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Tremor is one of the most common neurological symptoms. Its clinical and neurobiological complexity necessitates novel approaches for granular phenotyping. Instrumented neurophysiological analyses have proven useful, but are highly resource-intensive and lack broad accessibility. In contrast, bedside scores are simple to administer, but lack the granularity to capture subtle but relevant tremor features. We utilise the open-source computer vision pose tracking algorithm Mediapipe to track hands in clinical video recordings and use the resulting time series to compute canonical tremor features. This approach is compared to marker-based 3D motion capture, wrist-worn accelerometry, clinical scoring and a second, specifically trained tremor-specific algorithm in two independent clinical cohorts. These cohorts consisted of 66 patients diagnosed with essential tremor, assessed in different task conditions and states of deep brain stimulation therapy. We find that Mediapipe-derived tremor metrics exhibit high convergent clinical validity to scores (Spearman's ρ = 0.55–0.86, p≤.01) as well as an accuracy of up to 2.60 mm (95% CI [−3.13, 8.23]) and ≤0.21 Hz (95% CI [−0.05, 0.46]) for tremor amplitude and frequency measurements, matching gold-standard equipment. Mediapipe, but not the disease-specific algorithm, was capable of analysing videos involving complex configurational changes of the hands. Moreover, it enabled the extraction of tremor features with diagnostic and prognostic relevance, a dimension which conventional tremor scores were unable to provide. Collectively, this demonstrates that current computer vision algorithms can be transformed into an accurate and highly accessible tool for video-based tremor analysis, yielding comparable results to gold standard tremor recordings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this article is to evaluate to the masticatory function performance and Oral Health-related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) in implant-retained overdenture compared with different implant number placements in the edentulous mandible. Methods: From 2013 to 2015, each patients received 3 implants (iSy-Implant, Camlog, Wimsheim, Germany) in intraforaminal mandible (34, 41/31, 44). After operation, inserted implants were gradually loaded and incorporated into an overdenture with a self-aligning attachment system (Locator abutments) in 3 + 3 + 3 months. Five checked points were performed chewing cycle test with multicolored chewing gum and OHIP-G14 questionnaire and a sum score questionnaire as following: pre-operation, one implant load (41/31), two implants loaded (33,43), three implants loaded and 1-year follow up. Result: A total of 10 patients with 30 implants were placed, the survival rate of the implants was 100% within 1-year follow-up. Regarding the masticatory function analysis, for the higher number of chewing cycles, the higher mixing rate was observed. After 1 year, the inter-mixing rate without significant changes was found compared to the time after three implants were loaded with attachment system. The mean value of OHIP-G14 was 30.4 preoperatively, 21.1 after loading the first locator, 10.7 after loading two locator abutments, and 3.2 after loading all three locator abutments. After 1 year, OHIP-G14 was 2.6 without significantly changed. The mean of the sum score was 15.5 preoperatively, 27.8 after activation of the first locator, 39.4 after activation of two locators, 46.2 after activation of all three locators, and 47.3 after 1 year. An increase of 0.7 sum score units per time point was observed. No significance was detectable, analogous to OHIP-G14, compared to the time of activation of all three locator setups (p-value = 0.22). Conclusions: A significant improvement in masticatory function performance and OHRQoL was evaluated with the increasing number of implants with locator attachment in edentulous mandible. With the investigation of the OHIP-G14 and sum score, the results of patient report outcome might be associated with the increase in the number of implants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable weed management strategies are critical to feeding the world's population while preserving ecosystems and biodiversity. Therefore, site-specific weed control strategies based on automation are needed to reduce the additional time and effort required for weeding. Machine vision-based methods appear to be a promising approach for weed detection, but require high quality data on the species in a specific agricultural area. Here we present a dataset, the Moving Fields Weed Dataset (MFWD), which captures the growth of 28 weed species commonly found in sorghum and maize fields in Germany. A total of 94,321 images were acquired in a fully automated, high-throughput phenotyping facility to track over 5,000 individual plants at high spatial and temporal resolution. A rich set of manually curated ground truth information is also provided, which can be used not only for plant species classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks, but also for multiple object tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Dental implant abutments are defined as medical devices by their intended use. Surfaces of custom-made CAD/CAM two-piece abutments may become contaminated during the manufacturing process in the dental lab. Inadequate reprocessing prior to patient care may contribute to implant-associated complications. Risk-adapted hygiene management is required to meet the requirements for medical devices. Methods: A total of 49 CAD/CAM-manufactured zirconia copings were bonded to prefabricated titanium bases. One group was bonded, polished, and cleaned separately in dental laboratories throughout Germany (LA). Another group was left untreated (NC). Five groups received the following hygiene regimen: three-stage ultrasonic cleaning (CP and FP), steam (SC), argon–oxygen plasma (PL), and simple ultrasonic cleaning (UD). Contaminants were detected using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and segmented and quantified using interactive machine learning (ML) and thresholding (SW). The data were statistically analysed using non-parametric tests (Kruskal–Wallis test, Dunn's test). Results: Significant differences in contamination levels with the different cleaning procedures were found (p ≤ 0.01). The FP–NC/LA groups showed the most significant difference in contamination levels for both measurement methods (ML, SW), followed by CP–LA/NC and UD–LA/NC for SW and CP–LA/NC and PL–LA/NC for ML (p ≤ 0.05). EDS revealed organic contamination in all specimens; traces of aluminum, silicon, and calcium were detected. Conclusions: Chemothermal cleaning methods based on ultrasound and argon–oxygen plasma effectively removed process-related contamination from zirconia surfaces. Machine learning is a promising assessment tool for quantifying and monitoring external contamination on zirconia abutments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous flow pathways through the soil determine the transport of dissolved and particle-bound nutritional elements like phosphorus (P) to ground and surface waters. This study was designed to understand the spatial patterns of P in agriculturally used soils and the mechanisms causing P accumulation and depletion at the centimetre scale. We conducted dye tracer experiments using Brilliant Blue on a loamy Stagnosol in North-Eastern-Germany. The plant-available P was analysed using double lactate extraction (DL-P). The plant-available P content of the topsoil was significantly higher than that of the subsoil in all three replicates (p < 0.001). The topsoil's stained areas showed significantly higher P contents than unstained areas (p < 0.05), while the opposite was found for the subsoil. The P content varied enormously across all observed soil profiles (4 to 112 mg P kg−1 soil) and different categories of flow patterns (matrix flow, flow fingers, macropore flow, and no visible transport pathways). The P contents of these transport pathways differed significantly and followed the order: Pmatrix flow > Pfinger flow > Pno visible transport pathways > Pmacropore flow. We conclude that P tends to accumulate along flow pathways in the topsoil in the observed fertilized and tilled mineral soil. In contrast, in the subsoil at a generally lower P level, P is depleted from the prominent macroporous flow domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current dynamic MRA techniques are limited by temporal resolution and signal-to-noise penalties. GRASP, a fast and flexible MRI technique combining compressed-sensing, parallel imaging, and golden-angle radial sampling, acquires volumetric data continuously and can be reconstructed post hoc for user-defined applications. We describe a custom pipeline to retrospectively reconstruct ultrahigh temporal resolution, dynamic MRA from GRASP imaging obtained in the course of routine practice. GRASP scans were reconstructed using a custom implementation of the GRASP algorithm and post-processed with MeVisLab (MeVis Medical Solutions AG, Germany). Twenty consecutive examinations were scored by three neuroradiologists for angiographic quality of specific vascular segments and imaging artifacts using a 4-point scale. Unsubtracted images, baseline-subtracted images, and a temporal gradient dataset were available in 2D and 3D reconstructions. Distinct arterial and capillary phases were identified in all reconstructions, with a median of 2 frames (IQR1-3 and 2–3, respectively). Median rating for vascular segments was 3 (excellent) in all reconstructions and for nearly all segments, with excellent intraclass correlation (range 0.91–1.00). No cases were degraded by artifacts. GRASP-MRI obtained in routine practice can be seamlessly repurposed to produce high quality 4D MRA with 1–2-s resolved isotropic cerebrovascular angiography. Further exploration into diagnostic accuracy in disease-specific applications is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is known that cultural background influences the healthy brain, less is known about how it affects cortical changes in schizophrenia. Here, we tested whether schizophrenia differentially affected the brain in Japanese and German patients. In a sample of 155 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and 191 healthy controls from Japan and Germany, we acquired 3 T-MRI of the brain. We subsequently compared cortical thickness and cortical surface area to identify whether differences between healthy controls and patients might be influenced by ethnicity. Additional analyses were performed to account for effects of duration of illness and medication. We found pronounced interactions between schizophrenia and cultural background in the cortical thickness of several areas, including the left inferior and middle temporal gyrus, as well as the right lateral occipital cortex. Regarding cortical surface area, interaction effects appeared in the insula and the occipital cortex, among others. Some of these brain areas are related to the expression of psychotic symptoms, which are known to differ across cultures. Our results indicate that cultural background impacts cortical structures in different ways, probably resulting in varying clinical manifestations, and call for the inclusion of more diverse samples in schizophrenia research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-dimensional arrays (also known as raster data or gridded data) play a key role in many, if not all science and engineering domains where they typically represent spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation output, or statistics "datacubes". As classic database technology does not support arrays adequately, such data today are maintained mostly in silo solutions, with architectures that tend to erode and not keep up with the increasing requirements on performance and service quality. Array Database systems attempt to close this gap by providing declarative query support for flexible ad-hoc analytics on large n-D arrays, similar to what SQL offers on set-oriented data, XQuery on hierarchical data, and SPARQL and CIPHER on graph data. Today, Petascale Array Database installations exist, employing massive parallelism and distributed processing. Hence, questions arise about technology and standards available, usability, and overall maturity. Several papers have compared models and formalisms, and benchmarks have been undertaken as well, typically comparing two systems against each other. While each of these represent valuable research to the best of our knowledge there is no comprehensive survey combining model, query language, architecture, and practical usability, and performance aspects. The size of this comparison differentiates our study as well with 19 systems compared, four benchmarked to an extent and depth clearly exceeding previous papers in the field; for example, subsetting tests were designed in a way that systems cannot be tuned to specifically these queries. It is hoped that this gives a representative overview to all who want to immerse into the field as well as a clear guidance to those who need to choose the best suited datacube tool for their application. This article presents results of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Array Database Assessment Working Group (ADA:WG), a subgroup of the Big Data Interest Group. It has elicited the state of the art in Array Databases, technically supported by IEEE GRSS and CODATA Germany, to answer the question: how can data scientists and engineers benefit from Array Database technology? As it turns out, Array Databases can offer significant advantages in terms of flexibility, functionality, extensibility, as well as performance and scalability—in total, the database approach of offering "datacubes" analysis-ready heralds a new level of service quality. Investigation shows that there is a lively ecosystem of technology with increasing uptake, and proven array analytics standards are in place. Consequently, such approaches have to be considered a serious option for datacube services in science, engineering and beyond. Tools, though, vary greatly in functionality and performance as it turns out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As lead is a heavy metal showing high toxicity for many organisms, its entry in the ecosystem should be minimised. Nevertheless, considerable quantities are deposited in the environment via hunting ammunition. Such practice is responsible for the occurrence of lead poisoning in many wildlife species and represents a health risk to humans. We assess the differences in the fragmentation patterns of lead-based and lead-free hunting rifle bullets using the radiographic characteristics of gunshot wounds. We took radiographs of 297 wild ungulates shot during regular hunting events in Germany. Compared to lead-free ammunition, both the number of bullet fragments and the maximal distance between fragments and the wound channel increased when bullets were lead-based. Under normal German hunting conditions, the use of lead-based bullets causes a broad contamination of the carcass and the viscera with bullet material. The wide-spread substitution of lead-based bullets through non-lead alternatives should therefore be further encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the global research status and future trends of cadastre were evaluated by using bibliometric analysis. This study is based on the analysis of research topics, scientific production, collaboration among countries and authors, and most cited papers on cadastre research which obtained from database of Scopus during the time period from 1958 to 2018. A total of 4220 papers were published in 128 different journals and most of them were original articles (2906, 68.8%) followed by conference paper (966, 22.9%). It found that Germany was the most productive country with 218 papers and 5.2% of total literature followed by United States and Australia. University of Melbourne was found to publish the highest number of documents with 85 papers and to cover 4.2% of the total literature followed by Delft University of Technology. Most used five keywords were "cadastre", "GIS", "surveying", "mapping" and "land use" (n = 945, 791, 300, 296 and 294 times, respectively). The top two authors who contributed most were Williamson, I.P. (69 articles), Van Oosterom P. (40 articles). The top-cited publication was "Analysis of land-cover transitions based on seventeenth and eighteenth century cadastral maps and aerial photographs" written by Cousins, in Landscape Ecology in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially for investigator-initiated research at universities and academic institutions, Internet-based rare disease registries (RDR) are required that integrate electronic data capture (EDC) with automatic image analysis or manual image annotation. We propose a modular framework merging alpha-numerical and binary data capture. In concordance with the Office of Rare Diseases Research recommendations, a requirement analysis was performed based on several RDR databases currently hosted at Uniklinik RWTH Aachen, Germany. With respect to the study management tool that is already successfully operating at the Clinical Trial Center Aachen, the Google Web Toolkit was chosen with Hibernate and Gilead connecting a MySQL database management system. Image and signal data integration and processing is supported by Apache Commons FileUpload-Library and ImageJ-based Java code, respectively. As a proof of concept, the framework is instantiated to the German Calciphylaxis Registry. The framework is composed of five mandatory core modules: (1) Data Core, (2) EDC, (3) Access Control, (4) Audit Trail, and (5) Terminology as well as six optional modules: (6) Binary Large Object (BLOB), (7) BLOB Analysis, (8) Standard Operation Procedure, (9) Communication, (10) Pseudonymization, and (11) Biorepository. Modules 1-7 are implemented in the German Calciphylaxis Registry. The proposed RDR framework is easily instantiated and directly integrates image management and analysis. As open source software, it may assist improved data collection and analysis of rare diseases in near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis presents data from a new perspective offering key insights into the spread patterns of norovirus and influenza epidemic events. We utilize optic flow analysis to gain an informed overview of a wealth of statistical epidemiological data and identify trends in movement of influenza waves throughout Germany on the NUTS 3 level (413 locations) which maps municipalities on European level. We show that Influenza and norovirus seasonal outbreak events have a highly distinct pattern. We investigate the quantitative statistical properties of the epidemic patterns and find a shifted distribution in the time between influenza and norovirus seasonal peaks of reported infections over one decade. These findings align with key biological features of both pathogens as shown in the course of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]