bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A delay in radical nephroureterectomy can lead to upstaging
Authors: Waldert Matthias , Karakiewicz Pierre I. , Raman Jay D. , Remzi Mesut , Isbarn Hendrik , Lotan Yair , Capitanio Umberto , Bensalah Karim , Marberger Michael J. , Shariat Shahrokh F. 
Published: September 2009

Study Type – Prognosis (case series) Level of Evidence 4OBJECTIVETo examine the association between the delay from diagnosis of upper‐tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) to radical nephroureterectomy (RNU), and the pathological features and outcomes, as the decision to proceed to RNU for an individual patient is complex.PATIENTS AND METHODSThe records of 187 patients who had RNU were reviewed; the interval from diagnosis to RNU was analysed as both a continuous (months) and categorical variable (<3 vs ≥3 months). Logistic regression and survival analyses were used to evaluate the association between time from diagnosis to RNU with pathological characteristics and clinical outcomes.RESULTSThe median time from diagnosis to RNU was 45 days (interquartile range 68). A delay from diagnosis to RNU analysed as a continuous variable was associated with advanced stage, higher grade, previous endoscopic procedure, tumour necrosis, infiltrative tumour architecture, and lymphovascular invasion (P = 0.034), but not disease recurrence or cancer‐specific mortality. In the subgroup of patients (90, 48.1%) who had muscle‐invasive disease (≥pT2) a longer delay from diagnosis to RNU as a continuous variable was associated with advanced stage (P = 0.030), higher grade (P = 0.014), infiltrative tumour architecture (P = 0.044), lymphovascular invasion (P = 0.034), disease recurrence (P = 0.02), and cancer‐specific mortality (P = 0.03).CONCLUSIONSOur data suggest that a delay in the interval from diagnosis to RNU is associated with more advanced disease stage. These findings might have important implications for trial design in the ongoing evaluation of neoadjuvant regimens. Timely consideration of definitive treatment for patients with high‐risk UTUC is of high importance. Further studies are necessary to validate these hypothesis‐generating findings.
Hepatocyte nuclear factor (HNF)1A and HNF4A substitution occurring simultaneously in a family with maturity‐onset diabetes of the young
Authors: Beijers H. J. B. H. , Losekoot M. , Odink R. J. , Bravenboer B. 
Published: September 2009

AbstractIntroduction  Maturity‐onset diabetes of the young (MODY) is a monogenic form of diabetes mellitus characterized by an early age at onset, autosomal dominant inheritance and a primary defect in the function of the B‐cells of the pancreas. We report a family with two members carrying a substitution in both the hepatocyte nuclear factor (HNF)1A and HNF4A gene simultaneously.Case report  A 39‐year‐old man was referred because of mild diabetic retinopathy. Because of a dominant presentation of diabetes in his family, genetic testing was performed. Sequence analysis of the genes involved in MODY‐1–3 revealed the presence of an amino acid substitution in the HNF1A as well as the HNF4A gene. Both substitutions were also detected in his mother. The HNF1A substitution has been described previously as pathogenic, whereas the HNF4A substitution had not been found previously. The HNF4A substitution was located in a conserved region of the protein and, additionally, the proband and his mother had high birthweights and low triglyceride levels, both of which are associated with pathogenic HNF4A substitutions.Conclusions  To our knowledge this is the first reported family carrying both a substitution of HNF1A and HNF4A gene simultaneously. The exact contribution of each substitution to the phenotype of our subjects remains to be further elucidated, however, given the high birthweights and the low triglyceride levels in those with both substitutions, it is reasonable that the HNF4A substitution is pathogenic.
Children, Labour Supply and Child Care: Challenges for Empirical Analysis
Authors: Kalb Guyonne 
Published: September 2009

Abstract The aim of this article is to give an overview of the important issues relating to the labour supply of the primary carer in a household. Child care plays a central role in allowing the primary carer time away from the young children in a household. Therefore, child‐care use is a central topic of this article, as well. There are a number of different aspects to child care, such as the price, quality, availability and type of service. This article discusses the analytical problems and challenges, taking Australian data, policy and experience as a focus, but drawing on a wide range of international empirical studies. It reports the results from previous research on child‐care use and labour supply and it outlines the areas requiring more study. The focus of the article is on economic research.
Object Calibration for Augmented Reality
Authors: Whitaker Ross T. , Crampton Chris , Breen David E. , Tuceryan Mihran , Rose Eric 
Published: September 2009

AbstractAugmented reality involves the use of models and their associated renderings to supplement information in a real scene. In order for this information to be relevant or meaningful, the models must be positioned and displayed in such a way that they align with their corresponding real objects. For practical reasons this alignment cannot be known a priori, and cannot be hard‐wired into a system. Instead a simple, reliable alignment or calibration process is performed so that computer models can be accurately registered with their real‐life counterparts. We describe the design and implementation of such a process and we show how it can be used to create convincing interactions between real and virtual objects.
A Real‐time Continuous Alphabetic Sign Language to Speech Conversion VR System
Authors: Liang Rung‐Huei , Ouhyoung Ming 
Published: September 2009

AbstractMany ways of communications are used between human and computer, while using gesture is considered to be one of the most natural way in a virtual reality system. Because of its intuitiveness and its capability of helping the hearing impaired or speaking impaired, we develop a gesture recognition system. Considering the world‐wide use of ASL (American Sign Language), this system focuses on the recognition of a continuous flow of alphabets in ASL to spell a word followed by the speech synthesis, and adopts a simple and efficient windowed template matching recognition strategy to achieve the goal of a real‐time and continuous recognition. In addition to the abduction and the flex information in a gesture, we introduce a concept of contact‐point into our system to solve the intrinsic ambiguities of some gestures in ASL. Five tact switches, served as contact‐points and sensed by an analogue to digital board, are sewn on a glove cover to enhance the functions of a traditional data glove.
Three Architectures for Volume Rendering
Authors: Hesser Jürgen , Manner Reinhard , Knittel Günter , Straßer Wolfgang , Pfister Hanspeter , Kaufman Arie 
Published: September 2009

AbstractVolume rendering is a key technique in scientific visualization that lends itself to significant exploitable parallelism. The high computational demands of real‐time volume rendering and continued technological advances in the area of VLSl give impetus to the development of special‐purpose volume rendering architectures. This paper presents and characterizes three recently developed volume rendering engines which are based on the ray‐casting method. A taxonomy of the algorithmic variants of ray‐casting and details of each ray‐casting architecture are discussed. The paper then compares the machinefeatures and provides an outlook onfuture developments in the area of volume rendering hardware.
Shading with Curve Light Sources1
Authors: Bao Hujun , Ying Jianguo , Peng Qunsheng 
Published: September 2009

AbstractA new shading model for curve light sources is presented. It accounts for both diffuse reflection and specular reflection of the illuminated surface. By regarding a linear light source as a directional quadrilateral light source with very small width, a simple formula is derived first for calculating the diffuse reflection component due to the illumination of the linear segment. The diffuse reflection of the surface by direct illumination of a curve light source is then evaluated by approximating the curve light with a series of linear segments. The specular reflection component due to a curve light source is represented by an integration taking Phong's specular model as the kernel and evaluated by summing the contributions from the linear segments. Finally, an efficient shadow detection algorithm for curve light sources is proposed. The images rendered with the shading model are very photo‐realistic.
A new radiosity approach for regular objects: application to ruled surfaces
Authors: ARQUES Didier , MICHELIN Sylvain 
Published: September 2009

AbstractThis paper introduces a new approach in the radiosity method. The main principle applied here, is the improvement of form factor computation by the knowledge of the model properties. More precisely, if surfaces describing a scene are “regular”, the values of the form factor and its “derivatives” between any patch B and a patch A intervening in the meshing of a given surface, enable us to evaluate (with a required precision) the form factors values between B and the neighboring patches of A. We will also show that the mathematical relation we have obtained, 1) is especially efficient with ruled surfaces, 2) significantly decreases the computation time, 3) is well‐adapted to refinement or subdivision techniques and 4) gives us an interesting variety of surfaces. Calculation times are equivalent to those obtained with a projective method (hemi‐cube for example) but with an efficient control of the generated errors.
Using Procedural RenderMan Shaders for Global Illurnination
Authors: Slusallek Philipp , Pflaum Thomas , Seidel Hans‐Peter 
Published: September 2009

AbstractGlobal illumination techniques like radiosity or Monte‐Carlo ray‐tracing are becoming standard features of rendering systems. However, there is currently no accepted interface format which supports an appropriate physically‐based scene description. In this paper we present extensions to the well‐known RenderMan interface, which allow for a physically based scene description and support advanced global illumination techniques. Special emphasis has been laid on the support for procedural descriptions of reflection and emission by RenderMan surface shaders. So far, they could not be used with most global illumination algorithms. The extensions have been implemented in a physically‐based rendering system and are illustrated with examples.
Synthesizing Feather Textures in Galliformes
Authors: Dai Wen‐Kai , Shih Zen‐Chung , Chang Ruei‐Chuan 
Published: September 2009

AbstractThe texture of feather is one of the most fascinating, complicated, and beautiful texture patterns in nature. In this paper, we propose a new and effective texture generation approach that uses the traits of iteration behavior to synthesize the textures of Galliformes feathers realistically. We also propose an interactive feather modeling approach which provides a close connection between the user's intuition and the resulting branching pattern. In texturing the feather structure, we use an object‐space mapping technique. Experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of our method.
Functional Principal Component Analyses of Biomedical Images as Outcome Measures
Authors: O’Connor Emma , Fieller Nick , Holmes Andrew , Waterton John C. , Ainscow Edward 
Published: September 2009

SummaryMedical imaging data are often valuable in evaluating disease and therapeutic effects. However, in formal assessment of treatment efficacy, it is usual to discard most of the rich information within the image, instead relying on simple summary measures. This reflects the absence of satisfactory statistical tools for the description and analysis of variability between images. We present extended techniques of functional data analysis applied to distributions of variable values extracted from specified regions within images, which are used to produce displays of ‘principal densities’ that allow interpretation of principal modes of variation in terms of features in the distributions of the voxel values. These techniques are especially relevant in circumstances where the spatial distribution of variables within the specified region is not of interest. Tumours, for example, are disorganized in nature and may change shape rapidly so it is not possible, even in principle, to create a 1–1 correspondence between images before and post treatment. The techniques that are introduced here, however, enable us to distinguish differences between pretreatment and post-treatment densities. These methods are essentially exploratory; hence we develop a permutation test providing more formal assessment of differences of treatment, which assesses the changes within dose group. Extensions to multivariate images of two or more variables are also illustrated and we show that the methodology makes bivariate functional data just as easy to handle as univariate data.
Estimating the Cure Fraction in Population-Based Cancer Studies by Using Finite Mixture Models
Authors: Lambert P. C. , Dickman P. W. , Weston C. L. , Thompson J. R. 
Published: September 2009

SummaryThe cure fraction (the proportion of patients who are cured of disease) is of interest to both patients and clinicians and is a useful measure to monitor trends in survival of curable disease. The paper extends the non-mixture and mixture cure fraction models to estimate the proportion cured of disease in population-based cancer studies by incorporating a finite mixture of two Weibull distributions to provide more flexibility in the shape of the estimated relative survival or excess mortality functions. The methods are illustrated by using public use data from England and Wales on survival following diagnosis of cancer of the colon where interest lies in differences between age and deprivation groups. We show that the finite mixture approach leads to improved model fit and estimates of the cure fraction that are closer to the empirical estimates. This is particularly so in the oldest age group where the cure fraction is notably lower. The cure fraction is broadly similar in each deprivation group, but the median survival of the ‘uncured’ is lower in the more deprived groups. The finite mixture approach overcomes some of the limitations of the more simplistic cure models and has the potential to model the complex excess hazard functions that are seen in real data.
Evaluating a Continuous Biomarker for Infection by using Observed Disease Status with Covariate Effects on Disease
Authors: Jones Geoffrey , Johnson Wesley O. , Vink W. Daan 
Published: September 2009

SummaryA continuous valued serology test has been developed for the infective agent causing bovine digital dermatitis. Since infection cannot be observed directly, disease status as indicated by foot lesions is used as an imperfect proxy to evaluate the test. The desire to specify covariate effects on disease rather than infection status leads to some difficulties in developing a coherent probability model linking the variables of interest. We resolve these issues by making some plausible conditional independence assumptions, and we use the resulting model to investigate the ability of the serology test to discriminate between infected and uninfected animals.
Quantifying the Interest Rate Risk of Banks: Assumptions Do Matter
Authors: Entrop Oliver , Wilkens Marco , Zeisler Alexander 
Published: September 2009

Abstract This paper analyses the robustness of the standardised framework proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2004b) to quantify the interest rate risk of banks. We generalise this framework and study the change in the estimated level of interest rate risk if the strict assumptions of the standardised framework are violated. Using data on the German universal banking system, we find that estimates of the interest rate risk are very sensitive to the framework's assumptions. We conclude that the results obtained using the standardised framework in its current specification should be treated with caution when used for supervisory and risk management purposes.
Harre's Social Philosophy and Political Philosophy: A Social Scientific Critique
Authors: RATNER CARL 
Published: September 2009

In his article, “Saving Critical Realism,”Harre (2009) relates his revised philosophy of science to a social philosophy concerning the nature of society, and to a political philosophy regarding the nature of freedom and reform. I argue that his social philosophy and political philosophy rest upon an individualistic sense of society and freedom. I demonstrate that his individualism is factually and politically untenable. (I shall not comment on his philosophy of science, although the errors in his social and political philosophies make it suspect.) I counterpose an alternative social philosophy and political philosophy that are based on a structural model of society, freedom, and social change.My critique demonstrates how social science can adjudicate claims of structuralist vs. individualist social and political philosophy. It also argues that social science must constitute the basis for formulating political ideals of freedom and social organization if these are to be viable.
Undergraduate students' attitudes towards food shopping and attitudes to time
Authors: Dobson Suzanne , Ness Mitchell 
Published: September 2009

AbstractThe objectives of the study are to identify the dimensions underlying two constructs (students' attitudes to food shopping and students' attitudes to time), to use these dimensions to identify student segments and to profile them in terms of the construct dimensions, shopping behaviour and students' characteristics. The study employs a web‐based questionnaire. The useable sample was 744 full‐time undergraduate students at Newcastle University. Results indicated that there are six and seven dimensions underlying attitudes to food shopping and attitudes to time respectively. Three student segments are identified with different attitudes to food shopping, attitudes to time, shopping behaviour and students' characteristics. The implication for marketers is that the student market should not be considered en masse, but that segmentation, targeting and positioning is an appropriate strategy for food retailers to adopt.
Exploring mechanisms of sex differences in longevity: lifetime ovary exposure and exceptional longevity in dogs
Authors: Waters David J. , Kengeri Seema S. , Clever Beth , Booth Julie A. , Maras Aimee H , Schlittler Deborah L. , Hayek Michael G. 
Published: September 2009

SummaryTo move closer to understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of sex differences in human longevity, we studied pet dogs to determine whether lifetime duration of ovary exposure was associated with exceptional longevity. This hypothesis was tested by collecting and analyzing lifetime medical histories, age at death, and cause of death for a cohort of canine ‘centenarians’– exceptionally long‐lived Rottweiler dogs that lived more than 30% longer than average life expectancy for the breed. Sex and lifetime ovary exposure in the oldest‐old Rottweilers (age at death, ≥ 13 years) were compared to a cohort of Rottweilers that had usual longevity (age at death, 8.0–10.8 years). Like women, female dogs were more likely than males to achieve exceptional longevity (OR, 95% CI = 2.0, 1.2–3.3;P = 0.006). However, removal of ovaries during the first 4 years of life erased the female survival advantage. In females, a strong positive association between ovaries and longevity persisted in multivariate analysis that considered other factors, such as height, body weight, and mother with exceptional longevity. A beneficial effect of ovaries on longevity in females could not be attributed to resistance against a particular disease or major cause of death. Our results document in dogs a female sex advantage for achieving exceptional longevity and show that lifetime ovary exposure, a factor not previously evaluated in women, is associated with exceptional longevity. This work introduces a conceptual framework for designing additional studies in pet dogs to define the ovary‐sensitive biological processes that promote healthy human longevity.
How Likely is Proportional Representation in the House of Commons? Lessons from International Experience
Authors: Renwick Alan 
Published: September 2009

AbstractThis article asks what international evidence suggests about the likelihood of major reform of the system used to elect the British House of Commons. It identifies four paths that have generated major electoral reform or come close to doing so in established democracies in recent decades and examines how likely each is to lead to reform in the UK. It argues that, on this evidence, reform in the UK is unlikely but not impossible.
Evaluation of indocyanine green clearance and model for end‐stage liver disease for estimation of short‐term prognosis in decompensated cirrhosis
Authors: Stauber Rudolf E. , Wagner Doris , Stadlbauer Vanessa , Palma Stefan , Gurakuqi Gerald , Kniepeiss Daniela , Iberer Florian , Smolle Karl‐Heinz , Haas Josef , Trauner Michael 
Published: September 2009

AbstractBackground: Indocyanine green (ICG) clearance has been proposed as a quantitative liver function test several decades ago. Interest in this method has been renewed following the development of finger pulse densitometry for noninvasive estimation of the ICG plasma disappearance rate (PDR). On the other hand, the model for end‐stage liver disease (MELD), which is based on routine laboratory parameters, is widely used for estimation of short‐term survival in cirrhosis, but its prognostic value in critically ill cirrhotic patients is unclear.Aims: The aim of the present study was to compare the diagnostic accuracy of ICG PDR vs. MELD for estimation of short‐term prognosis in cirrhotic patients.Methods: Ninety consecutive cirrhotic patients who were admitted for decompensated disease or were being evaluated for liver transplantation were screened. Patients who underwent liver transplantation within the following 90 days and those with hepatocellular carcinoma were excluded. In the remaining 70 patients, routine laboratory parameters and ICG clearance were analysed. Following an injection of ICG 0.25 mg/kg, PDR was measured by finger pulse densitometry. The diagnostic accuracy of ICG PDR and MELD for prediction of 90‐day survival was assessed by receiver–operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis.Results: ROC curve analysis revealed superior diagnostic accuracy for MELD as compared with ICG PDR in predicting 90‐day survival (area under the ROC curve 0.89 vs. 0.71). A MELD cut‐off of 22 provided the best discrimination for prediction of 90‐day survival.Conclusions: MELD is superior to ICG PDR for estimation of short‐term survival in patients with decompensated cirrhosis.