bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Comparison of markerless and marker-based motion capture of gait kinematics in individuals with cerebral palsy and chronic stroke: A case study series
Authors: Steffensen Emily A. , Magalhães Fabrício , Knarr Brian A. , Kingston David C. 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Background
Three-dimensional (3D) motion analysis is an advanced tool used to quantify movement patterns in adults with chronic stroke and children with cerebral palsy. However, gold-standard marker-based systems have limitations for implementation in clinical settings. Markerless motion capture using Theia3D may provide a more accessible and clinically feasible alternative, but its accuracy is unknown in clinical populations. The purpose of this study was to quantify kinematic differences between marker-based and markerless motion capture systems in individuals with gait impairments.
Methods
Three adults with chronic stroke and three children with cerebral palsy completed overground walking trials while marker-based and markerless motion capture data were synchronously recorded. Time-series waveforms of 3D ankle, knee, hip, and trunk angles were stride normalized and compared. Root mean squared error, maximum peak, minimum peak, and range of motion were used to assess discrete point differences. Pearson's correlation and coefficient of multiple correlation were computed to assess similarity between the time series joint angle waveforms from both systems.
Results
This study demonstrates that markerless motion capture using Theia3D produces good agreement with marker-based in the measurement of gait kinematics at most joints and anatomical planes in individuals with chronic stroke and cerebral palsy.
Conclusions
This is the first investigation to study the feasibility of Theia3D markerless motion capture for use in chronic stroke and cerebral palsy gait analysis. Our results indicate that markerless motion capture may be an acceptable tool to measure gait kinematics in clinical populations to provide clinicians with objective movement assessment data.
Optical observations of an ultrabright constellation satellite
Authors: Nandakumar Sangeetha , Eggl Siegfried , Tregloan-Reed Jeremy , Adam Christian , Anderson-Baldwin Jasmine , Bannister Michele , Battle Adam , Benkhaldoun Zouhair , Reddy Vishnu , Colque Juanpablo , Damke Guillermo , Frayn Ilse Plauchu , Ghachoui Mourad , Guillen Francisco , Kaeouach Aziz , Krantz Harrison , Langbroek Marco , Rattenbury Nicholas , Ridden-Harper Ryan , Young Brad , Unda-Sanzana Eduardo , Watson Alan , Barentine John , Benvenuti Piero , Vruno Federico Di , Peel Mike , Rawls Meredith , Walker Connie , Bassa Cees , Flores-Quintana Catalina , Garcia Pablo , Kim Sam , Longa-Perna Penelope , Ortiz Edgar , Otarola Angel , Romero María , Sanhueza Pedro , Siringo Giorgio , Soto Mario 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Large constellations of bright artificial satellites in low Earth orbit pose significant challenges to ground-based astronomy [1]. Currently orbiting constellation satellites have visual brightnesses between apparent magnitudes 4 and 6, satellite operators, astronomers, and other users of the night sky are working on brightness mitigation strategies [2,3]. Here we report the outcome of an international optical observation campaign of a prototype constellation satellite, AST Space Mobile’s “BlueWalker 3”. BlueWalker 3 features a 64.3 m2 phased-array antenna, as well as a 10.0 m2 Launch Vehicle Adapter (LVA)1. The peak brightness of the satellite reached an apparent visual magnitude of 0.4. This made the new satellite one of the brightest objects in the night sky. With an apparent visual magnitude of 5.5, the LVA which jettisoned on 2022-11-10 (UT), for which an orbital ephemeris was not publicly released until four days later, was four times brighter than the current International Astronomical Union recommendation of magnitude 7 [2,5]. The expected build-out of constellations with tens of thousands of new, brighter objects will make active satellite tracking and avoidance strategies a necessity for ground-based telescopes. However, this requires a complete and highly accurate set of satellite orbits. For BlueWalker 3, we determine that at present these location predictions are only accurate to within 7.2 ± 3.1 arcmin.
[1] See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=265584&x=
Postoperative prolonged mechanical ventilation in patients with surgically treated pyogenic spondylodiscitis: a surrogate endpoint for early postoperative mortality
Authors: Scorzin Jasmin E. , Potthoff Anna-Laura , Lehmann Felix , Banat Mohamed , Borger Valeri , Schuss Patrick , Bode Christian , Vatter Hartmut , Schneider Matthias 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Purpose
Surgical procedures with spinal instrumentation constitute a prevalent and occasionally highly indicated treatment modality in patients with pyogenic spondylodiscitis (PSD). However, surgical therapy might be associated with the need of prolonged postoperative intensive care medicine which in turn might impair intended operative benefit. We therefore analyzed prolonged mechanical ventilation (PMV) as an indicator variable for such intensive care treatment with regard to potential correlations with mortality in this vulnerable patient cohort.
Methods
Between 2012 and 2018, 177 consecutive patients received stabilization surgery for PSD at the authors’ neurosurgical department. PMV was defined as postoperative mechanical ventilation of more than 24 hours. A multivariable analysis was performed to identify independent predictors for 30-day mortality.
Results
23 out of 177 patients (13%) with PSD suffered from postoperative PMV. 30-day mortality rate was 5%. Multivariable analysis identified “spinal empyema” (p=0.02, Odds ratio (OR) 6.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.3-30.2), “Charlson comorbidity index (CCI) > 2” (p=0.04, OR 4.0, 95% CI 1.0-15.5), “early postoperative complications (PSIs)” (p=0.001, OR 17.1, 95% CI 3.1-96.0) and “PMV > 24 hrs” (p=0.002, OR 13.0, 95% CI 2.7-63.8) as significant and independent predictors for early postoperative mortality.
Conclusions
The present study indicates PMV to significantly correlate to elevated early postoperative mortality rates following stabilization surgery for PSD. These results might entail further scientific efforts to investigate PMV as a so far underestimated negative prognostic factor in the surgical treatment of PSD.
Voice Spoofing Attacks and Countermeasures: A Systematic Review, Analysis, and Experimental Evaluation
Authors: Khan Awais , Malik Khalid Mahmood , Ryan James , Saravanan Mikul 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
With the advent of automated speaker verification (ASV) systems comes an equal and opposite development: malicious actors may seek to use voice spoofing attacks to fool those same systems. Various countermeasures have been proposed to detect these spoofing attacks, but current offerings in this arena fall short of a unified solution. For this reason, defensive measures for ASV systems produced in the last 6-7 years need to be classified, and qualitative and quantitative comparisons of state-of-the-art (SOTA) countermeasures should be performed to assess the effectiveness of these systems against real-world attacks. Hence, in this work, we conduct a review of the literature on spoof-ing detection using hand-crafted features, deep learning, and end-to-end spoofing countermeasure solutions to detect logical access (LA) attacks, such as speech synthesis (SS) and voice conversion (VC), and physical access (PA) attacks, i.e., replay attacks. Additionally, we review integrated and unified solutions to voice spoofing evaluation and speaker verification, and adversarial and anti-forensic attacks on both voice countermeasures and ASV systems. In an extensive experimental analysis, the limitations and challenges of existing spoofing countermeasures are presented, the performance of these countermeasures on several datasets is reported, and cross-corpus evaluations are performed, something that is nearly absent in the existing literature, in order to assess the gen-eralizability of existing solutions. For the experiments, we employ the 1 Springer Nature 2021 L A T E X template Voice Spoofing Attacks and Countermeasures ASVspoof2019, ASVspoof2021, and VSDC datasets along with GMM, SVM, CNN, and CNN-GRU classifiers. (For reproducibility of the results, the code of the testbed can be found at our GitHub Repository *).
The intersection of biological sex and gender in adverse events following seasonal influenza vaccination in older adults
Authors: Shapiro Janna R. , Seddu Kumba , Park Han-Sol , Lee John S. , Creisher Patrick S. , Yin Anna , Shea Patrick , Kuo Helen , Li Huifen , Abrams Engle , Leng Sean X. , Morgan Rosemary , Klein Sabra L. 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Background
Women/females report more adverse events (AE) following immunization than men/males for many vaccines, including the influenza and COVID-19 vaccines. This discrepancy is often dismissed as a reporting bias, yet the relative contributions of biological sex and gender are poorly understood. We investigated the roles of sex and gender in the rate of AE following administration of the high-dose seasonal influenza vaccine to older adults (≥ 75 years) using an AE questionnaire administered 5–8 days post-vaccination. Participant sex (male or female) was determined by self-report and a gender score questionnaire was used to assign participants to one of four gender categories (feminine, masculine, androgynous, or undifferentiated). Sex steroid hormones and inflammatory cytokines were measured in plasma samples collected prior to vaccination to elucidate a possible biological mechanism for the AE reported.
Results
A total of 423 vaccines were administered to 173 participants over four influenza seasons (2019-22) and gender data were available for 339 of these vaccinations (2020-22). At least one AE was reported following 105 vaccinations (25%), by 23 males and 82 females. The majority of AE occurred at the site of injection, were mild, and transient. The odds of experiencing an AE were 3-fold greater in females than males and decreased with age to a greater extent in females than males. The effects of gender, however, were not statistically significant, supporting a central role of biological sex in the occurrence of AE. In males, estradiol was significantly associated with IL-6 and with the probability of experiencing an AE. Both associations were absent in females, suggesting a sex-specific effect of estradiol on the occurrence of AE that supports the finding of a biological sex difference.
Conclusions
These data support a larger role for biological sex than for gender in the occurrence of AE following influenza vaccination in older adults and provide an initial investigation of hormonal mechanisms that may mediate this sex difference. This study highlights the complexities of measuring gender and the importance of assessing AE separately for males and females to better understand how vaccination strategies can be tailored to different subsets of the population.
A Methodology for Analyzing Metro Team Cooperation Errors Based on Complex Network Theory
Authors: Guo Jun , Wang Jie 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
For complex metro systems to operate efficiently, effective cooperation among teams is needed. Many accidents happen due to control failure caused by team errors during cooperation. Improving the efficiency of teamwork not only focuses on the team’s organizational structure and teamwork procedure, but also stresses each workers’ state during cooperation, because personal errors or interactions errors may lead to the collaboration failure. Combining the theory of human error and the complex network theory, this paper proposes a method to identify team errors and explore the mechanisms of team error during teamwork in the metro systems. Team cooperation is decomposed into each team member’s information process and interactions among human, machines and the environment, which are connected by a collection of information flows in the task. The TICN (Teamwork Information Complex Network) is established, in which information state of individual and interactions within agents are represented by nodes, and information flows are represented by directed edges. Then, vulnerable information states causing teamwork failure are identified by analyzing the degree centrality and betweenness centrality of the complex network. In the end, the model is applied to a specific emergency. The result shows that team members need enhanced skill-based level cognitive ability, the station supervisor needs a thorough understanding of the management system and rules, the decision-maker has to make and communicate decisions concisely, and the communication equipment should be adjusted and designed according to ergonomic requirements. Based on the results, some suggestions were put forward to improve the team performance in the metro system.
Optimizing the expression and characterization of a thermostable ssDNA ligase from a Thermus scotoductus bacteriophage TS2126
Authors: Ma Zhenxia , Chen Han , Yang Yao , Gao Siyi , Yang Jiaping , Deng Bowen , Cui Shihai , Zhou Shiyuan , Jiang Boyang , Yang Chenfang , Zou Bin , Sun Mingjuan , Wang Lianghua 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Although aptamers are widely used in various biomedical areas as novel molecular recognition elements, they are degraded by nucleases in biological fluids due to short single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) or RNA oligonucleotides. Research shows that this problem can be solved by circularizing aptamers with circular ligases, which can catalyze the intramolecular ligation of ssDNA templates with 5'-phosphate and 3'-hydroxyl groups. Herein, a thermostable ssDNA ligase was successfully expressed and purified for subsequent aptamer cyclization. The purified ligase showed good circularization activity for substrates with different lengths and had much higher circularization efficiency than T4 RNA ligase 1. Moreover, circularization reaction conditions, such as the concentration of MnCl2, enzyme and betaine, were studied to ascertain the optimal conditions for the catalytic reaction. The results indicated that the highest ligating activity occurred at MnCl2, enzyme and betaine concentrations of 1.25–2.5 mM, 0.02 mM and 1 М, respectively. Based on these, templates with different terminal nucleotides were tested to assess the sequence dependence of ligase. The results show that the efficiency of circularization is sequence dependent, in which 5'-G and 3'-T are the terminal nucleotides most favored by ligase. Finally, the stability asssy further confirmed that the circular aptamer was more stable than its linear form in biological fluids.
Continuous-Time System H ∞ Control Based on Dynamic Quantization and Event-triggered Mechanism
Authors: Wang Xiao-Yan , xiaoheng chang 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
The H∞ state feedback control problem of Takagi-Sugneo (T-S) fuzzy system with dynamic quantization and event-triggered mechanism is studied in this paper. Based on T-S fuzzy model, a new quantization scheme is proposed to solve the problem of synchronous quantiza-tion and event-triggered mechanism in continuous-time system. A new event-triggered communication scheme is proposed to improve the utilization rate of network resources. The sufficient conditions for the stability of H∞ state feedback control are given by means of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a simulation of the spring-mass-damping system.
RCTrep: An R Package for the Validation of Estimates of Average Treatment Effects
Authors: Shen Lingjie , Geleijnse Gijs , Kaptein Maurits 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Despite the recent development of numerous methods aiming to estimate individual-level treatment effects based on observational data, understanding the validity of these estimates remains challenging. Often it is unclear whether the observational data meet the assumptions imposed by the method. Additionally, there is often large flexibility in model choice when implementing a given method. We present the R package RCTrep designed to make it easy to compare and validate estimates of (conditional) average treatment effects obtained using observational data by a) making it easy to obtain and visualize estimates derived using a large variety of methods, and b) ensuring that estimates are easily compared to a gold standard (i.e., estimates derived from randomized controlled trials). RCTrep offers a generic protocol for treatment effect validation based on four simple steps, namely, set-selection, estimation, diagnosis, and validation. The package provides a simple dashboard to review the obtained results. This article presents design of RCTrep and serves as a user guide for researchers aiming to leverage the potential of observational data.
Brightness perception under photopic conditions - experiments and modeling with contributions of S-cone and ipRGC
Authors: Khanh Tran Quoc , Bodrogi Peter , Zandi Babak , Trinh Vinh Quang 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
In 1931, the CIE published and standardised the photopic luminous efficiency function. Based on these standardized curves,luminous flux in lumens, luminance in cd/m2, and illuminance in lux are determined by an integral of these curves and theincident light spectra in photometers and are considered as a physical brightness. However, human brightness perception isnot only weighted by this simple determination, but is a more complicated combination of all L-cones, M-cones, S-cones, rods,and later ipRGCs, which was partly illustrated by the equivalent brightness of Fotios et al. with the correction factor (S/V)0.24.Recently, new researches have mentioned the role of ipRGCs in the human brightness perception. However, it is still unclearhow these signal components of the human visual system are involved in overall human brightness perception. In this work, thehuman brightness perception under photopic conditions was studied by experimenting with 28 subjects under 25 different lightspectra. These spectra were varied not only in brightness but also in spectral geometry. In this way, the contributions of thesignal components can be investigated. Subsequently, an optimization process was performed with the obtained database. Theresults show that not only the photopic component, but also the S-cones and ipRGC play their role, although it is smaller. Thus,the visually scaled brightness model based on the database optimization was constructed with not only illuminance but alsoS-cones and ipRGC with R2 of 0.9554 and RMSE of 4.7802. These results are much better than the Fotios-based brightnessmodel with only S-cones (R2 = 0.8161, RMSE = 9.7123) and the traditional model without S-cones and ipRGC (R2 = 0.8121,RMSE = 9.8171). It also suggests that a "blue-sensitive" signal (S or G=ipRGC or their combination) should be given seriousenough attention in the human brightness perception, and a more comprehensive study is needed to investigate it more deeply.
Measuring nitrate concentration in surface waters with a microfluidic device facilitated by a miniaturized capacitive deionization cell
Authors: Zhang Hang , Zhao Ran , Yang Ying , Liu Yingwei , Han Linchen 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Excessive nitrate in surface waters poses a great threat to the health of human beings. Traditional measuring tools require either hazardous chemicals or organic matter compensation. In this work, we proposed an online microfluidic device incorporated with a miniaturized capacitive deionization cell that separates organic matter and nitrate ions before the measurement and afterwards determines the nitrate concentration with a 235-nm LED. The optimal operational parameter setting, which is a combination of 600-s charging duration and 0.5-V cell potential, was also obtained in order to achieve the maximum fractionation of nitrate ions. Promising results were obtained by our new approach, revealing that this device could serve as a functional and effective tool for the determination of nitrate concentration in surface water.
Shikimate Kinase Inhibitors: An Update on Promising Strategy against Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Authors: Rajput Vikrant Singh , Khan Inshad Ali , Runthala Ashish 
Published: February 2023

Abstract:
Humanity has been battling with tuberculosis (TB) for a long period, and despite the availability of drugs well-known to act against the deadly microbe, the menace is still very far from reaching its end. Moreover, problems related to TB chemotherapy, such as lengthy treatment peri-ods leading to poor patient compliance, increasing drug resistance, and association with another deadlier disease HIV-AIDS, make the situation alarming, thereby pressing the need for the discov-ery of new potent drugs urgently. Therefore, a drug target that is essential for survival and exclusive to M. tuberculosis presents a promising platform to explore novel molecules against the microor-ganism for better pathogen clearance with minimal toxicity. The shikimate pathway that leads to the synthesis of essential aromatic amino acids is one such attractive target. Shikimate kinase, the fifth enzyme of this pathway, converts shikimate to shikimate-3-phosphate by using ATP as a co-substrate. Targeting shikimate kinase could be an effective strategy in light of its essentiality and absence of any homologue in mammals. This review discusses different strategies adopted for dis-covering novel compounds or scaffolds targeting M. tuberculosis shikimate kinase (MtSK) in vitro. The application of substrate analogues, their structure, and ligand-based approach for screening a library of anti-mycobacterial compounds, marine-derived molecules, and commercially available libraries have yielded promising MtSK inhibitors exhibiting micro-molar activities. To develop these leads into future drugs with minimum off-target effects on the host microenvironment, the molecules need to be structurally optimized for improved activities against enzymes and whole-cell organisms.