SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results

peer reviewedThe SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet

Speckle tracking echocardiography-determined measures of global and regional left ventricular function correlate with functional capacity in patients with and without preserved ejection fraction.

BACKGROUND: Standard measures of left ventricular systolic and diastolic function often fail to identify left ventricular dysfunction in patients with heart failure and do not correlate with measures of functional capacity. AIM: To determine if speckle tracking echocardiography (STE)-determined measures of global and regional myocardial contractility have a linear association with functional capacity in patients with and without preserved ejection fraction. METHODS: In 68 adult patients, functional status was estimated with the Duke Activity Status Index (DASI), left ventricular ejection fraction was determined with Simpson\u27s biplane method, and QLAB advanced quantification software (Philips, The Netherlands) was used to determine peak measures of strain. RESULTS: Global and regional measures of longitudinal, circumferential, and radial strain had a strong linear association with the DASI score. Longitudinal strain in the inferolateral segments had the strongest correlation with DASI (r = -0.72, P \u3c 0.001). In patients with an ejection fraction ≥45%, ejection fraction and E/e\u27 had no correlation with DASI, whereas longitudinal strain in the inferolateral segments had significant correlation with DASI (r = -0.53, P = 0.03, n = 16). CONCLUSIONS: STE-determined measures of global and regional left ventricular function have a strong linear association with estimates of functional capacity in patients with and without preserved ejection fraction. STE-determined measures of strain, especially longitudinal strain, are likely to be important targets for therapy and should be considered in future studies aimed at improving our diagnosis of left ventricular inadequacy in patients with heart failure, especially those with preserved ejection fraction

Bioinspired Spatially Topological Strategy Boosts the Anion Exchange Membrane for Industrial-scale Water Electrolysis

The transport of ions through the anion exchange membrane (AEM) depends on the overall energy barriers imposed by the collective interplay of ion channel architecture. The efficient transport of water and ions can be observed ubiquitously in plants. Inspired by the pectin in nature, we developed a spatially topological strategy for designing high-performance AEMs. To achieve precision control at the molecular level, several spatially topological molecules such as triptycene and 9,9’-spirobifluorene were utilized as single or dual framework centers for the anion exchange membrane. By manipulating the ratio of triptycene and 9,9’-spirobifluorene in the polymer, a high ionic conductivity (197.4 mS cm-1 at 80 °C) and an exceedingly low swelling ratio (8.6% at 80 °C) can be attained. The present AEM-WEs achieved a new record high current density of 8.4 A cm−2 at 2.0 V with a 1 M KOH at 80 °C using platinum group metal (PGM)-free catalysts, which surpassed that of state-of-the-art proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers (PEM-WEs) (~ 6 A cm−2 at 2.0 V) and operated stably at a current density of 2 A cm−2 with a cell voltage of 1.8 V for more than 600 h at 60 °C. Notably, when we used the cell with five stacked PGM-free based membrane (T4-1.0-0.5, 80 μm) electrodes, a hydrogen production rate of 0.54 Nm3 h−1 was achieved. The industrial system demonstrates a high level of efficiency and stability while operating under working conditions with a current density of 1 A cm-2 at 2 V