bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Crop Insurance in the EU: Lessons and Caution from the US
Authors: Santeramo Fabio G. , Ford Ramsey A. 
Published: July 2017

SummaryRecent changes in the Common Agricultural Policy suggest the possibility of an enlarged crop insurance programme in Europe (Art. 37–39 of EU Reg. 1305/2013). Several countries in the European Union already have national crop insurance schemes, but the performance of these programmes in terms of realised demand has been low, and at EU level the participation in crop insurance programmes is around 20 per cent. This situation can be contrasted with the federal crop insurance programme in the US which covers the majority of all agricultural land. We review the existing programmes in the EU and US to provide direction on two questions: is there any justification for subsidised crop insurance and how could such a scheme possibly be implemented in the EU? We argue that, while in the long run it may be desirable to establish an EU‐wide crop insurance programme, there are several serious impediments to implementation in terms of effectiveness and feasibility. A more immediate approach could be increased flexibility of national insurance systems. In particular, weather‐based index insurance and revenue insurance present possible solutions that may be worthy of consideration at the national level.
Post‐pyloric feeding tube placement in critically ill patients: Extending the scope of practice for Australian dietitians
Authors: Yandell Rosalie , Chapman Marianne , O'Connor Stephanie , Shanks Alison , Lange Kylie , Deane Adam 
Published: July 2017

AimTo determine whether the placement of a post‐pyloric feeding tube (PPFT) can be taught safely and effectively to a critical care dietitian.MethodsThis is a prospective observational study conducted in an adult intensive care unit (ICU). The intervention consisted of 19 attempts at post‐pyloric intubation by the dietitian. The 10 ‘learning’ attempts were performed by the dietitian under the direction of an experienced (having completed in excess of 50 successful tube placements) user. A subsequent nine ‘consolidation’ attempts were performed under the responsibility of the intensive care consultant on duty. The primary outcome measures were success (i.e. tip of the PPFT being visible in or distal to the duodenum on X‐ray) and time (minutes) to PPFT placement. Patients were observed for adverse events per standard clinical practice.ResultsA total of 19 post‐pyloric tube placements were attempted in 18 patients (52 (23–70) years, ICU admission diagnoses: trauma n = 4; respiratory failure n = 3; and burns, pancreatitis and renal failure n = 2 each). No adverse events occurred. Most (75%) patients were sedated, and mechanically ventilated. Prokinetics were used to assist tube placement in 11% (2/19) of attempts, both of which were successful. Placement of PPFT was successful in 58% (11/19) of attempts. Whilst training, the success rate was 40% (4/10) compared with 78% (7/9) once training was consolidated (P = 0.17). In the successful attempts, the mean time to placement was 11.0 minutes (3.9–27.1 minutes).ConclusionsA dietitian can be trained to safely and successfully place PPFT in critically ill patients.
Whole mitochondrial genome capture from faecal samples and museum‐preserved specimens
Authors: van der Valk Tom , Lona Durazo Frida , Dalén Love , Guschanski Katerina 
Published: July 2017

AbstractPopulation‐scale molecular studies of endangered and cryptic species are often limited by access to high‐quality samples. The use of noninvasively collected samples or museum‐preserved specimens reduces the pressure on modern populations by removing the need to capture and handle live animals. However, endogenous DNA content in such samples is low, making shotgun sequencing a financially prohibitive approach. Here, we apply a target enrichment method to retrieve mitochondrial genomes from 65 museum specimens and 56 noninvasively collected faecal samples of two endangered great ape species, Grauer's gorilla and the eastern chimpanzee. We show that the applied method is suitable for a wide range of sample types that differ in endogenous DNA content, increasing the proportion of target reads to over 300‐fold. By systematically evaluating biases introduced during target enrichment of pooled museum samples, we show that capture is less efficient for fragments shorter or longer than the baits, that the proportion of human contaminating reads increases postcapture although capture efficiency is lower for human compared to gorilla fragments with a gorilla‐generated bait, and that the rate of jumping PCR is considerable, but can be controlled for with a double‐barcoding approach. We succeed in capturing complete mitochondrial genomes from faecal samples, but observe reduced capture efficiency as sequence divergence increases between the bait and target species. As previously shown for museum specimens, we demonstrate here that mitochondrial genome capture from field‐collected faecal samples is a robust and reliable approach for population‐wide studies of nonmodel organisms.
Predicting QRS and PR interval prolongations in humans using nonclinical data
Authors: Bergenholm L , Parkinson J , Mettetal J , Evans N D , Chappell M J , Collins T 
Published: July 2017

Background and PurposeRisk of cardiac conduction slowing (QRS/PR prolongations) is assessed prior to clinical trials using in vitro and in vivo studies. Understanding the quantitative translation of these studies to the clinical situation enables improved risk assessment in the nonclinical phase.Experimental ApproachFour compounds that prolong QRS and/or PR (AZD1305, flecainide, quinidine and verapamil) were characterized using in vitro (sodium/calcium channels), in vivo (guinea pigs/dogs) and clinical data. Concentration‐matched translational relationships were developed based on in vitro and in vivo modelling, and the in vitro to clinical translation of AZD1305 was quantified using an in vitro model.Key ResultsMeaningful (10%) human QRS/PR effects correlated with low levels of in vitro Nav1.5 block (3–7%) and Cav1.2 binding (13–21%) for all compounds. The in vitro model developed using AZD1305 successfully predicted QRS/PR effects for the remaining drugs. Meaningful QRS/PR changes in humans correlated with small effects in guinea pigs and dogs (QRS 2.3–4.6% and PR 2.3–10%), suggesting that worst‐case human effects can be predicted by assuming four times greater effects at the same concentration from dog/guinea pig data.Conclusion and ImplicationsSmall changes in vitro and in vivo consistently translated to meaningful PR/QRS changes in humans across compounds. Assuming broad applicability of these approaches to assess cardiovascular safety risk for non–arrhythmic drugs, this study provides a means of predicting human QRS/PR effects of new drugs from effects observed in nonclinical studies.
Brain serotoninergic nervous system is involved in bombesin‐induced frequent urination through brain 5‐HT7 receptors in rats
Authors: Shimizu Takahiro , Shimizu Shogo , Wada Naoki , Takai Shun , Shimizu Nobutaka , Higashi Youichirou , Kadekawa Katsumi , Majima Tsuyoshi , Saito Motoaki , Yoshimura Naoki 
Published: July 2017

Background and PurposePsychological stress exacerbates symptoms of urinary bladder dysfunction; however, the underlying brain mechanisms are unclear. We have demonstrated that centrally administered bombesin, a stress‐related neuropeptide, facilitates the rat micturition reflex. Brain bombesin‐like peptides modulate the serotoninergic nervous system activity under stress conditions; therefore, we examined whether brain 5‐HT is involved in the bombesin‐induced increased frequency of urination in urethane‐anaesthetised male Sprague–Dawley rats.Experimental ApproachEvaluation of intercontraction intervals (ICI) and maximal voiding pressure (MVP) during cystometrograms were started 1 h before i.c.v. administration of bombesin or i.c.v. pretreatment with the 5‐HT receptor antagonists.Key ResultsBombesin (0.03 nmol per animal, i.c.v.) significantly reduced ICI without affecting MVP. The bombesin‐induced response was significantly suppressed by acute depletion of brain 5‐HT, which was induced by pretreatment with p‐chlorophenylalanine, a 5‐HT synthesis inhibitor. Bombesin at a lower dose (0.01 nmol per animal, i.c.v.) showed no significant effect on ICI, while it significantly reduced ICI in the presence of WAY‐100635 (5‐HT1A receptor antagonist, 0.1 or 0.3 μg per animal, i.c.v.), which can block the negative feedback control of 5‐HT release. Bombesin (0.03 nmol per animal)‐induced ICI reduction was significantly attenuated by SB269970 (5‐HT7 receptor antagonist, 0.1 or 0.3 μg per animal, i.c.v.) but not by ritanserin (5‐HT2 receptor antagonist, 0.3 or 1 μg per animal, i.c.v.).Conclusions and ImplicationsThe brain serotoninergic nervous system is involved in the facilitation of the rat micturition reflex induced by bombesin‐like peptides at least in part through brain 5‐HT7 receptors.
Compactly Supported Biorthogonal Wavelet Bases on the Body Centered Cubic Lattice
Authors: Horacsek J.J. , Alim U.R. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractIn this work, we present a family of compact, biorthogonal wavelet filter banks that are applicable to the Body Centered Cubic (BCC) lattice. While the BCC lattice has been shown to have superior approximation properties for volumetric data when compared to the Cartesian Cubic (CC) lattice, there has been little work in the way of designing wavelet filter banks that respect the geometry of the BCC lattice. Since wavelets have applications in signal de‐noising, compression, and sparse signal reconstruction, these filter banks are an important tool that addresses some of the scalability concerns presented by the BCC lattice. We use these filters in the context of volumetric data compression and reconstruction and qualitatively evaluate our results by rendering images of isosurfaces from compressed data.
Constructing and Evaluating Visualisation Task Classifications: Process and Considerations
Authors: Kerracher N. , Kennedy J. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractCategorising tasks is a common pursuit in the visualisation research community, with a wide variety of taxonomies, typologies, design spaces, and frameworks having been developed over the last three decades. While these classifications are universally purported to be useful in both the design and evaluation processes and in guiding future research, remarkably little attention has been paid to how these frameworks have—and can be—constructed and evaluated. In this paper we review the task classification literature and report on current practices in construction and evaluation. We consider the stages of task classification construction and identify the associated threats to validity arising at each stage and in response to the different methods employed. We provide guidance on suitable validation approaches in order to mitigate these threats. We also consider the appropriateness of evaluation strategies according to the different aspects of the classification which they evaluate. In so doing, we seek to provide guidance for developers of classifications in determining appropriate construction and evaluation strategies when developing a classification, and also for those selecting between competing classifications for use in the design and evaluation processes.
Glyph‐Based Comparative Stress Tensor Visualization in Cerebral Aneurysms
Authors: Meuschke M. , Voß S. , Beuing O. , Preim B. , Lawonn K. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractWe present the first visualization tool that enables a comparative depiction of structural stress tensor data for vessel walls of cerebral aneurysms. Such aneurysms bear the risk of rupture, whereas their treatment also carries considerable risks for the patient. Medical researchers emphasize the importance of analyzing the interaction of morphological and hemodynamic information for the patient‐specific rupture risk evaluation and treatment analysis. Tensor data such as the stress inside the aneurysm walls characterizes the interplay between the morphology and blood flow and seems to be an important rupture‐prone criterion. We use different glyph‐based techniques to depict local stress tensors simultaneously and compare their applicability to cerebral aneurysms in a user study. We thus offer medical researchers an effective visual exploration tool to assess the aneurysm rupture risk. We developed a GPU‐based implementation of our techniques with a flexible interactive data exploration mechanism. Our depictions are designed in collaboration with domain experts, and we provide details about the evaluation.
Overview + Detail Visualization for Ensembles of Diffusion Tensors
Authors: Zhang C. , Caan M.W.A. , Höllt T. , Eisemann E. , Vilanova A. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractA Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) group study consists of a collection of volumetric diffusion tensor datasets (i.e., an ensemble) acquired from a group of subjects. The multivariate nature of the diffusion tensor imposes challenges on the analysis and the visualization. These challenges are commonly tackled by reducing the diffusion tensors to scalar‐valued quantities that can be analyzed with common statistical tools. However, reducing tensors to scalars poses the risk of losing intrinsic information about the tensor. Visualization of tensor ensemble data without loss of information is still a largely unsolved problem. In this work, we propose an overview + detail visualization to facilitate the tensor ensemble exploration. We define an ensemble representative tensor and variations in terms of the three intrinsic tensor properties (i.e., scale, shape, and orientation) separately. The ensemble summary information is visually encoded into the newly designed aggregate tensor glyph which, in a spatial layout, functions as the overview. The aggregate tensor glyph guides the analyst to interesting areas that would need further detailed inspection. The detail views reveal the original information that is lost during aggregation. It helps the analyst to further understand the sources of variation and formulate hypotheses. To illustrate the applicability of our prototype, we compare with most relevant previous work through a user study and we present a case study on the analysis of a brain diffusion tensor dataset ensemble from healthy volunteers.
Interactive Regression Lens for Exploring Scatter Plots
Authors: Shao L. , Mahajan A. , Schreck T. , Lehmann D. J. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractData analysis often involves finding models that can explain patterns in data, and reduce possibly large data sets to more compact model‐based representations. In Statistics, many methods are available to compute model information. Among others, regression models are widely used to explain data. However, regression analysis typically searches for the best model based on the global distribution of data. On the other hand, a data set may be partitioned into subsets, each requiring individual models. While automatic data subsetting methods exist, these often require parameters or domain knowledge to work with. We propose a system for visual‐interactive regression analysis for scatter plot data, supporting both global and local regression modeling. We introduce a novel regression lens concept, allowing a user to interactively select a portion of data, on which regression analysis is run in interactive time. The lens gives encompassing visual feedback on the quality of candidate models as it is interactively navigated across the input data. While our regression lens can be used for fully interactive modeling, we also provide user guidance suggesting appropriate models and data subsets, by means of regression quality scores. We show, by means of use cases, that our regression lens is an effective tool for user‐driven regression modeling and supports model understanding.
Visual Exploration of Global Trade Networks with Time‐Dependent and Weighted Hierarchical Edge Bundles on GPU
Authors: Hofmann J. , Größler M. , Rubio‐Sánchez M. , Pichler P.‐P. , Lehmann D. J. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractThe UN Comtrade database is the world's largest repository of bilateral trade data. Their complexity poses a challenge to visualization systems, leading to issues such as scalability and visual clutter. Thus, we propose a radial layout‐based visual exploration system to enable the user to smoothly explore the change over time and to explore different commodity classes at once by using a novel edge bundling concept. We evaluated our system with the aid of a group of domain experts.
Measuring Symmetry in Drawings of Graphs
Authors: Welch E. , Kobourov S. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractLayout symmetry is an important and desired feature in graph drawing. While there is a substantial body of work in computer vision around the detection and measurement of symmetry in images, there has been little effort to define and validate meaningful measures of the symmetry of graph drawings. In this paper, we evaluate two algorithms that have been proposed for measuring graph drawing symmetry, comparing their judgments to those of human subjects, and investigating the use of stress as an alternative measure of symmetry. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of these measures, possible ways to improve them, and implications for the design of algorithms that optimize the symmetry in the layout.
Reverse‐Engineering Visualizations: Recovering Visual Encodings from Chart Images
Authors: Poco Jorge , Heer Jeffrey 
Published: July 2017

AbstractWe investigate how to automatically recover visual encodings from a chart image, primarily using inferred text elements. We contribute an end‐to‐end pipeline which takes a bitmap image as input and returns a visual encoding specification as output. We present a text analysis pipeline which detects text elements in a chart, classifies their role (e.g., chart title, x‐axis label, y‐axis title, etc.), and recovers the text content using optical character recognition. We also train a Convolutional Neural Network for mark type classification. Using the identified text elements and graphical mark type, we can then infer the encoding specification of an input chart image. We evaluate our techniques on three chart corpora: a set of automatically labeled charts generated using Vega, charts from the Quartz news website, and charts extracted from academic papers. We demonstrate accurate automatic inference of text elements, mark types, and chart specifications across a variety of input chart types.
Finding a Clear Path: Structuring Strategies for Visualization Sequences
Authors: Hullman Jessica , Kosara Robert , Lam Heidi 
Published: July 2017

AbstractLittle is known about how people structure sets of visualizations to support sequential viewing. We contribute findings from several studies examining visualization sequencing and reception. In our first study, people made decisions between various possible structures as they ordered a set of related visualizations (consisting of either bar charts or thematic maps) into what they considered the clearest sequence for showing the data. We find that most people structure visualization sequences hierarchically: they create high level groupings based on shared data properties like time period, measure, level of aggregation, and spatial region, then order the views within these groupings. We also observe a tendency for certain types of similarities between views, like a common spatial region or aggregation level, to be seen as more appropriate categories for organizing views in a sequence than others, like a common time period or measure. In a second study, we find that viewers’ perceptions of the quality and intention of different sequences are largely consistent with the perceptions of the users who created them. The understanding of sequence preferences and perceptions that emerges from our studies has implications for the development of visualization authoring tools and sequence recommendations for guided analysis.
Linear Discriminative Star Coordinates for Exploring Class and Cluster Separation of High Dimensional Data
Authors: Wang Yunhai , Li Jingting , Nie Feiping , Theisel Holger , Gong Minglun , Lehmann Dirk J. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractOne main task for domain experts in analysing their nD data is to detect and interpret class/cluster separations and outliers. In fact, an important question is, which features/dimensions separate classes best or allow a cluster‐based data classification. Common approaches rely on projections from nD to 2D, which comes with some challenges, such as: The space of projection contains an infinite number of items. How to find the right one? The projection approaches suffers from distortions and misleading effects. How to rely to the projected class/cluster separation? The projections involve the complete set of dimensions/features. How to identify irrelevant dimensions? Thus, to address these challenges, we introduce a visual analytics concept for the feature selection based on linear discriminative star coordinates (DSC), which generate optimal cluster separating views in a linear sense for both labeled and unlabeled data. This way the user is able to explore how each dimension contributes to clustering. To support to explore relations between clusters and data dimensions, we provide a set of cluster‐aware interactions allowing to smartly iterate through subspaces of both records and features in a guided manner. We demonstrate our features selection approach for optimal cluster/class separation analysis with a couple of experiments on real‐life benchmark high‐dimensional data sets.
Minimum‐Displacement Overlap Removal for Geo‐referenced Data Visualization
Authors: van Garderen M. , Pampel B. , Nocaj A. , Brandes U. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractGiven a set of rectangles embedded in the plane, we consider the problem of adjusting the layout to remove all overlap while preserving the orthogonal order of the rectangles. The objective is to minimize the displacement of the rectangles. We call this problem Minimum-Displacement Overlap Removal (mdor). Our interest in this problem is motivated by the application of displaying metadata of archaeological sites. Because most existing overlap removal algorithms are not designed to minimize displacement while preserving orthogonal order, we present and compare several approaches which are tailored to our particular usecase. We introduce a new overlap removal heuristic which we call reArrange. Although conceptually simple, it is very effective in removing the overlap while keeping the displacement small. Furthermore, we propose an additional procedure to repair the orthogonal order after every iteration, with which we extend both our new heuristic and PRISM, a widely used overlap removal algorithm. We compare the performance of both approaches with and without this order repair method. The experimental results indicate that reArrange is very effective for heterogeneous input data where the overlap is concentrated in few dense regions.
Generating Tile Maps
Authors: McNeill Graham , Hale Scott A. 
Published: July 2017

AbstractTile maps are an important tool in thematic cartography with distinct qualities (and limitations) that distinguish them from better‐known techniques such as choropleths, cartograms and symbol maps. Specifically, tile maps display geographic regions as a grid of identical tiles so large regions do not dominate the viewer's attention and small regions are easily seen. Furthermore, complex data such as time series can be shown on each tile in a consistent format, and the grid layout facilitates comparisons across tiles. Whilst a small number of handcrafted tile maps have become popular, the time‐consuming process of creating new tile maps limits their wider use. To address this issue, we present an algorithm that generates a tile map of the specified type (e.g. square, hexagon, triangle) from raw shape data. Since the ‘best’ tile map depends on the specific geography visualized and the task to be performed, the algorithm generates and ranks multiple tile maps and allows the user to choose the most appropriate. The approach is demonstrated on a range of examples using a prototype browser‐based application.