Sustainable Living with Environmental Risks

Earth System Sciences; Environmental Management; Sustainable Development; Environmental Risk Management; Sustainable Society; Biodiversity and Environment; Interdisciplinary Science; Leadership Education; Sustainable Living with Environmental Risks (SLER

Linking Species to Ecosystem : The Periodical Millipede Determines Nutrient Cycling in a Larch Forest

横浜国際大学Scedule:17-18 March 2003, Vemue: Kanazawa, Japan, Kanazawa Citymonde Hotel, Project Leader : Hayakawa, Kazuichi, Symposium Secretariat: XO kamata, Naoto, Edited by:Kamata, Naoto

Implementation of Do Not Attempt Resuscitate Orders in a Japanese Nursing Home

Objective: To investigate whether do not attempt resuscitation (DNAR) orders can be implemented in a standard nursing home in Japan, where routine DNAR orders are not yet common in many facilities including hospitals. Method: Ninety-eight residents in a 100-bed nursing home were evaluated. All of the eligible residents and/or their family members were asked whether they wanted to receive resuscitation, including mechanical ventilation. Result: The residents were 54 to 101 years of age (mean 83.3), with 27 males and 71 females. After administering the questionnaire, 92 (94%) patients did not want resuscitation and mechanical ventilation. Conclusion: In a nursing home, it was possible to obtain advance directives by which most residents/families rejected resuscitation and mechanical ventilation. This could avoid unnecessary and undesirable resuscitation procedures

Significant Bauschinger effect and back stress strengthening in an ultrafine grained pure aluminum fabricated by severe plastic deformation process

Bauschinger test in uniaxial tension-compression mode was carried out for the first time on the pure Al specimens having homogeneous ultra-fine grained (UFG) microstructures fabricated by equal-channel angular pressing (ECAP) and subsequent annealing processes. Significant Bauschinger stress (transient softening), Bauschinger energy parameter and their strong dependences on the tensile plastic pre-strain at the very early stage of the tensile deformation were measured in the UFG specimens, in sharp contrast to their coarse-grained (CG) counterpart. The grain size dependence of the Bauschinger effect in pure Al was qualitatively discussed in terms of the back stress arising from the formation of dislocation pile-up against the grain boundary during plastic deformation

Automated Assessment of Aortic and Main Pulmonary Arterial Diameters using Model-Based Blood Vessel Segmentation for Predicting Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension in Low-Dose CT Lung Screening

Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) is characterized by obstruction of the pulmonary vasculature by residual organized thrombi. A morphological abnormality inside mediastinum of CTEPH patient is enlargement of pulmonary artery. This paper presents an automated assessment of aortic and main pulmonary arterial diameters for predicting CTEPH in low-dose CT lung screening. The distinctive feature of our method is to segment aorta and main pulmonary artery using both of prior probability and vascular direction which were estimated from mediastinal vascular region using principal curvatures of four-dimensional hyper surface. The method was applied to two datasets, 64 low-dose CT scans of lung cancer screening and 19 normal-dose CT scans of CTEPH patients through the training phase with 121 low-dose CT scans. This paper demonstrates effectiveness of our method for predicting CTEPH in low-dose CT screening

Segmentation of aorta and main pulmonary artery of non-contrast CT images using U-Net for chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension : evaluation of robustness to contacts with blood vessels

Enlargement of the pulmonary artery is a morphological abnormality of pulmonary hypertension patients. Diameters of the aorta and main pulmonary artery (MPA) are useful for predicting the presence of pulmonary hypertension. A major problem in the automatic segmentation of the aorta and MPA from non-contrast CT images is the invisible boundary caused by contact with blood vessels. In this study, we applied U-Net to the segmentation of the aorta and MPA from non-contrast CT images for normal and chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) cases and evaluated the robustness to the contacts between blood vessels. Our approach of the segmentation consists of three steps: (1) detection of trachea branch point, (2) cropping region of interest centered to the trachea branch point, and (3) segmentation of the aorta and MPA using U-Net. The segmentation performances were compared in seven methods: 2D U-Net, 2D U-Net with pre-trained VGG-16 encoder, 2D U-Net with pre-trained VGG-19 encoder, 2D Attention U-Net, 3D U-Net, an ensemble method of them, and our conventional method. The aorta and MPA segmentation methods using these U-Net achieved higher performance than a conventional method. Although the contact boundaries of blood vessels caused lower performance compared with the non-contact boundaries, the mean boundary distances were below about one pixel

Automated detection method of thoracic aorta calcification from non-contrast CT images using mediastinal anatomical label map

Progression of thoracic aortic calcification (TAC) has been shown to be associated with hard cardiovascular events including stroke and all-cause mortality as well as coronary events. In this study, we propose an automated detection method of TACs of non-contrast CT images using mediastinal anatomical label map. This method consists of two steps: (1) the construction of a mediastinal anatomical label map, and (2) the detection of TACs using the intensity and the mediastinal anatomical label map. The proposed method was applied to two non-contrast CT image datasets: 24 cases of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) and 100 non-CTEPH cases of low-dose CT screening. The method was compared with two-dimensional U-Nets and the Swin UNETR. The results showed that the method achieved significantly higher F1 score of 0.937 than other methods for the non-CTEPH case dataset (p-value < 0.05, pairwise Wilcoxon signed rank test with Bonferroni correction)

南アルプス南部寸又川流域における亜高山帯性針葉樹の分布－前黒法師岳におけるオオシラビソの分布の確認－

Distribution of subalpine conifers was investigated in the Sumatagawa area, the southern part of the Southern Japan Alps. Abies veitchii was dominant in upper part of subalpine area, and Tsuga diversifolia was dominant in lower part, while Abies mariesii waslessdominant than those species. Abies mariesii was found on Mts. Irodake, Tekaridake , Kagamoriyama , Hyakumatazawanoatama, Shinanomata, Peak 2,320 m, Onezawayama, Daimugensan, Sho-mugensan, and Maekuroboshidake. Among them, Mt. Maekuroboshidake（1,943 m, 35°11’N, 138°4’E）was located southernmost, 12 km southwest from Mt. Daimugensan（35°15’N, 138°9’E）that had been known as the southernmost locality of A . mariesii . Around the summit of Mt. Maekuroboshidake, A. mariesii occurred only in A. veichii-dominant forest more than 1,920 m in altitude. We found six trees more than 2 m in height, many living saplings, and some dead suppressed saplings of A. mariesii.To discuss the persistence of the southernmost population of the species, we need investigation on the structure and dynamics of the population