bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Air pollution deaths attributable to fossil fuels: observational and modelling study
Authors: Lelieveld Jos , Haines Andy , Burnett Richard , Tonne Cathryn , Klingmüller Klaus , Münzel Thomas , Pozzer Andrea 
Published: November 2023

Abstract

Objectives
To estimate all cause and cause specific deaths that are attributable to fossil fuel related air pollution and to assess potential health benefits from policies that replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy sources.

Design
Observational and modelling study.

Methods
An updated atmospheric composition model, a newly developed relative risk model, and satellite based data were used to determine exposure to ambient air pollution, estimate all cause and disease specific mortality, and attribute them to emission categories.

Data sources
Data from the global burden of disease 2019 study, observational fine particulate matter and population data from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellites, and atmospheric chemistry, aerosol, and relative risk modelling for 2019.

Results
Globally, all cause excess deaths due to fine particulate and ozone air pollution are estimated at 8.34 million (95% confidence interval 5.63 to 11.19) deaths per year. Most (52%) of the mortality burden is related to cardiometabolic conditions, particularly ischaemic heart disease (30%). Stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease both account for 16% of mortality burden. About 20% of all cause mortality is undefined, with arterial hypertension and neurodegenerative diseases possibly implicated. An estimated 5.13 million (3.63 to 6.32) excess deaths per year globally are attributable to ambient air pollution from fossil fuel use and therefore could potentially be avoided by phasing out fossil fuels. This figure corresponds to 82% of the maximum number of air pollution deaths that could be averted by controlling all anthropogenic emissions. Smaller reductions, rather than a complete phase-out, indicate that the responses are not strongly non-linear. Reductions in emission related to fossil fuels at all levels of air pollution can decrease the number of attributable deaths substantially. Estimates of avoidable excess deaths are markedly higher in this study than most previous studies for these reasons: the new relative risk model has implications for high income (largely fossil fuel intensive) countries and for low and middle income countries where the use of fossil fuels is increasing; this study accounts for all cause mortality in addition to disease specific mortality; and the large reduction in air pollution from a fossil fuel phase-out can greatly reduce exposure.

Conclusions
Phasing out fossil fuels is deemed to be an effective intervention to improve health and save lives as part the United Nations' goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Ambient air pollution would no longer be a leading, environmental health risk factor if the use of fossil fuels were superseded by equitable access to clean sources of renewable energy.
Moving forward through consensus: a national Delphi approach to determine the top research priorities in prostate cancer in Uganda
Authors: Ssemata Andrew Sentoogo , Muhumuza Richard , Seeley Janet , Lombe Dorothy Chilambe , Mwamba Monde , Msadabwe Susan , Mwaka Amos Deogratius , Aggarwal Ajay 
Published: November 2023

ObjectiveTo identify key areas for research in prostate cancer (PC) in the Ugandan context by establishing the major health system, socioeconomic and clinical barriers to seeking, reaching and receiving high-quality cancer care.DesignModified Delphi Technique.SettingGovernment and private-not-for-profit hospitals.MethodsWe applied a two-stage modified Delphi technique to identify the consensus view across cancer experts. In round 1, experts received a questionnaire containing 21 statements drawn from a systematic review identifying the reason for the delay in accessing cancer care. Each statement was scored out of 20. Statements scoring ≥15 from over 70% of participants were prioritised for inclusion while statements for which <30% of participants gave a score of ≥15 were excluded. Sixteen statements were included in round 2 as they did not receive consensus for inclusion or exclusion.ResultsWe found that the top six research priority areas arise from challenges including: (1) lack of diagnostic services—ultrasound, laboratory tests and biopsy facilities; (2) high costs of services, for example, surgery, radiotherapy, hormone therapy are unaffordable to most patients, (3) lack of essential medicines, (4) limited radiotherapy capacity, (5) lack of awareness of cancer as a disease and low recognition of symptoms, (6) low healthcare literacy. The lack of critical surgical supplies, high diagnostic and treatment costs were ranked highest in order of importance in round 1. Round 2 also revealed lack of diagnostic services, unavailability of critical medicines, lack of radiotherapy options, high costs of treatments and lack of critical surgical supplies as the top priorities.ConclusionThese research priority areas ought to be addressed in future research to improve prompt PC diagnosis and care in Uganda. There is need to improve the supply of high-quality affordable anticancer medicines for PC patients so as to improve the survivorship from the cancer.
Periodic health evaluation in athletes competing in Tokyo 2020: from SARS-CoV-2 to Olympic medals
Authors: Squeo Maria Rosaria , Monosilio Sara , Gismondi Alessandro , Perrone Marco , Gregorace Emanuele , Lemme Erika , Di Gioia Giuseppe , Mango Ruggiero , Prosperi Silvia , Spataro Antonio , Maestrini Viviana , Di Giacinto Barbara , Pelliccia Antonio 
Published: November 2023

BackgroundThe Tokyo Olympic games were the only games postponed for a year in peacetime, which will be remembered as the COVID-19 Olympics. No data are currently available on the effect on athlete’s performance.AimTo examine the Italian Olympic athletes who have undergone the return to play (RTP) protocol after COVID-19 and their Olympic results.Methods642 Potential Olympics (PO) athletes competing in 19 summer sport disciplines were evaluated through a preparticipation screening protocol and, when necessary, with the RTP protocol. The protocol comprised blood tests, 12-lead resting ECG, transthoracic echocardiogram, cardiopulmonary exercise test, 24-hour Holter-ECG monitoring and cardiovascular MR based on clinical indication.ResultsOf the 642 PO athletes evaluated, 384 participated at the Olympic Games, 254 being excluded for athletic reasons. 120 athletes of the total cohort of 642 PO were affected by COVID-19. They were evaluated with the RTP protocol before resuming physical activity after a mean detraining period of 30±13 days. Of them, 100 were selected for Olympic Games participation, 16 were excluded for athletic reasons and 4 were due to RTP results (2 for COVID-19-related myocarditis, 1 for pericarditis and 1 for complex ventricular arrhythmias). Among athletes with a history of COVID-19 allowed to resume physical activity after the RTP and selected for the Olympic Games, no one had abnormalities in cardiopulmonary exercise test parameters, and 28 became medal winners with 6 gold, 6 silver and 19 bronze medals.ConclusionsAmong athletes with COVID-19, there is a low prevalence of cardiac sequelae. For those athletes allowed to resume physical activity after the RTP evaluation, the infection and the forced period of inactivity didn’t have a negative impact on athletic performance.
Multi-object Tracking with Spatial-Temporal Tracklet Association
Authors: You Sisi , Yao Hantao , Bao Bing-Kun , Xu Changsheng 
Published: November 2023

Recently, the tracking-by-detection methods have achieved excellent performance in Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), which focuses on obtaining a robust feature for each object and generating tracklets based on feature similarity. However, they are confronted with two issues: (1) unstable features in short-term occlusion and (2) insufficient matching in long-term occlusion. Specifically, the unstable feature is caused by the appearance variation under occlusion, and the association with the current unstable feature will lead to insufficient matching in long-term occlusion. To address the above issues, we propose a two-stage tracklet-level association method, Spatial-Temporal Tracklet Association (STTA), to effectively combine spatial-temporal context between feature extraction and data association. In the first stage, we propose the Tracklet-guided Spatial-Temporal Attention network (TSTA) to generate robust and stable features. Specifically, TSTA captures spatial-temporal context to obtain the most salient regions between the current and previous clips. In the second stage, we design the Bi-Tracklet Spatial-Temporal association (BTST) module to fully exploit the spatial-temporal context in data association. Specifically, we leverage BTST to merge different tracklets into long-term trajectories by jointly learning visual feature and spatial-temporal context and designing a bidirectional interpolation to recover the missed objects between matched tracklets. Extensive experiments of public and private detections on four benchmarks demonstrate the robustness of STTA. Furthermore, the proposed method is a model-agnostic method, which can be plugged and played with existing methods to boost their performance, e.g., obtain 11.0%, 10.1%, 2.9%, 3.2%, and 7.8% improvement on IDF1 in the MOT16 validation dataset for Tracktor, CenterTrack, Deepsort, JDE, and CTracker, respectively.
Immunologic Signatures of Peripheral Blood T Cells Reveal the Outcome of p53MVA Vaccine and Pembrolizumab Treatment in Patients with Advanced Ovarian Cancer
Authors: Kos Ferdynand J. , Frankel Paul , Cristea Mihaela , Eng Melissa , Tinsley Raechelle , Dempsey Shannon , Ruel Nora , Stewart Daphne , Dellinger Thanh H. , Diamond Don J. 
Published: November 2023

Abstract

Purpose:
Our previous studies indicated that p53-reactive T cells were associated with clinical benefit in patients with advanced ovarian cancer who were treated with p53-expressing modified vaccinia Ankara (p53MVA) vaccine and gemcitabine chemotherapy. To replace chemotherapy with an approach that will enhance vaccine efficacy and antitumor immunity, we treated patients with p53MVA in combination with PD-1 checkpoint blocker, pembrolizumab. We also attempted to further characterize the activation status of T cells prior to vaccination and during treatment.

Experimental Design:
Patients received up to three triweekly vaccinations concurrent with pembrolizumab, followed by pembrolizumab monotherapy at 3-week intervals. Correlative studies analyzed peripheral blood T-cell phenotypes and profiles of immune function gene expression.

Results:
We observed 6/28 (21%) patients with a clinical benefit to therapy, including 3 partial responses (PR) and 3 patients with stable disease (SD) for 6+ months. The median progression-free survival was 1.8 months (95% confidence interval: 1.7–3.8) and median overall survival was 15.1 months (9.4–30.4). Two patients remain progression-free at 28 and 33 months. Of the 18 patients evaluable in correlative studies, 6 were immunologic responders of whom 5 had clinical benefit (3 PR, 2 SD). Immunologic non-responders expressed in pretreatment peripheral blood mononuclear cell samples high levels of mRNA for multiple molecules associated with terminally differentiated T cells.

Conclusions:
p53MVA/pembrolizumab immunotherapy showed promising antitumor activity in patients who demonstrated functionally competent peripheral blood T cells. Detection of markers of terminally differentiated T cells before treatment may identify patients unlikely to respond to p53MVA/pembrolizumab.

Significance:
The activity of a combination immunotherapy of p53 vaccine and PD-1 checkpoint blockade in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer was evaluated in a phase II trial. Clinical benefit was correlated with the responsive immune status of patients before and during the treatment, defining potential predictive markers for immune therapy.
An improved dynamic-layered classification of retinal diseases
Authors: Nagamani Gilakara Muni , Sudhakar Theertagiri 
Published: November 2023

<span lang="EN-US">Retina is main part of the human eye and every disease shows the effect on retina. Eye diseases such as choroidal neovascularization (CNV), DRUSEN, diabetic macular edema (DME) are the main retinal diseases that damage the retina and if these damages are identified in the later stages, it is very difficult to reverse the vision for these retinal diseases. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-nosy image testing for finding the retinal diseases. OCT mainly collects the cross-section images of retina. Deep learning (DL) is used to analyze the patterns in several complex research applications especially in the disease prediction. In DL, multiple layers give the accurate detection of abnormalities in the retinal images. In this paper, an improved dynamic-layered classification (IDLC) is introduced to classify retinal diseases based on their abnormality. Image filters are used to filter the noise present in the input images. ResNet is the pre-trained model which is used to train the features of retinal diseases. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the DL model used to analyze the OCT image. The dataset consists of three types of OCT disease datasets from Kaggle. Evaluation results show the performance of IDLC compared with state-of-art algorithms. A better performance is obtained by using the IDLC and achieved the better accuracy. </span>
Photo-realistic photo synthesis using improved conditional generative adversarial networks
Authors: Mandara Kirimanjeshwara Raghavendra Shetty , Prasad Sarappadi Narasimha 
Published: November 2023

<span lang="EN-US">There are a wide range of potential uses for both the forward (generating face drawings from actual images) and backward (generating photos from synthetic face sketches). However, photo/sketch synthesis is still a difficult problem to solve because of the distinct differences between photos and sketches. Existing frameworks often struggle to acquire a strong mapping among the geometry of drawing and its corresponding photo-realistic pictures because of the little amount of paired sketch-photo training data available. In this study, we adopt the perspective that this is an image-to-image translation issue and investigate the usage of the well-known enhanced pix2pix generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate high-quality photo-realistic pictures from drawings; we make use of three distinct datasets. While recent GAN-based approaches have shown promise in image translation, they still struggle to produce high-resolution, photorealistic pictures. This technique uses supervised learning to train the generator's hidden layers to produce low-resolution pictures initially, then uses the network's implicit refinement to produce high-resolution images. Extensive tests on three sketch-photo datasets (two publicly accessible and one we produced) are used to evaluate. Our solution outperforms existing image translation techniques by producing more photorealistic visuals with a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 59.85% and pixel accuracy of 82.7%. </span>
Head teacher perspectives on school lunch: At variance with national policy
Authors: Berggren Linda , Waling Maria , Olsson Cecilia 
Published: November 2023

Objective: Previous research indicates that head teachers in Sweden frequently fail to see school lunch as part of the educational activities of a school. This study contributes to an understanding of how head teachers in Sweden perceive and experience current national policy intentions related to school lunch. Design: Qualitative inquiry. Setting: Ten municipal state schools in Sweden. Method: Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 head teachers responsible for the compulsory education of 6- to 15-year-olds in state schools. Data from digitally recorded and transcribed interviews were thematically analysed. Results: Head teachers primarily saw school lunch as a means to ensure pupils were fed and energised. Their focus tended to be on what followed after school lunch in the form of academic performance and mood, rather than the stated intentions of national school meal policy. Head teachers stressed the value of a free and nutritious school lunch for social equality, and the importance of good collaboration with food service managers and school meal personnel, despite the difficulty of achieving this. Conclusion: This paper highlights a gap between head teachers’ perspectives with respect to school lunch and official intentions stated in Swedish national school meals policy. The meanings head teachers saw as connected to school lunch were those of social equality and ensuring pupils were fed, rather than the wider potential envisioned by the authorities. This paper identifies factors that affect the possibility of realising national policy intentions for school lunch in Sweden.
Institutionalizing Populist Power Coalitions in Latin America: Argentina’s Economic and Social Council and Brazil’s Council for Economic and Social Development
Authors: von-Zeschau Juan Federico , Sánchez-Mosquera Marcial 
Published: November 2023

The Argentine Consejo Económico y Social (Economic and Social Council) and the Brazilian Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Council for Economic and Social Development) are institutions promoted by populist governments to shape a neodevelopmentalist agenda in countries classified as having hierarchical market economies. Both councils only partially conform to the hierarachical market economy model and have suffered from heavy governmental dependence, but Argentine unionism may constitute a potential success factor for the institution in the future. This influence represents an exception to the theory of these economies. El Consejo Económico y Social de Argentina y el Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social de Brasil son instituciones promovidas por gobiernos populistas para dar pie a una agenda neodesarrollista en países clasificados como de economías de mercado jerárquicas. Ambos consejos se ajustan sólo parcialmente al modelo jerárquico de la economía de mercado y han sufrido una fuerte dependencia gubernamental. Sin embargo, el sindicalismo argentino podría constituir un potencial factor de éxito para la institución en el futuro. Dicha influencia constituye una excepción a la teoría de estas economías.
Association between circHIPK3/miR-378a-3p/HDAC4 axis and osteoporotic fractures: A comprehensive investigation
Authors: Wang Lei , Sheng Zhen , Yao Tao 
Published: November 2023

Background Osteoporotic fractures (OFs) are a significant public health issue, which can lead to pain and impaired mobility. The underlying mechanisms of OFs remain unclear, but recent studies have suggested that the circRNA-miRNA-mRNA pathway may play a crucial role. Purpose This study aimed to investigate the potential involvement of the circHIPK3/miR-378a-3p/HDAC4 pathway in the pathogenesis of OFs. Methods We collected tissue and serum samples from 10 patients with OFs and 10 healthy controls. The expression levels of circHIPK3, miR-378a-3p, and HDAC4 were measured by qPCR and WB. Additionally, we quantified the serum levels of bone metabolism-related indicators (ALP, OC, TRAP, OCIF, ODF) using ELISA. Results Our results revealed significant upregulation of circHIPK3 and HDAC4 in both tissue and serum samples from OF patients compared with controls. Simultaneously, we detected a lower expression level of miR-378a-3p in OF tissues and serum than that in the control group. Furthermore, the serum levels of bone metabolism-related indicators ALP, TRAP, OCIF, and ODF were significantly higher in OF patients than in the control group. Interestingly, the serum level of OCIF was lower in OF patients than in the control group. Conclusion Our study provides important evidence for the involvement of the circHIPK3/miR-378a-3p/HDAC4 pathway in the pathogenesis of OFs. The upregulation of circHIPK3 and HDAC4 and downregulation of miR-378a-3p observed in OF patients suggests their potential regulatory effects on bone metabolism. Meanwhile, abnormal expression of serum bone metabolism-related indicators may contribute to the development of OFs by disrupting the balance of bone remodeling.
A Novel Intervention to Simultaneously Address the Dual Pathologies of Breathing Disorders During Sleep and Undiagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in School-Aged Children Ages 5–12
Authors: Paracha Hamza , Parker Davidson Karen , Dixon Corby , Wilde Zach 
Published: November 2023

Purpose: To evaluate the improvement of ADHD related symptoms in school-aged children ages 5 to 12 in treatment with a monobloc appliance (MOA) for Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB). Methods: A retrospective review of questionnaire scores of ADHD symptoms from school-aged children being treated with a MOA for SDB. Data was obtained from parent survey questionnaires of 40 school-aged children in three dental offices in treatment with an MOA for SDB showing symptoms of ADHD yet to be confirmed with a formal diagnosis between 2019 and 2021. ADHD symptom scores were ascertained by a parent survey questionnaire completed at the initial visit before MOA treatment, and 2 to 6 months, and 7+ months during MOA treatment. Results: At the 7+ month endpoint, 17 of the 28 (61%) children ages 5 to 12 saw at least a 1-point drop in the sum of their questionnaire scores indicating an improvement in ADHD symptoms after initiating treatment with an MOA. Although there was a reduction of the overall average symptom score from the initial visit to 2 to 6 months ( M = 4.06, SD ± 1.55), a statistically significant improvement in ADHD symptoms occurred at the 7+ month endpoint ( M = 15.29, SD ± 4.50) during MOA treatment. Conclusions: Treatment with an MOA may be highly effective in addressing the dual pathologies of SDB and ADHD in school-age children ages 5 to 12.