Month: July 2024

Strategies to improve postpartum engagement in healthcare after high-risk conditions diagnosed in pregnancy: a narrative review

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Abstract

Transition from antepartum to postpartum care is important, but often fragmented, and attendance at postpartum visits can be poor. Access to care is especially important for individuals diagnosed antepartum with conditions associated with longer-term implications, including gestational diabetes (GDM) and hypertensive disorders in pregnancy (HDP). Strategies to link and strengthen this transition are essential to support people to attend recommended appointments and testing. This narrative review evaluates what is known about postpartum transition of care after higher-risk antepartum conditions, discusses barriers and facilitators to uptake of recommended testing, and outlines strategies trialled to increase both postpartum attendance and testing. Barriers to attendance frequently overlap with general barriers to accessing healthcare. Specific postpartum challenges include difficulties with transport, coordinating breastfeeding and childcare access. Systemic challenges include inadequate communication to women around implications of health conditions diagnosed in pregnancy, and the importance of postpartum follow up. Uptake of recommended testing after a diagnosis of GDM and HDP is variable but generally suboptimal. Strategies which demonstrate promise include the use of patient navigators, focused education and specialised clinics. Reminder systems have had variable impact. Telehealth and technology are under-utilised in this field but offer promising options particularly with the expansion of virtual healthcare into routine maternity care. Strategies to improve both attendance rates and uptake of testing must be designed to address disparities in healthcare access and tailored to the needs of the community. This review provides a starting point to develop such strategies from the community level to the population level.

A farewell to the lone hero researcher: team research and writing

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Abstract

Criminology have long celebrated the lone hero researcher. Doing and writing up research in solitude has been the key to academic success and institutional promotions. However, the social sciences in general have increasingly moved towards more collaborative ways of doing research, and co-authorship has become more common. In this study, we summarize and discuss the pros and cons of working in teams when doing qualitative research. Drawing upon our own experiences from Mexico and Norway, we argue for a radical approach to team research and co-authorship, which we describe as team writing. Most importantly, we suggest opening up to include stakeholders and community partners, thus challenging the borders between researchers and those researched. This is arguably particularly important for research done in the academic, geographical and topical periphery of criminology. Team research and writing answers some of the critique of power inequality, representativity and lack of diversity in contemporary academic research. We also believe that team research, and writing, can make criminological research more multifaceted, reflexive, and thus better.

Mapmaking as visual storytelling: the movement and emotion of managing sex work in the urban landscape

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Abstract

This paper explores an interdisciplinary approach that researchers can use to understand how people feel about their movement in the cityscape and their risk-taking activities by visualizing it. Author 1, a visual artist, and Author 2, a criminologist, used a psychogeography method where participants hand-drew maps of their everyday operations in the sex marketplace. Researchers, artists, and activists have used mapmaking to elucidate how individuals conceptualize physical space and place or their subjective, emotional relationship to the city's geography. Psychogeographers Lynch and Debord have used it to understand how participants feel about moving, inhabiting, navigating risk, and subverting space in the metropolis. We use this method as a vehicle to show how sex market facilitators’ imagine the physical geographic space where they work in the nighttime economy, their embodiment in managing a business in the urban landscape, their emotions in this risk-taking activity, and how they feel rerouting city blocks and subverting formal capitalism. In addition, this technique enabled participants to feel and recall emotions of this lived experience, such as excitement, control, authenticity, shame, and freedom. Sixty participants who worked in New York City hand drew mental maps or visual depictions of where they worked within the city. This visual storytelling method provides an avenue for what O'Neill terms an ethno-mimetic process where images/performances make lived experiences palpable to viewers. In this case, we see a glimpse of the sensations of this high-risk activity in the sex marketplace, allowing us to understand participants' social relations, lived experiences, and motivations.

Combining genetic and environmental data to map and model regions of provenance for silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) in Italy

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Abstract

Regions of provenance for forest reproductive materials are the basis for wise use of forest resources in a changing climate. In this work a modelling framework is proposed for silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) in Italy where genetic clusters described by nuclear microsatellites were combined with high-resolution climatic data. When the genetic clusters were too large or had an uncertain ecological niche expression, an additional subregion division-was evaluated according to a climatic assessment. Subsequently each genecological group (Region of Provenance, RoP) was projected in geographic space separately using species distribution modelling (SDM) procedure under current (1991–2020) and a future climate scenario derived from the 6th assessment report for the period 2041–2070. The final division into nine RoPs was able to explain 77.41% of the total climatic variance, a good trade-off between statistical significance and practical usability. The modelling steps then showed a large degree of ecological overlap between RoPs with some of them occurring in similar ecological environments but characterized by a different genetic structure. When projected at the continental scale, the Italian RoPs were found to be suitable for almost all the current European range of silver fir, with potential expansion in Nordic countries in the future, beyond the current distribution range. The study showed that the combination of genetic and ecological data can be a robust way to proceed in areas where a strong genetic differentiation between populations occurs, such as in Italy. New markers such as SNPs can then be used to detect adaptive traits and drive the selection of provenances for common garden experiments in areas where the SDM modelscurrently extrapolate potential sites outside the current natural range.

Life cycle assessment of an upcoming nuclear power plant decommissioning: the Fessenheim case study from public data

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Abstract

Purpose

Historical French fleet of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) is near end-of-life, with 14 NPPs planned to begin decommissioning by 2035. Despite decade-old calls for more research regarding these activities’ environmental impact, very few if any studies were conducted since. Due to the French fleet high-degree of standardization, a prospective investigation regarding the Fessenheim NPP—first large-scale plant to be decommissioned in France, starting 2026—is conducted to identify results of interest beyond this case study.

Methods

A life cycle assessment is realized, following ISO 14040/44, with a functional unit defined as “the decommissioning of the Fessenheim NPP.” The system boundaries encompass four unit-processes: dismantling of electromechanical equipment, clean-up of the structures, demolition of plant buildings, and transport of conventional and radioactive waste (RW). This last unit-process is investigated separately to make a clear comparison of conventional and radioactive waste. Pre-decommissioning activities, soil rehabilitation, and RW final storage are excluded. Primary data were obtained from the decommissioning public report of EDF (Electricity of France), with scaling based on the literature and third-party reports/documents. Background processes were modeled with the ecoinvent 3.8 database. Environmental impacts are estimated using the CML-IA baseline methodology to allow comparison with previous works based on CML2001.

Results and discussion

The “Metal cutting” sub-process is found to be the major contributor to environmental impacts during dismantling, clean-up, and demolition, results varying from 62.6 to 99.5% depending on the impact category. A sensitivity analysis explores the effect of variation in shares of thermal and mechanical cutting. It demonstrates the huge potential of impact reduction for the total system under study if thermal cutting use is limited as much as possible. Despite representing only 5% of the total mass of waste, RW scores 1.8–6.6 times higher than conventional waste during transport, due to much higher distances to cover and specific conditioning. Previous explorations of results transferability are found to be methodologically uncertain, and the NPP total power installed is evaluated as an unpromising transferability factor.

Conclusions

Decommissioning of nuclear power plants is still in need of thorough studies based on exhaustive and transparent datasets. Until then, state-of-the-art prospective assessments and transferability of LCA results to future studies are severely limited. Restraint in use of oxy-acetylene cutting is nevertheless highly recommended. French unique policy regarding very low-level waste needs further consideration, and decentralized storage sites are a promising research lead.

Preoperative evaluation of mediastinal lymph nodes in non-small cell lung cancer using [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT: a prospective pilot study

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Abstract

Purpose

Mediastinal nodal staging is crucial for surgical candidate selection in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but conventional imaging has limitations often necessitating invasive staging. We investigated the additive clinical value of fibroblast activation protein inhibitor (FAPI) PET/CT, an imaging technique targeting fibroblast activation protein, for mediastinal nodal staging of NSCLC.

Methods

In this prospective pilot study, we enrolled patients scheduled for surgical resection of NSCLC based on specific criteria designed to align with indications for invasive staging procedures. Patients were included when meeting at least one of the following: (1) presence of FDG-positive N2 lymph nodes, (2) clinical N1 stage, (3) central tumor location or tumor diameter of ≥ 3 cm, and (4) adenocarcinoma exhibiting high FDG uptake. [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT was performed before surgery after a staging workup including [18F]FDG PET/CT. The diagnostic accuracy of [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT for “N2” nodes was assessed through per-patient visual assessment and per-station quantitative analysis using histopathologic results as reference standards.

Results

Twenty-three patients with 75 nodal stations were analyzed. Histopathologic examination confirmed that nine patients (39.1%) were N2-positive. In per-patient assessment, [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT successfully identified metastasis in eight patients (sensitivity 0.89 (0.52–1.00)), upstaging three patients compared to [18F]FDG PET/CT. [18F]FDG PET/CT detected FDG-avid nodes in six (42.8%) of 14 N2-negative patients. Among them, five were considered non-metastatic based on calcification and distribution pattern, and one was considered metastatic. In contrast, [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT correctly identified all non-metastatic patients solely based on tracer avidity. In per-station analysis, [68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT discriminated metastasis more effectively compared to [18F]FDG PET/CT-based (AUC of ROC curve 0.96 (0.88–0.99) vs. 0.68 (0.56–0.78), P < 0.001).

Conclusion

[68Ga]FAPI-46 PET/CT holds promise as an imaging tool for preoperative mediastinal nodal staging in NSCLC, with improved sensitivity and the potential to reduce false-positive results, optimizing the need for invasive staging procedures.

A strong direct link from the layer 3/4 border to layer 6 of cat primary visual cortex

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Abstract

The cat primary visual cortex (V1) is a cortical area for which we have one of the most detailed estimates of the connection ‘weights’ (expressed as number of synapses) between different neural populations in different layers (Binzegger et al in J Neurosci 24:8441–8453, 2004). Nevertheless, the majority of excitatory input sources to layer 6, the deepest layer in a local translaminar excitatory feedforward loop, was not accounted for by the known neuron types used to generate the quantitative Binzegger diagram. We aimed to fill this gap by using a retrograde tracer that would label neural cell bodies in and outside V1 that directly connect to layer 6 of V1. We found that more than 80% of labeled neurons projecting to layer 6 were within V1 itself. Our data indicate that a substantial fraction of the missing input is provided by a previously unidentified population of layer 3/4 border neurons, laterally distributed and connecting more strongly to layer 6 than the typical superficial layer pyramidal neurons considered by Binzegger et al. (Binzegger et al in J Neurosci 24:8441–8453, 2004). This layer 3/4 to layer 6 connection may be a parallel route to the layer 3 – layer 5 – layer 6 feedforward pathway, be associated with the fast-conducting, movement-related Y pathway and provide convergent input from distant (5–10 degrees) regions of the visual field.

Selective activations and functional connectivities to the sight of faces, scenes, body parts and tools in visual and non-visual cortical regions leading to the human hippocampus

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Abstract

Connectivity maps are now available for the 360 cortical regions in the Human Connectome Project Multimodal Parcellation atlas. Here we add function to these maps by measuring selective fMRI activations and functional connectivity increases to stationary visual stimuli of faces, scenes, body parts and tools from 956 HCP participants. Faces activate regions in the ventrolateral visual cortical stream (FFC), in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) visual stream for face and head motion; and inferior parietal visual (PGi) and somatosensory (PF) regions. Scenes activate ventromedial visual stream VMV and PHA regions in the parahippocampal scene area; medial (7m) and lateral parietal (PGp) regions; and the reward-related medial orbitofrontal cortex. Body parts activate the inferior temporal cortex object regions (TE1p, TE2p); but also visual motion regions (MT, MST, FST); and the inferior parietal visual (PGi, PGs) and somatosensory (PF) regions; and the unpleasant-related lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Tools activate an intermediate ventral stream area (VMV3, VVC, PHA3); visual motion regions (FST); somatosensory (1, 2); and auditory (A4, A5) cortical regions. The findings add function to cortical connectivity maps; and show how stationary visual stimuli activate other cortical regions related to their associations, including visual motion, somatosensory, auditory, semantic, and orbitofrontal cortex value-related, regions.

The role of trust, information and legal stability in the development of renewable energy: the analysis of non-economic factors affecting entrepreneurs’ investments in green energy in Poland

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Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse the factors influencing entrepreneurs’ decisions about investing in renewable energy. It outlines a number of different factors that may affect the process of transforming entrepreneurs into business prosumers, who thus want to limit the effects of rising energy prices. The article defends the thesis that in addition to the economic, technological and psychological dimensions, legal and political stability, access to reliable information and the level of trust in a given society are equally important. Based on the quantitative research results, the article indicates which elements are particularly important for entrepreneurs when making decisions about investing in renewable energy and which institutions are indicated by Polish entrepreneurs as responsible for implementing energy transition. The article also indicates that information about the possibility of receiving funding from the European Union and the government, the government’s energy policy and technological possibilities is important for entrepreneurs’ decisions about investing in renewable energy in Poland. It is always difficult to implement sustainable development goals without an atmosphere of trust and predictable legal stability in which entrepreneurs can run their businesses.

A comprehensive comparison study of ML models for multistage APT detection: focus on data preprocessing and resampling

Latest Results

Abstract

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) present a significant cybersecurity challenge, necessitating innovative detection methods. This study stands out by integrating advanced data preparation with strategies for handling data imbalances, tailored for the SCVIC-APT-2021 dataset. We employ a mix of resampling, cost-sensitive learning, and ensemble methods, alongside machine learning and deep learning models like XGBoost, LightGBM, and ANNs, to enhance APT detection. Our strategy, which draws from the MITRE ATT&CK framework, concentrates on each stage of APT attacks, which significantly increases detection accuracy. Notably, we achieved a Macro F1-score of 95.20% with XGBoost and 96.67% with LightGBM, and significant enhancements in the area under the precision–recall curve for both. Our study’s exploration of the SCVIC-APT-2021 dataset marks a progressive step in APT detection research, with vital implications for future cybersecurity developments.