maps, which are consecutively reconstructed by a denoising module. The components are predicted based on statistics aggregated at the pixel level by the renderer. Denoising these components individually allows the use of per‐component kernels that adapt to each component's noisy signal characteristics. Experimentally, we show that the proposed decomposition module consistently improves the denoising quality of current state‐of‐the‐art kernel‐predicting denoisers on large‐scale academic and production datasets.
Real‐time Monte Carlo Denoising with Weight Sharing Kernel Prediction Network
Authors: Fan Hangming , Wang Rui , Huo Yuchi , Bao Hujun 
Published: July 2021

AbstractReal‐time Monte Carlo denoising aims at removing severe noise under low samples per pixel (spp) in a strict time budget. Recently, kernel‐prediction methods use a neural network to predict each pixel's filtering kernel and have shown a great potential to remove Monte Carlo noise. However, the heavy computation overhead blocks these methods from real‐time applications. This paper expands the kernel‐prediction method and proposes a novel approach to denoise very low spp (e.g., 1‐spp) Monte Carlo path traced images at real‐time frame rates. Instead of using the neural network to directly predict the kernel map, i.e., the complete weights of each per‐pixel filtering kernel, we predict an encoding of the kernel map, followed by a high‐efficiency decoder with unfolding operations for a high‐quality reconstruction of the filtering kernels. The kernel map encoding yields a compact single‐channel representation of the kernel map, which can significantly reduce the kernel‐prediction network's throughput. In addition, we adopt a scalable kernel fusion module to improve denoising quality. The proposed approach preserves kernel prediction methods’ denoising quality while roughly halving its denoising time for 1‐spp noisy inputs. In addition, compared with the recent neural bilateral grid‐based real‐time denoiser, our approach benefits from the high parallelism of kernel‐based reconstruction and produces better denoising results at equal time.
DONeRF: Towards Real‐Time Rendering of Compact Neural Radiance Fields using Depth Oracle Networks
Authors: Neff T. , Stadlbauer P. , Parger M. , Kurz A. , Mueller J. H. , Chaitanya C. R. A. , Kaplanyan A. , Steinberger M. 
Published: July 2021

AbstractThe recent research explosion around implicit neural representations, such as NeRF, shows that there is immense potential for implicitly storing high‐quality scene and lighting information in compact neural networks. However, one major limitation preventing the use of NeRF in real‐time rendering applications is the prohibitive computational cost of excessive network evaluations along each view ray, requiring dozens of petaFLOPS. In this work, we bring compact neural representations closer to practical rendering of synthetic content in real‐time applications, such as games and virtual reality. We show that the number of samples required for each view ray can be significantly reduced when samples are placed around surfaces in the scene without compromising image quality. To this end, we propose a depth oracle network that predicts ray sample locations for each view ray with a single network evaluation. We show that using a classification network around logarithmically discretized and spherically warped depth values is essential to encode surface locations rather than directly estimating depth. The combination of these techniques leads to DONeRF, our compact dual network design with a depth oracle network as its first step and a locally sampled shading network for ray accumulation. With DONeRF, we reduce the inference costs by up to 48× compared to NeRF when conditioning on available ground truth depth information. Compared to concurrent acceleration methods for raymarching‐based neural representations, DONeRF does not require additional memory for explicit caching or acceleration structures, and can render interactively (20 frames per second) on a single GPU.
Q‐NET: A Network for Low‐dimensional Integrals of Neural Proxies
Authors: Subr Kartic 
Published: July 2021

AbstractIntegrals of multidimensional functions are often estimated by averaging function values at multiple locations. The use of an approximate surrogate or proxy for the true function is useful if repeated evaluations are necessary. A proxy is even more useful if its own integral is known analytically and can be calculated practically. We design a family of fixed networks, which we call Q‐NETs, that can calculate integrals of functions represented by sigmoidal universal approximators. Q‐NETs operate on the parameters of the trained proxy and can calculate exact integrals over any subset of dimensions of the input domain. Q‐NETs also facilitate convenient recalculation of integrals without resampling the integrand or retraining the proxy, under certain transformations to the input space. We highlight the benefits of this scheme for diverse rendering applications including inverse rendering, sampled procedural noise and visualization. Q‐NETs are appealing in the following contexts: the dimensionality is low (< 10D); integrals of a sampled function need to be recalculated over different sub‐domains; the estimation of integrals needs to be decoupled from the sampling strategy such as when sparse, adaptive sampling is used; marginal functions need to be known in functional form; or when powerful Single Instruction Multiple Data/Thread (SIMD/SIMT) pipelines are available.
Video‐Based Rendering of Dynamic Stationary Environments from Unsynchronized Inputs
Authors: Thonat T. , Aksoy Y. , Aittala M. , Paris S. , Durand F. , Drettakis G. 
Published: July 2021

AbstractImage‐Based Rendering allows users to easily capture a scene using a single camera and then navigate freely with realistic results. However, the resulting renderings are completely static, and dynamic effects – such as fire, waterfalls or small waves – cannot be reproduced. We tackle the challenging problem of enabling free‐viewpoint navigation including such stationary dynamic effects, but still maintaining the simplicity of casual capture. Using a single camera – instead of previous complex synchronized multi‐camera setups – means that we have unsynchronized videos of the dynamic effect from multiple views, making it hard to blend them when synthesizing novel views. We present a solution that allows smooth free‐viewpoint video‐based rendering (VBR) of such scenes using temporal Laplacian pyramid decomposition video, enabling spatio‐temporal blending. For effects such as fire and waterfalls, that are semi‐transparent and occupy 3D space, we first estimate their spatial volume. This allows us to create per‐video geometries and alpha‐matte videos that we can blend using our frequency‐dependent method. We also extend Laplacian blending to the temporal dimension to remove additional temporal seams. We show results on scenes containing fire, waterfalls or rippling waves at the seaside, bringing these scenes to life.
Rendering Point Clouds with Compute Shaders and Vertex Order Optimization
Authors: Schütz Markus , Kerbl Bernhard , Wimmer Michael 
Published: July 2021

AbstractIn this paper, we present several compute‐based point cloud rendering approaches that outperform the hardware pipeline by up to an order of magnitude and achieve significantly better frame times than previous compute‐based methods. Beyond basic closest‐point rendering, we also introduce a fast, high‐quality variant to reduce aliasing. We present and evaluate several variants of our proposed methods with different flavors of optimization, in order to ensure their applicability and achieve optimal performance on a range of platforms and architectures with varying support for novel GPU hardware features. During our experiments, the observed peak performance was reached rendering 796 million points (12.7GB) at rates of 62 to 64 frames per second (50 billion points per second, 802GB/s) on an RTX 3090 without the use of level‐of‐detail structures. We further introduce an optimized vertex order for point clouds to boost the efficiency of GL_POINTS by a factor of 5× in cases where hardware rendering is compulsory. We compare different orderings and show that Morton sorted buffers are faster for some viewpoints, while shuffled vertex buffers are faster in others. In contrast, combining both approaches by first sorting according to Morton‐code and shuffling the resulting sequence in batches of 128 points leads to a vertex buffer layout with high rendering performance and low sensitivity to viewpoint changes.
Optimised Path Space Regularisation
Authors: Weier Philippe , Droske Marc , Hanika Johannes , Weidlich Andrea , Vorba Jiří 
Published: July 2021

AbstractWe present Optimised Path Space Regularisation (OPSR), a novel regularisation technique for forward path tracing algorithms. Our regularisation controls the amount of roughness added to materials depending on the type of sampled paths and trades a small error in the estimator for a drastic reduction of variance in difficult paths, including indirectly visible caustics. We formulate the problem as a joint bias‐variance minimisation problem and use differentiable rendering to optimise our model. The learnt parameters generalise to a large variety of scenes irrespective of their geometric complexity. The regularisation added to the underlying light transport algorithm naturally allows us to handle the problem of near‐specular and glossy path chains robustly. Our method consistently improves the convergence of path tracing estimators, including state‐of‐the‐art path guiding techniques where it enables finding otherwise hard‐to‐sample paths and thus, in turn, can significantly speed up the learning of guiding distributions.
Occupational allergic contact dermatitis: A 24‐year, retrospective cohort study from Turkey
Authors: Özkaya Esen , Elinç Aslan Meryem Sevinç 
Published: July 2021

AbstractBackgroundLimited data exist on occupational allergic contact dermatitis (OACD) in Turkey.ObjectivesTo investigate the epidemiologic profile of OACD in Turkey.MethodsA retrospective cohort study on 294 patients with OACD among 2801 consecutively patch‐tested patients in the Allergy Unit of the Dermatology Department of İstanbul Faculty of Medicine between 1996 and 2019.ResultsThe overall prevalence of OACD was 10.5%, showing a male predominance. OACD was most frequently seen in construction workers (45.2%), followed by hairdressers, metalworkers, health care workers, and miscellaneous. The main relevant allergens were chromium in cement, thiurams in rubber gloves, hairdressing chemicals, resins/glues/plastics, metals, isothiazolinones, and fragrances. Hands were the mainly involved site (95.6%). Airborne eczema was observed in 21.4%. Hand and foot eczema and co‐sensitizations to chrome and thiuram and chrome and cobalt were significantly associated with being a construction worker. Sensitizations to isothiazolinones in house painters, ammonium persulfate and p‐phenylenediamine in hairdressers, and colophonium increased after 2010.ConclusionThis was the largest group of data on OACD from Turkey, reflecting the importance of rubber glove allergy in all occupations and the striking increase in ammonium persulfate allergy among hairdressers. Chrome and cobalt were still the main cement allergens in Turkey, where the cement directive is not yet in force.