Each year, millions of visitors crowd the halls of the vast ensemble of museums in New York City, among which are some of the most prestigious and highly visited cultural heritage sites in the United States Fig. . These hThe Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are currently the only two New York City museums with full-time scientific staff. In addition to carrying out research in house, scientists at both institutions have actively pursued successful collaborations with colleagues in academia. While conservators may have varying degrees of scientific training and access to basic instrumentation, a scientist’s highly specialized skills and broad technical expertise are often desirable to embark on in-depth investigations and address high-impact questions. To meet the scientific needs of the New York City museum community and nurture opportunities for collaboration among neighbor institutions in the cultural heritage field, in September 2016 The Met’s Department of Scientific Research (DSR) launched the Network Initiative for Conservation Science, or NICS, with financial support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Growing out of a history of informal collaborations between The Met’s DSR and other New York City museums, NICS is a 6-year program aiming to share The Met’s resources, expertise, and state-of-the-art scientific research facilities with partner institutions free of charge. NICS currently supports 11 museums and cultural heritage institutions in New York City, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, the Central Park Conservancy, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The Frick Collection, the Hispanic Museum & Library, The Morgan Library & Museum, MoMA, The New York Public Library, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.NICS aims to promote sustainable research and advance scholarship in art history, archaeology, conservation, and science; to provide in-depth characterization of the materials and techniques used to create artifacts of archaeological, historical, and artistic relevance; to offer insight into the state of preservation and degradation of artworks; to develop innovative methodologies for the monitoring, stabilization, and repair of these objects; and to create an interface through which needs, capabilities, and knowledge can be shared at no cost among all institutions in the program. To date, NICS has served as a crucial resource for New York City museums and cultural heritage institutions, allowing members to probe in-depth scientific research questions as well as answer basic requests in the service of art conservation and preservation. Along with the use of benchtop instrumentation available in The Met’s DSR, NICS scientists have created a mobile laboratory that can be employed for in-situ analysis of unmovable objects, and have also relied on external research facilities through national and international collaborations. Since the beginning of the program, the team has carried out collaborative work on 70 projects, focusing on over 300 objects that span a broad range of media, cultures, and historical periods Fig. . PresentThis collection, including 8 articles, presents findings from some of the most relevant and fascinating projects that the NICS team has pursued in collaboration with other New York City museums. Among the topics discussed are discoveries on the repainting of Alexander Calder’s motorized sculptures , the deg


The history of healthy city planning can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century. Since the industrialization period, the harsh living conditions of cities and the outbreak of infectious diseases have promoted the coordinated development of urban planning and public health, and people have gradually realized the importance of urban design and planning to the health of residents. After searching keywords related to health city and urban planning, and excluding repeated, non-English, and unrelated papers, this work retrieved 2582 documents as the basic data . Additionally, CiteSpace was used to analyze document co-citation, cooperation network, and topic co-occurrence. Subsequently, random forest algorithm was used to predict the probability of citation. Overall, this work found that the hot spots of healthy urban planning are physical activity, green space, urban green space, and mental health. It also shows the diversification of themes and the development trend of cross-fields in the field of healthy urban planning. In addition, the article found that two factors, namely, the average number of citations of the first author and whether the article belongs to the field of environmental research, have a great impact on the number of citations of the article. This work is of practical significance to relevant practitioners and researchers, because it provides guidance for hot topics and future research directions in the field of healthy urban planning. The squalid living conditions of industrialized cities and communicable disease outbreaks in the 19th century gave rise to both the urban planning and public health professions ,3, whichIn the 1980s, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially proposed the healthy city project in Europe in 1986 and took five years as a phase to promote the development of healthy cities ,15. ThisIn the 1990s, with the broad spread of health city projects, more countries formed a cooperative network and integrated healthy city planning into their national policies. Germany further strengthened their health city network at the annual general meeting (AGM) in Greifswald, and emphasized the importance of health impact assessment and urban planning . Korea uAt the beginning of the 21st century, concepts such as City Health Development Planning (CHDP)  and HealIn terms of research, the themes of healthy city planning are widely distributed, which relates to impact of urban morphology ,36,37, eThe rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Bibliometric analysis is used for the quantitative analysis of books, articles, or other publications ,66 and hThis work will use CiteSpace to conduct a bibliometric analysis on the field of healthy urban planning. To have a deeper understanding of future research trends in this field, this work will also use the random forest algorithm to explore the influencing factors of literature citations using the characteristics of the article , and key research fields are used to predict hotspots and trends in the field of healthy urban planning.In summary, this work combines two different methods to jointly analyze the current and future research focus of healthy urban planning. As for the research design, we presented an outline of the research process in In step one for data acquisition, this work uses the core set of the WOS as the data source. Considering that our research focuses on healthy urban planning, which is the combination of health city and urban planning, we searched for papers of which the research topics, titles, or keywords contain “healthy city” (including synonyms) and the WOS categories that are highly related to urban planning . The specific search formula is TS =  OR TI =  OR AK =  AND WC = . The time span is 1 January 1981–31 December 2020, and the retrieval time is 28 January 2021.In step two for data processing, we firstly sorted out the papers of which the document type was articles (including reviews) and excluded non-English papers. Secondly, we removed the repeated articles. Finally, we manually excluded papers that were unrelated to the theme of healthy urban planning; finally, 2582 articles were obtained for CiteSpace analysis. The workflow above followed the criteria of Database Search , which iThen, the random forest algorithm analysis of this work uses the literature data of 2582 articles obtained in the WOS as the basis. The initial data from the WOS for each article included information of the Web of Science Core Collection field tags, such as AU (author), TI (title), etc. We selected terms that could be used in random forest part, reorganized them into 22 forecast influence factors, and divided them into the following three types: publication, author, and document. After calculation and statistics, the influencing factors such as the categories, names, sources, and statistical methods of all the influencing factors, were listed in (1)Analysis processIn this work, we used CiteSpace to conduct bibliometric analysis in the field of healthy urban planning from the aspects of cooperation network at the national, institutional, and individual scales; co-citation analysis of highly cited authors, journals and references; and theme analysis such as keywords co-occurrence.(2)Analysis typeThis research used CiteSpace 5.7.R3 (64-bit)-(c)2003-2021 Chaomei Chen to analyze the co-citation status, cooperation status, and sudden changes (burst detection of words or items through time) of keywords to determine the internal structure of the field, knowledge database of different periods of time, research hotspots, and research frontiers,91,92,93a.Cooperation Network AnalysisResearch on the country and institutional cooperation network is conducive to exploring the spatial and geographic distribution of published articles. Additionally, the author of the study has a key role in reflecting the research ability and evaluating the development of the academic field.b.Co-citation AnalysisWe must pay attention to the citation frequency of articles to identify the core authors and journals in a certain field. Moreover, from the topic distribution of the reference literature, we can see the knowledge base of the healthy urban planning field and provide reference values for subsequent research.c.Thematic Co-occurrence AnalysisThe co-occurrence of keywords can reflect the research hotspots of the subject field and provide auxiliary support for scientific research effectively. Additionally, the keyword explosive detection map is to detect keywords with a rapid increase in frequency in the short term, which reflects the occurrence of hot spots more directly.(1)Modeling processReferring to previous studies , we used(2)Random sampling was performed on the sample data set with replacement to obtain a data set with the same size sample.Specify the mtry value, that is, randomly generate mtry variables for the binary tree on the node, and the choice of the binary tree variables still meets the principle of minimum node impurity.Establish a fully grown decision tree to train all the extracted data sets.The final result is obtained by counting the average of the possible results of all decision trees.Algorithm stepsRandom forest is an ensemble learning algorithm that is based on decision trees, which was proposed in 2001 by Leo Breiman  along wi(3)Parameter SelectionAccording to the above steps, we organize the data set and build a random forest model. The model structure is shown in a.Root mean square error (RMSE).The root mean square error (RMSE) corresponds to the square root of the ratio of the square of the deviation between the predicted value and the true value to the number of observations n. It is used to measure the deviation between the predicted value and the true value. The smaller the value is, the smaller the deviation between the predicted value and the true value is, and the higher the prediction accuracy of the model is. Thus, the prediction model needs to seek to minimize the RMSE of the model training set.b.Decision tree (ntree).This work uses the test set to evaluate the performance of the model for predicting the number of citations in the literature. During the parameter selection process, the number of decision trees (ntree) is fixed to 500 for the following two reasons: first, the more trees exist, the more wasteful the computer’s performance will be. Second, after a certain number of models, the performance of the model remains basically stable, and the improvement of model performance with the increase in the number of trees is very small. Subsequently, this work optimizes the value of the number of predictors (mtry) randomly selected by each tree by searching in discrete intervals of 1…60.c.K-fold cross-validation.To establish a more accurate prediction model under the condition of a smaller amount of data, this paper used K-fold cross-validation to perform k = 10 repeated k-fold cross-validation, which means that the training set is divided into k sub-samples, a single sub-sample is retained as the verification data, the other k-1 samples are used for training, the cross-validation is repeated k times, each sub-sample is verified once, the results are averaged k times, and an optimal result is finally obtained.d.Ranking of Influencing FactorsIn the random forest prediction model, increased mean squared error (%IncMSE) refers to the expected value of the square of the difference between the estimated value of the parameter and the true value of the parameter caused by the change in the predictive index. The larger the value is, the greater the impact of the factor on the prediction model is. This article uses %IncMSE value  to determine the factors that have the greatest impact on the number of citations in the literature.After data processing, a series of networks were generated to determine the state for healthy urban planning research. The 2582 articles were listed according to their year of publication. Then, networks of country, institution, author, journal, keywords, were derived using CiteSpace. Then, the outcome of random forest algorithm showed the most important influence factor of an article in this field as well as the future trend of the healthy urban planning area.The analysis of publishing was divided into the following two parts: publication volume and publication year, then the WOS category analysis of the literature. The analysis of the publication volume and the publication year can clearly show the development process of the healthy urban planning area. Additionally, the WOS category analysis of the literature can clearly show the distribution of disciplines in the research field of healthy urban planning.According to the growth curve of healthy urban planning research, it is divided into the following three stages: preparation period, budding period, and development period. Notably, its stage node has a corresponding relationship with the WHO healthy city project.(1) Preparation period 1981–1992 (I). Before 1993, less than 10 articles on healthy urban planning were issued each year, and the growth was extremely slow. This phenomenon may be related to the initial proposal of the concept of a healthy city, and the research was in the exploratory stage.(2) Budding period 1993–2007 . A series of research results on healthy urban planning appeared in this period ,103, and(3) Development period 2008–2020 . Since 2008, issues related to healthy cities have gradually become one of the most concerned issues for scientists, government decision makers, various countries, and international organizations in the related fields. Moreover, the number of documents has grown rapidly since 2008, and its growth rate is much greater than the preparation and budding periods. In 2020, 407 related documents were produced, and 2236 documents were produced in 12 years.In general, the amount of literature related to healthy city planning has increased exponentially in 40 years, and the growth cycle of its literature is basically the same as the development cycle of healthy city projects. The promotion and publicity of healthy city projects have had a certain impact on the academic research of healthy urban planning.The exported literature covers 44 WOS categories. There are three analysis types of this work using CiteSpace, including Cooperation network analysis, Co-citation Analysis, and Thematic Co-occurrence Analysis. From these networks, the development context of the healthy urban planning area can be completely presented.(1)Country Cooperation Network AnalysisCooperation networks exist among countries, institutions, as well as authors. We used CiteSpace to build the following three individual networks: a country, an institutional, and an author cooperation network to explore the cooperation relationship within the field of healthy urban planning.The country cooperation network of healthy urban planning research is shown in (2)Institutional Cooperation Network AnalysisAs shown in (3)Author Cooperation Network AnalysisBased on 2582 articles by 6550 different authors, (1)Author Co-cited Network AnalysisIn this work, we conducted the co-citation analysis from the perspectives of the author, journals, and references, in order to identify the core authors and journals of the healthy urban planning area and the knowledge bases of this area.(2)Network Analysis of Co-cited JournalsAccording to the analysis of the co-cited journals, the distribution of the journals cited has a vivid reflection in the field of healthy urban planning.Landscape and Urban Planning is the journal with the most co-citations , and its citations and centrality are much higher than other journals. This result indicates that Landscape and Urban Planning has a high reference value for research in the field of healthy urban planning. The second journal is Health & Place , and the third is Urban Forestry & Urban Greening . These three journals serve as the core nodes that have established connections with other nodes.(3)Co-citation Analysis of ReferencesWhat can be seen from (1)Co-occurrence of Key WordsKeywords are important in our research of the healthy urban planning area. In this work, we used the co-occurrence of keywords, the timeline of keywords, as well as the burst detection of keywords to identify the hot spots of this research area.(2)Timeline of Key WordsThe words health, city, urban, and environment are too broad in meaning to be analyzed. What can be seen from (3)Burst Detection of Key WordsThe result of the random forest algorithm of this work can be presented from the following three perspectives that can show the most significant characteristics of this analysis: overall result, the WOS field, and country or region.In terms of the volume of publications, the number of documents related to healthy urban planning has generally shown an exponential increase in 40 years, and the growth cycle of its documents is basically the same as the development cycle of healthy urban projects. The promotion and publicity of healthy city projects has an impact on academic research in healthy urban planning. Then, we found out that the field of healthy urban planning is highly interdisciplinary. In addition to the fields related to urban research, it also has a certain degree of intersection with economics, environmental science, and ecology.In terms of cooperation networks, at the level of national cooperation, except for Denmark, Scotland, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden, four other countries, China, Brazil, New Zealand, and France, have each formed a certain scale of cooperation, and most of the other countries have not formed a certain scale of cooperation groups. The United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, and many other countries play an important role in the cooperation network of healthy urban planning. At the level of institutional cooperation, the University of Hong Kong and University of Illinois are fruitful contributors in this field with a higher number of and more in-depth publications. At the micro level of author cooperation, some small-scale cooperation networks have been formed but without very central authors.Landscape and Urban Planning, Health & Place, and Urban Forestry & Urban Greening were the core journals in the field of healthy urban planning. In terms of co-cited references, the impact of urban green space landscape on residents’ psychology; the behavior, emotion, health and spatial quality evaluation of people related to urban green space; and the walkability of the space and its impact on the health of residents, partial clustering provides a powerful reference for the study of healthy urban planning.In terms of co-citation analysis, among the authors, WHO, Hartig T, and Kaplan are among the top three in terms of citations. In terms of the journals co-cited, In terms of thematic co-occurrence, the hot spots in the field of healthy urban planning are physical activity, green space, and mental health. According to the analysis of the keyword timeline, the research of healthy urban planning not only focuses on the planning and design of urban space and green space resources but also considers the health factors of urban residents. Moreover, the clustering of keywords has a certain inclusion relationship with the clusters co-cited in the literature, which reflects that the field of healthy urban planning is gradually expanding and becoming diversified. In addition, through explosive testing, the hot words of healthy urban planning changed rapidly and were not sustainable.After having a more comprehensive understanding of the field of healthy urban planning, this work used the random forest algorithm to establish a model to predict and rank the factors that influence the citation of literature in the field of healthy urban planning. Taken together, top three influence factors which have dominant influence on the number of citations of the document are: the number of times the first author’s articles have been cited, the number of pages, the journal‘s impact factor. The two influencing factors, namely, whether it is a single author and the diversity of the research direction, also have high %incMSE values, showing that multi-author cooperation and multi-disciplinary literature have the potential of being highly cited to a certain extent. Among the influencing factors related to the WOS fields, the %IncMSE values of Environmental Studies, Geography, Regional and Urban Planning, and Ecology are all high, suggesting that the frequency of the citations of documents which overlap with these fields in healthy urban planning research may increase to some extent. Among the five countries with the largest number of publications in the field of healthy urban planning, China’s %incMSE value ranks first, which may indicate that Chinese researchers have made relatively significant progress in the field of healthy urban planning. Therefore, according to this result, it may be a good choice to cooperate with Chinese researchers. However, this does not mean to deny the contribution of any other country in the research of this field. It is only the objective result produced from the selected 2582 articles. What we really want to do is encourage international cross-country cooperation and enhance the international cooperation network in this fieldHealthy urban planning is a field under rapid development. Over the past few decades, countries have made unremitting efforts to make our cities healthier. In this work, CiteSpace data visualization analysis and a random forest algorithm are used to analyze the articles on the healthy urban planning area in the WOS core database from 1981 to 2020 (as of 31 December 2020). The conclusions are as follows:(1) The field of healthy city planning has developed rapidly in the past 40 years, the number of annual articles of healthy urban planning research has increased from 2 to 407 exponentially. In the meantime, this field is growing more and more interdisciplinary.Landscape and Urban Planning, Health & Place, and Urban Forestry & Urban Greening are the core journals in the field of healthy urban planning, having the highest co-cited frequency. Moreover, the research hotspots are wide and changing rapidly, mainly focusing on physical activity, urban green space, mental health, etc., which also reflects that the field of healthy city planning is gradually expanding and diversifying.(2) A certain scale of cooperation network has been formed, where the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, etc., and the University of Hong Kong, University of Illinois, etc., are in an important position. This may be relative to the promotion of the WHO healthy city project. Additionally, (3) Based on the analysis result of the random forest algorithm, for related researchers, it is advantageous to consider international cross-country cooperation, interdisciplinary themes, and multi-author cooperation when studying in the field of healthy urban planning in the future, especially considering fields such as Environmental Studies, Geography, Regional and Urban Planning, and Ecology.The emerging trends and patterns identified using CiteSpace and the prediction results of the random forest algorithm provide novel, interesting, and comprehensive views on how to conduct healthy urban planning research. Based on the conclusion, this article has provided some suggestions for future research: First, the research direction of future healthy urban planning should not only focus on the planning and design of urban space and green space resources but also consider the physical and mental health of urban residents. Specifically, the research on green space needs to consider factors such as human activities and mental health. Second, this study found that the field of healthy urban planning is highly interdisciplinary. At the same time, multi-author cooperation and multi-disciplinary literature have the potential to be highly cited, thereby showing that the field of healthy urban planning is looking forward to the new cross-cutting of knowledge to bring about differences to the field. Healthy urban planning itself involves multi-disciplinary knowledge, such as urban research, geography, environmental science, landscape architecture, public health, and medicine. Strengthening the cross-cooperation among various disciplines and conducting joint research can help analyze the fundamentals of healthy urban development and understand the essential relationship between the city and people’s healthy life and also provide us with multiple perspectives to explore the characteristics of the rules behind the harmonious relationship of people and city.Despite the contribution of this work, the research still has some shortcomings and limitations. First, the research data are only selected to analyze the literature data in the largest global database of scientific publications , but other international databases  are not


In January 2018, the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan, released an amended Guideline on the Prevention of Specified Infectious Diseases on Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to propose measures to control the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS. Content analysis was performed to examine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the guidelines in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, thus aiming to promote discussions on the guideline itself and the national HIV/AIDS strategy in Japan in the years ahead. The strengths included the incorporation of the latest scientific advancements, clarification of high-risk populations, an alignment with measures against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and willingness towards international cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. The weaknesses that were exposed included a lack of explicit targets for controlling and containing HIV/AIDS, insufficient descriptions about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and aggregated discussions on HIV/AIDS among foreign residents. Although several opportunities for re-energizing the discussions around HIV/AIDS were recognized, insufficient political will and funding, along with the emergence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, could operate as threats. Addressing barriers that were recognized before 2019 and exposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and tackling underlying health inequalities through the concept of social determinants of health will be critical. Although the annual numbers of newly reported human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) patients have peaked at 1126 in 2008 and 484 in 2013, respectively, followed by a slightly decreasing trend, and the prevalence of HIV remains low in Japan, HIV/AIDS has been a critical public health issue in Japan [In Japan, countermeasures against HIV/AIDS were implemented by following the Act on the Prevention of Infectious Diseases and Medical Care for Patients with Infectious Diseases. The guideline that is specific to HIV/AIDS was first launched in 1999 and has been amended three times . The latTherefore, the primary objective of this study is to examine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the Guidelines on the Prevention of Specified Infectious Diseases on AIDS in Japan. The guidelines were published in 2018, but the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted urgent consideration of opportunities and threats that are external to the guidelines; thus, there is a need to promote discussions on the guidelines themselves, to reconsider the national HIV/AIDS strategy in Japan, and to provide policy recommendations to inform the next updates.To analyze the potential impact of the guidelines, highlight internal strengths (S) and weaknesses (W), and clarify the external opportunities (O) and threats (T), the methodology of a SWOT analysis has been employed in line with previous analysis on the Updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy in the U.S. . This meTwo steps were undertaken for the investigation. First, the latest Guidelines on Prevention of Specified Infectious Diseases on AIDS in Japan were identified  and analOverall, five strengths were extracted from the analysis. First, the guidelines touched on recent scientific evidence regarding HIV/AIDS, such as treatment as prevention (T as P) and emphasized the importance of early detection and treatment to improve prognosis. In this context, progress in the research of the UNAIDS cascade both at national and regional levels was highlighted, and it was argued that an oral consent process for testing is possible. In addition, the guidelines noted the shift from cure to care of older HIV/AIDS patients. Second, the definition of a risk population was revisited to follow the consensus of key affected populations (KAPs), as defined by international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Additionally, MSM were recognized as the most prioritized group for consideration, and the healthcare services for foreign residents with HIV/AIDS and cooperation with non-governmental organizations were highlighted.Third, to raise public awareness and knowledge, the guidelines emphasized the need for targeted health promotion at educational institutions for adolescents, among the MSM community, and at healthcare facilities for healthcare workers. The guidelines emphasized the role of healthcare workers in social engagement and the need to enhance their understanding of HIV/AIDS, as well as the importance of taking standard precautions to mitigate fear and anxiety among healthcare workers who are unfamiliar with HIV/AIDS. Fourth, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) share similar characteristics in prevention, detection, treatment, and supportive care, and inter-collaboration between countermeasures against HIV/AIDS and STDs has been heavily emphasized. In the guidelines on HIV/AIDS, the shared approaches and challenges, along with the importance of simultaneous testing of HIV and STDs, were discussed. Fifth, the necessity of international collaboration, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, was noted.Although the guidelines have several strengths, including mention of the scientific advancements in HIV/AIDS research, they also have several weaknesses. First and foremost, there is a lack of reference to scientific evidence and clearly delineated goals. There is also a lack of reference to the extent to which early detection and treatment have contributed to reducing HIV prevalence. Additionally, the numbers of the UNAIDS cascade on achieving 90-90-90 have not been presented. The risk populations were summarized and presented, but an estimated number of each population was not presented in the data. The slogan of “Undetectable = Untransmissible (U = U)” that has been primarily advocated by the Prevention Access Campaign  was missSecond, despite the increasing trend and potential usefulness of postal HIV testing as suggested by the high demand among MSM , effectiFirst, there has been a re-energized recognition of the importance of early treatment of HIV/AIDS in Japan. The latest guideline on anti-HIV treatment recommends that treatment should begin for all people living with HIV, regardless of their CD4 counts. Second, though very modest among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the inclusivity of legal lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons in Japan has been improving , and theOne of the biggest threats is the lack of an overall strategy against HIV/AIDS in Japan. The guidelines were published by the Minister of Health, but there has been a lack of sector-wide political will to end HIV/AIDS in Japan. Second, Japan still lacks an individual registration system for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) . This imFinally, the current COVID-19 pandemic could work as a threat to advancing discussions on HIV/AIDS as public health centers were overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic ,5 and a The results of the analysis on the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities are summarized below .This is the first SWOT analysis of the updated Guidelines on the Prevention of Specified Infectious Diseases of AIDS in Japan that reflects on the current COVID-19 pandemic. Several challenges faced in the development of countermeasures against HIV/AIDS were extracted from this study. To consider potential solutions, the discussion will be separated into four pillars.To prevent HIV infection, effective biomedical, behavioral, and structural interventions need to be combined . Highly To prevent the transmission of HIV, behavioral change based on the risk profiles of each individual has been emphasized, and the latest guidelines also try to accelerate health promotion campaigns in various settings, such as households, regions, schools, and offices. As PLWHA are still marginalized in the context of Japan, sufficient promotion campaigns that aim to prevent social prejudice and discrimination are vital. Moreover, enhancing the recognition of HIV/AIDS among healthcare workers and enhancing community engagement will be crucial where the HIV prevalence is relatively low and treatment of HIV patients is generally conducted in specific hospitals.Further, the transmission of HIV has been triggered among MSM through unsafe sexual activities . HoweverIn Japan, the biggest challenge in achieving the UNAIDS cascade on 90-90-90 by 2020 and 95-95-95 by 2025 has been in the first component: 90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status. Previous modelling and epidemiological analysis suggested that the diagnosed proportion of HIV in Japan has not reached 90% ,31. DespBefore the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was already discussion on the issue of access to testing in Japan. Accessibility to sexual health services was limited, especially for MSM , and socThe COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as a significant threat for PLWHA. Clinically, HIV has been acknowledged as one of significant risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection, and the higher mortality by the COVID-19 among PLWHA, which was assumed to be brought by the relatively complicated immune response, was reported, suggesting the necessity of careful consideration to PLWHA . AdditioThe global AIDS response to date has suggested several key components, such as political leadership, the engagement of civil society and PLWHA themselves, and multi-sectoral collaboration and sector-wide partnerships ,23. ThesIt should be noted, however, that the leadership and increased political commitment at higher levels to contain HIV and engage civil society and PLWHA are relatively limited in Japan. Unfortunately, there is still no central registry of PLWHA; hence, monitoring and evaluation of links to HIV care from the latest data are impossible. HIV testing at healthcare facilities in outpatient settings is not free, which has resulted in HIV testing hesitancy among both healthcare workers and patients. The lack of data and information could make it challenging to grasp the overall picture of HIV and PLWHA in Japan, and the possibility of double counting has not been eliminated. Therefore, creating a large cohort that is worth monitoring and evaluating for HIV transmission dynamics, sexual behaviors, and number of partners  should be urgently considered. This will help evaluate and achieve the UNAIDS cascade and promote targeted interventions based on risk profiles.As this study aimed to highlight major points in the current guidelines and incorporate the context of COVID-19, ensuring the comprehensiveness is one of limitations. However, as major challenges are connected to minor issues at sub-national levels, what this study has pointed out could be elaborated in each region, and it is expected that this could be referenced for further discussion.This is the first study to analyze the current Guideline on HIV/AIDS by incorporating the perspectives of ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. To contain HIV/AIDS transmission and achieve the UNAIDS cascade, several weaknesses and threats were analyzed, which were exaggerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to address barriers that were recognized before 2019 and exposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tackle underlying health inequalities by employing the concept of social determinants of health, and ramp up discussions on the national HIV/AIDS strategy.


Cultural heritage, especially the fine arts, plays an invaluable role in the cultural, historical, and economic growth of our societies. Works of fine arts are primarily developed for aesthetic purposes and are mainly expressed through painting, sculpture, and architecture. In recent years, owing to technological improvements and drastic cost reductions, a large-scale digitization effort has been made, which has led to the increasing availability of large, digitized fine art collections. Coupled with recent advances in pattern recognition and computer vision, this availability has provided, especially researchers in these fields, with new opportunities to assist the art community by using automatic tools to further analyze and understand works of fine arts. Among other benefits, a deeper understanding of the fine arts has the potential to make works more accessible to a wider population, both in terms of fruition and creation, thus supporting the spread of culture.The call for papers for the Special Issue “Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition” was opened to anyone wishing to present advancements in the state of the art, innovative research, ongoing projects, and academic and industrial reports on the application of visual pattern extraction and recognition, for a better understanding and fruition of works of fine arts. The Special Issue solicited contributions from researchers in diverse areas such as pattern recognition, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and image processing. Furthermore, we also solicited the submission of papers as an extension of the works presented at the homonymous workshop we organized at the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition .The Special Issue received several submissions, which underwent a rigorous peer review process. After the review process, 11 articles were selected based on the ratings and comments. The published articles cover various applications of cultural heritage and digital humanities research; focus on different branches fine arts such as painting, architecture, and photography; and develop and apply a range of techniques, from image processing to computer vision, based on handcrafted features and deep learning.Artworks are subject to alterations over time due to various factors such as natural aging, external agents, inadequate conservation treatments, etc. Hence, techniques for monitoring, preserving, and restoring cultural heritage artifacts have become crucial. To this end, Daffara and Marini  present In their contribution, Banfi and Mandelli  exploiteOther contributions have addressed the problem of high-level semantic analysis and the interpretation of artworks. With the advent of digitized art collections, such an analysis has acquired increasing importance as a means of providing new information within digital art image repositories, supporting both enthusiasts and experts in finding and comparing artworks. To this end, computer vision techniques are good candidates to aid in the automatic categorization and retrieval of artworks. Following this line of research, Pinciroli Vago et al.  experimeTo support art historical research, Sindel et al.  did not Journal of Imaging for their endless support in making this Special Issue possible. We hope it will benefit the scientific community and increase interest in this exciting area of research.We express our sincere gratitude to the authors for their contributions, to the reviewers for their efforts in reviewing the manuscripts, and to the editorial staff of the MDPI


In the original article, we neglected to include the funder Canadian Institutes of Health Research, 201803PJT-159700 to JW.s for Xiaoxue Ma. As well as having affiliations 1 and 2, XM should also have Canadian Center for Vaccinology, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, NS, Canada.In the original article, there was an error in the affiliationIn the original article, Jun Wang was not included as an author. The corrected Author Contributions Statement appears below.XM and SN created the research concept, designed and wrote the manuscript. JW was involved in the modification of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.The authors apologize for these errors and state that this does not change the scientific conclusions of the article in any way. The original article has been updated.


The COVID-19 infections have profoundly and negatively impacted the whole world. Hence, we have modeled the dynamic spread of global COVID-19 infections with the connectedness approach based on the TVP-VAR model, using the data of confirmed COVID-19 cases during the period of March 23rd, 2020 to September 10th, 2021 in 18 countries. The results imply that, (i) the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia are global epidemic centers, among which the United States has the highest degree of the contagion of the COVID-19 infections, which is stable. South Korea, France and Italy are the main receiver of the contagion of the COVID-19 infections, and South Korea has been the most severely affected by the overseas epidemic; (ii) there is a negative correlation between the timeliness, effectiveness and mandatory nature of government policies and the risk of the associated countries COVID-19 epidemic affecting, as well as the magnitude of the net contagion of domestic COVID-19; (iii) the severity of domestic COVID-19 epidemics in the United States and Canada, Canada and Mexico, Indonesia and Canada is almost equivalent, especially for the United States, Canada and Mexico, whose domestic epidemics are with the same tendency; (iv) the COVID-19 epidemic has spread though not only the central divergence manner and chain mode of transmission, but also the way of feedback loop. Thus, more efforts should be made by the governments to enhance the pertinence and compulsion of their epidemic prevention policies and establish a systematic and efficient risk assessment mechanism for public health emergencies. In December 2019, the COVID-19 epidemic merged in Wuhan, China, which has multiple characteristics, including high infectivity. The number of patients increased drastically at the beginning of the outbreak, due to the above characteristics of the epidemic  and generalized forecast error variance decomposition (GFEVD) developed by Koop et al.  and Pesai. We compute the differences between a J-step-ahead forecast where once the COVID-19 epidemic of country i broke out and once where the COVID-19 epidemic of country i did not break out. The differences can be accounted for to measure the magnitude of the contagion of country i, which can be calculated by the following:J represents the forecast horizon, δj,t represents the selection vector with one on the jth position and zero otherwise, and Ft−1 represents the information set until t − 1.The GIRFs represent the responses of all countries following a change of COVID-19 in country i. This is calculated as follows:i to country j, which is calculated as follows:j to country i can be calculated as follows:i to country j as the contagion of the COVID-19 epidemic from country i to country j minus the contagion of the COVID-19 epidemic from country j to country i. This is calculated as follows:Subsequently, we compute the GFEVD, which can be interpreted as the variance share one country has on others. These shares are then normalized, so that each row sums up to one, meaning that all countries together explain 100% of the COVID-19 epidemic of country i to other sample countries (TOitContagion). The expression is as follows:i from other sample countries (FROMit Contagion), the expression is as follows:TOitContagion and FROMit Contagion, such as from Formula (16):NETit are positive, it means that the impact of country i on other countries in the network is greater than the reaction of other countries in the network. On the contrary, if NETit are negative, country i is impacted by other countries in the network and accepts their net contagion.Based on the above study, we can calculate the magnitude of the contagion effect of COVID-19 epidemic between a country and other sample countries, such as the COVID-19 contagion transmitted by country Formulas  and 14)i to otheAs per the situation of COVID-19 epidemic around the world, we selected eighteen G20 countries in which EU and China are not included in are selected as sample with a wide range  and other countries on one country (From Contagion) and the net contagion of the sample countries, as shown in The contagion roles played by most countries in the sample are stable to some extent; the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey have strong contagion impact from a dynamic perspective. Additionally, the net contagion of each country is often negatively correlated with the effectivity, timeliness, and mandatory nature of the domestic anti-epidemic policies, especially under the trend of global economic integration. For example, the contagion of COVID-19 in the United States has been at a high level for a significant amount of time, and the reasons are as follows: first, the compulsory and urgent epidemic prevention of American government authorities who regard economic and employment data as political weights is insufficient, and partisan disputes are also an important obstacle to domestic anti-epidemic measures and the protection of people's right to life and health. Second, given the serious hollowing out of the American manufacturing industry, emergency reserve resources of medical supplies like respirators and masks are sufficient. As shown by the data provided by United States Health Secretary Azar, emergency reserves of medical supplies in the United States included only about 12 million medical-grade N95 masks and 30 million surgical masks, which has not been enough. Moreover, the partial privatization of medical institutions and medical insurance companies has led to high medical costs, which exacerbates the Matthew effect. Third, as the center of global economy, the United States maintains close economic and trade ties with other economies. For example, the United States is the core country in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a former member and leading country of the TPP Agreement, so the contagion of the United States' COVID-19 epidemic has been facilitated by the cross-border flow of resources, technology, and talents among these countries.The levels of severity and external infectivity of the COVID-19 epidemic in Canada and Mexico are also high because the United States borders Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. Canada and Mexico's fluctuation trends of “From Contagion,” “To Contagion” and “Net Contagion” levels are particularly similar to those in the United States, and the tendency of the epidemic among the three countries is synchronized to some extent, which will necessitate higher requirements for epidemic prevention work in North America. In addition, Brazil also has a high magnitude of net contagion, which is closely related to the increasingly close economic and trade ties between Brazil and the United States. The United States has become Brazil's second largest trading partner since 2014, and a series of trade agreements has been signed by 2020, which has created a transmission link between the United States and Brazil, making the COVID-19 epidemic within the two countries resonate and form a negative cycle. Thus, Brazil's COVID-19 epidemic is spreading globally through the trend of economic globalization and population mobility globalization. At the same time, the frequent outbreaks of COVID-19 under the unfavorable domestic anti-epidemic situation in Brazil are also a critical reason for the country's high contagion level. The Indonesian government's slackness in preventing the epidemic and a lack of medical resources is also driving factors for the high cross-border contagion level under the continuous improvement of global economic integration.Along with population mobility which aggravates the contagion and severity of domestic COVID-19 epidemics  such as There are still some countries in the sample—such as South Korea, Italy and France—that have always been affected by COVID-19 epidemics in other countries. Among them, the country most significantly affected by the overseas epidemic is South Korea, which has actively adopted China's recommendations for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic, adopting plans for detection, tracking, isolation, and treatment, and frequently introducing policies to combat the epidemic. However, the effectiveness of domestic epidemic prevention and control has been seriously weakened by domestic party disputes. Moreover, religious groups have spread infections and refused to cooperate, continuously amplifying the speed of cross-border transmission and diffusion risk of overseas epidemics. In the meantime, complex and fragile domestic epidemic prevention environment, which include domestic employment pressure and frequent anti-COVID-19 vaccine activities, have also resulted in Italy and France becoming receiver of the contagion of the overseas epidemic.The dynamic circumstances of the COVID-19 epidemic in various countries can be fully reflected via the measurement of the dynamic contagion of the COVID-19 epidemic in sample countries, which can also depict the role and its dynamic changes of each country's epidemic in time dimension. Moreover, it is meaningful to further analyze the micro-structure of COVID-19 cross-border contagion in various countries based on research on infection from one country to other countries and from other countries to one country, to clarify the cross-border contagion path. Thus, we will capture and identify the microscopic structure of the COVID-19 epidemic among countries, and then clarify the dynamic characteristics of the contagion.We depict the net contagion of the COVID-19 epidemic among sample countries. The results shown in Europe is another main source of COVID-19 outbreaks, and the United Kingdom and Turkey are the main disseminators, and the United Kingdom has higher contagion level than Turkey. Both countries have persistent contagion on Japan, Australia and German, and the contagion effect of the epidemic between Turkey and German is increasing. The main reason for this increase is that there are a large number of Turkish immigrants in German, with close population mobility between the two countries, and the increase of population mobility after October 2020 under the staged relaxation of anti-epidemic measures has been a fuse for intensifying the transnational spread of COVID-19.As far as Asian countries and African countries are concerned, Russia and Indonesia whose spread paths have global characteristics are at a high level of net contagion. For example, South Africa, India and Canada can be affected across borders by the COVID-19 of Indonesia, which regards tourism that provides the conditions for the early global diffusion of domestic COVID-19 as the pillar industry of its domestic economy, as shown in Based on the sample countries, South Korea, France and Italy are intensively affected by the COVID-19 of countries around the world, as shown in Regarding the three major COVID-19 receiver—which are South Korea, France and Italy—South Korea still maintains the net receiver of the epidemic identity, which indicates that strengthening the intensity of prevention of abroad epidemic affecting is the top priority for South Korea, in its attempt to effectively control the domestic COVID-19 epidemic situation.There are still some countries with low net contagion level and in which the contagion direction has changed repeatedly during the sample period due to the slight dynamic change of COVID-19, such as Mexico and Canada, the United States and Canada, the United States and Indonesia, Indonesia and Canada, the United Kingdom and Canada and so on, as displayed in This paper is based on research on the micro-structure of the dynamic spread of COVID-19 epidemic among countries around the world. According to the dynamic contagion of COVID-19 between two countries, we rank the main “From” countries and “To” countries of the single economy, recording the top three countries, which effectively depict the tendency of domestic COVID-19 impact in sample countries. This depiction provides theoretical basis for countries to prevent the contagion of COVID-19 from overseas, control the overflow impact of domestic epidemics, and provide a decision-making reference for the government to issue relevant policies.In The COVID-19 epidemic not only spreads directly in a central divergent way, but also transmits indirectly through a complex network. For example, in the United States, as shown in At present, the major transmitters of the contagion of the COVID-19 epidemic including the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia should not only strengthen their domestic epidemic prevention, but also increase their efforts to control cross-border transmission of their own epidemics, especially for those countries with the deepest epidemic correlations, such as South Korea, France, Italy, Australia and South Africa. As for the major receivers of COVID-19, purposefully controlling overseas epidemic input and temporarily weakening the associations with sources countries of the epidemic are crucial prerequisites to avoid the frequent and repeated outbreak of domestic epidemics and to ensure macroeconomic stabilization and recovery.In this article, the connectedness approach based on the TVP-VAR model is used to construct a dynamic contagion index to model the global dynamic spread of COVID-19. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:First, the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia are the global epidemic centers, among which the United States has the highest level of COVID-19 epidemic contagion with contagion stability. Canada and Mexico who are geographically close to the United States, also have strong cross-border infectivity, and all three countries demonstrate the same development tendencies for their domestic epidemics, which necessitates higher requirements for anti-epidemic work in North America. South Korea, France and Italy are the major receivers of COVID-19 around the world, among which South Korea is the most seriously affected by overseas epidemics. Additionally, the promotion of compulsory, timely and effective anti-epidemic policies can impose a negative effect on the input from foreign COVID-19 epidemics, weakening their contagion of domestic epidemics.Second, the severity of domestic COVID-19 epidemics in some countries is in an equal position according to the results. These countries include Mexico and Canada, the United States and Mexico, the United States and Canada, the United States and Indonesia, Indonesia and Canada, the United Kingdom and Canada, Turkey and South Africa, Saudi Arabia and German and so on, which means that the conclusion that the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia are the centers of the global COVID-19 epidemic is robust.Third, the global COVID-19 pandemic centering on the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia, not only spreads directly from near center to far, but also transmits indirectly through chain unidirectional conduction.Some policy implications can be drawn from the above conclusions: first, governments should enhance the pertinence and compulsion of their epidemic prevention policies, which should include setting up graded early warning and emergency response mechanisms for different major infectious countries, and using big data and other technologies to collect the customs entry information of various overseas personnel quickly. They should also include monitoring the flow of cross-border personnel to observe the national epidemic in real time and effectively reduce the risk of overseas epidemics affecting. In addition, it is still necessary to establish a punishment mechanism compatible with anti-epidemic policies, which can reduce the risk of the outward spread of COVID-19 in the country. Second, a systematic and efficient risk assessment mechanism for public health emergencies with unified powers and responsibilities should be established; at the same time, adhering to the policy of “putting prevention first,” continuously increasing capital investment for risk assessment, strengthening the construction of specialized teams for risk assessment, and establishing a normalization mechanism for risk assessment are of vital importance. Additionally, the rights and responsibilities of the risk assessment team should be clearly defined in a legal form, and the mechanism arrangement for the risk assessment of public health emergencies should also be established to ensure timely identification of the input risks of overseas epidemics. Finally, countries should prioritize actively guiding public opinion, strengthening the supervision of public opinion, and releasing authentic and reliable information to maintain the stability of the domestic market in the post-epidemic era. Meanwhile, counseling public psychological, avoiding the spread of panic, and being wary of the risk that domestic and foreign capitals exaggerate the COVID-19 epidemic and speculate about the market to undermine domestic economic order cannot be ignored.This paper discusses the path of the global COVID-19 spread, the degree of the contagion and the transmission tendency of the epidemic. The limitation of our reasoning is the lack of integration of theoretical modeling for the dynamics of epidemiology. Future longitudinal studies are needed to focus on the basic unit of the global COVID-19 epidemic transmission, and the clustering pattern of the contagion.https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data.Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: LX: conceptualization, validation, writing original draft, supervision, and funding acquisition. SM: methodology and writing—review and editing. LY: writing—review and editing and visualization. WW: software, data curation, project administration, and visualization. ZY: resources, formal analysis, and editing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.We acknowledge the financial support from Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant Number: ZR2020QG032), Shandong Provincial Social Science Planning Office (Grant Numbers: 21DGLJ12 and 21DJJJ02), Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province, China (Grant Numbers: ts201712059 and tsqn201909135) and Youth Innovative Talent Technology Program of Shandong Province, China (Grant Number: 2019RWE004). All errors remain our own.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


This paper explores the role and place of national, regional, and international society collaborations in addressing the major global burden of rheumatic heart disease (RHD). On the same order of HIV, RHD affects over 40 million people worldwide. In this article, we will outline the background and current therapeutic landscape for cardiac surgery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) including the resource-constrained settings within which RHD surgery often occurs. This creates numerous challenges to delivering adequate surgical care and post-operative management for RHD patients, and thus provides some context for a growing movement for and applicability of structural heart approaches, innovative valve replacement technologies, and minimally invasive techniques in this setting. Intertwined and building from this context will be the remainder of the paper which elaborates how national, regional, and international societies have collaborated to address rheumatic heart disease in the past  with a focus on primary and secondary prevention. We then provide the recent history and context of the growing movement for how surgery has become front and center in the discussion of addressing RHD through the passing of the Cape Town Declaration. Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) affects up to 40 million individuals globally . Caused These efforts are commendable and will be elaborated upon further in this article. The current therapeutic landscape for addressing RHD is multidimensional and has many challenges. We will first provide a review of the therapeutic ecology of RHD treatment, specifically focusing on the current state of affairs of cardiac surgery for RHD in LMICs . This diSurgery is a cornerstone of any health care system. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that worldwide 5 billion people lack access to safe or affordable surgery and anesthesia . For carMortality due to RHD is high in LMICs, especially among young individuals. For example, a recent study by Okello et. al.  reportedIn order for more patients to be able to receive treatment and to improve the safety of post-operative care for patients receiving surgery, the majority of these patients urgently require two major developments in replacement valves to address their needs. The first, and perhaps most pressing requirement is for improved valve design, incorporating long-lasting valve leaflet materials that will allow implantation into young patients without the need for anticoagulation. The other area in need of attention is to develop and implement simplified and reproducible transcatheter procedures that can deploy such valves cost-effectively, thereby significantly increasing the capacity of low-volume hospitals . A combiThere are many challenges to delivering sustainable cardiac surgical care in LMICs. On a broad scale, these include lack of health care infrastructure, critical gaps in the health care workforce, lack of training opportunities for critical providers, insufficient funding at the government level, competing health care priorities, and poor tracking of outcomes . SpecifiOther challenges appear on a more local level in terms of advancing the cardiac surgical agenda. For example, there are few regional centers of excellence for cardiac surgery in sub-Saharan Africa. While centers throughout the continent do perform cardiac surgery, few pathways exist for collaboration. Furthermore, training of key providers, and the volume to support such training is still lacking .The concept of a role for international agencies and academic societies in collaborating to address capacity for cardiac surgery in the developing world is, in and of itself, a relatively recent initiative. Societies serve as an integral part of the academic and service community in terms of addressing and promoting clinical care, research, and education in cardiac surgery. In this section, we will provide a brief history of recent conferences with resultant publications and importantly policy documents which have been integral to the further advancement of the agenda to combat RHD.In October 2005, delegates to the 1st All Africa Workshop on Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatic Heart Disease gathered in the Drakensberg mountains, South Africa and called out and acknowledged the large burden of RHD on the continent with an appreciation for the sociopolitical nature of its endemicity. The result was what has come to be known as the Drakensberg Declaration, with authors representing institutions from across the continent and the world including individuals representing the University of Cape Town, New York Medical College, University of Ibadan, University of Ghana Medical School, University of Melbourne, World Health Organization, University of Zimbabwe, Harare, University of Nairobi and the University of Libreville, to name a few . The resIn 2013, the World Heart Federation called for a reduction in premature RHD mortality by 25% by 2025 and the World Congress of Paediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery brought together over 300 delegates at the 2nd RHD forum to discuss needs, opportunities and research in RHD, including the need for access to surgery in LMICs –28. One Local societies in endemic countries have played an important role in maintaining momentum, promoting partnerships, and outlining a clear and detailed path forward for curbing the burden of RHD e.g., Algerian Society of Cardiology. And, in the period between 1990 and 2015, deaths, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and years of life lost have all decreased. All this notwithstanding, however, new estimates of the prevalence of RHD are as high as 40 million, with stabilization of the mortality estimates in the 2019 Global burden of disease reports and it is estimated that as many as 300–400 operations per million population surgical procedures are needed for RHD patients in certain LMIC settings . In lighConvened by Professor Peter Zilla, the then-Chair of the Christiaan Barnard Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, delegates and signatories of the Cape Town Declaration represented cardiothoracic/cardiovascular societies from across the globe, such as the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, American Association for Thoracic Surgery, Australian and New Zealand Society of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgeons, Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of South Africa, Pan-African Society of Cardiology, Brazilian Society of Cardiovascular Surgery, European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, World Heart Federation, Asian Society for Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, Chinese Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Pan-African Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery, and the South African Heart Association. Additionally, delegates represented many humanitarian organizations, governments, industry and academia .The overarching theme of the Cape Town Declaration is unique to the previous multi-sectorial and international declarations and communiques. For perhaps the first time in modern history, surgery was front and center. The mission of the Cape Town Declaration was “to urge all relevant entities within the international cardiac surgery, industry and government sectors to commit to develop and implement an effective strategy to address the scourge of RHD in the developing world through increased access to life-saving cardiac surgery” . This waThe CSIA recently announced its endorsement of two pilot sites in Rwanda and Mozambique, including King Faisal Hospital Kigali (Rwanda) and Hospital Central Maputo (Mozambique) . InternaAdditionally, groups such as the CSIA can leverage and build upon previously existing efforts and strong networks of collaboration that have manifested from the All-Africa Workshops on Rheumatic Fever and RHD. The CSIA plans to partner and build on ongoing efforts in the region to build a robust, prospective, multicenter registry for RHD surgical patients, including following them in the post-operative period. Previous registry work, such as the REMEDY and VALVAFRIC, have made important contributions to our understanding of RHD in LMICs , 38. SmaAs we look to the future of cardiac surgery for RHD, it is clear it will continue to require a multisectoral and multidisciplinary effort. As part of that effort, we should not underestimate the role that collaborations between international societies, agencies, and other involved parties can play in furthering the agenda to reduce the enormous burden of RHD. Recent history has demonstrated that some trends for RHD mortality and morbidity have moved in the right direction, and international collaborations may have played a major role in achieving that. Nevertheless, the surgical burden of RHD remains high, and heretofore has been largely unaddressed. For many patients with symptomatic RHD and major valvular pathology, surgery remains the only effective treatment. Manifest through these new collaborations, we anticipate that cardiac surgical societies have a crucial role in ensuring increased access to life-saving cardiac surgery for RHD in the developing world. In doing so, we will begin to realize the vision of the Cape Town Declaration, the Addis Ababa Communique, and the many other declarations and hopes that have been laid bare to address and curb the burden of RHD for the most vulnerable populations.The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


The importance of silence has been emphasized in both ancient and modern traditions  held in Assisi, Italy in the summer of 2019. The Research Topic is the culmination of the effort to accumulate and present multiple approaches on silence and initiate new dialogues, and it includes both empirical and theoretical accounts, as well as reviews, for exploring silence.Srinivasan's contribution, which is an investigation on traditional statements about a state of consciousness without content in Indian tradition and its actual possibility in light of a current neurophysiological model of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE). Another paper by Paoletti and Ben-Soussan introduces the concept of silence as a tool for sensory saturation that can be hypothetically utilized to produce states of consciousness without content, discussing this hypothesis in the framework of the Sphere Model of Consciousness. In another paper, Josipovic and Miskovic addresses the differences between MPE and non-dual awareness.Theoretical contributions include three papers which consider silence in relation to the study of consciousness without content or with minimal content: one is Glicksohn and Ben-Soussan focus on absorption, visionary experiences and their electrophysiological correlates, pointing out that silence has a role as a creative stimulus for producing a spiritual experience. Woods et al. use evidence synthesis based on expert texts from three meditative traditions, namely Shamatha, Trascendental, and Still Meditation, with the key finding that silence has a particular connection with stillness, and the absence of concepts, mental noise, thoughts, and disturbance. Pintimalli et al. study the effects of a new meditative technique, and explore the relationship between first-person reports related to silence, space, and self-consciousness. Finally, Ben-Soussan et al. utilized neurophenomenology to explore the connection between first-person reports of silence and neuroanatomical changes.Empirical contributions included four studies, utilizing diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches. Pfeifer and Wittmann analyse the literature and present an exploration of the perception of silence, by exposing individuals to several minutes of silence in different contexts, finding that silence increases relaxation, improves mood states, and alters the perception of time and the orientation toward the present moment. Venditti et al. review a growing body of literature exploring epigenetic changes related with different meditative practices, such as mindfulness meditation, Vipassana, Yoga, Tai Chi, and Quadrato Motor Training. Finally, Naor and Mayseless focus on the experience of solitude in the wilderness, by exploring how the wilderness solo is experienced and understood, specifically as contributing to therapeutic outcome and personal growth. They review the empirical and theoretical literature, pointing to the significance of solitude and silence, to enhance a sense of personal belonging and purpose.In terms of reviews, In conclusion, research on silence offers many challenges, including for example, a common definition of silence , capturing this phenomenon in neuroscientific setups, or measuring it by scales. However, considering silence's possible benefits for the individual and societal level, overcoming such obstacles to research is highly warranted. We further propose that future studies should be conducted in the interface between psychology and education, particularly important in the current pandemic times, to explore how loneliness can be positively re-interpreted as silence and solitude and thus affect well-being differently. We wish to thank Frontiers for their support, the guest editors, authors, and reviewers for their precious time and contribution. We hope that this Research Topic will serve as another step toward integrating the literature on, as well as enrich our understanding of the beauty and utility of silence.All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The handling Editor declared a shared affiliation, though no other collaboration, with one of the authors FC.


We read with great interest of the report by Rosen and colleagues  about thFirst, in Rosen’s study , the patSecond, Rosen and colleagues  reportedThird, in Rosen’s study , most paIn summary, combining this lack of accuracy of comparison of APP and non-APP patients, and the possibly late initiation of APP in the moderate to severe ARF COVID-19 patients, a priori chance of finding a difference in intubation was low and may explain the negative findings for the APP. And further analysis with data from comparison of non-APP populations and prolonged APP group, especially in patients support with HFNC and prolonged APP, is needed for a more settled conclusion.


This Special Issue aimed to gather high-quality advancements in theoretical and practical aspects of computer recognition, pattern recognition, image processing and machine learning , including, in particular, novel implementations of these techniques in the areas of modern telecommunications and cybersecurity. As almost all human activities have been moved online due to the pandemic, novel robust and efficient approaches and further research have been in higher demand in the field of computer science and telecommunication.The selected authors of the contributions presented on 12th International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems (CORES) and the 12th International Conference on Image Processing and Communications (IP&C), held jointly with the 22nd International Conference on Advanced Computer Systems (ACS), were invited to submit extended versions of their original papers for this Special Issue. Our multi-conference took place in June 2021. This Special Issue was open to other submissions outside of the conference, too.Finally, after a rigorous review process, we accepted 13 interesting papers in various domains and applications of computer recognition, image processing and communications.Image processing can be applied in numerous areas of our daily lives: for entertainment, security and also improving medicine. This type of computer vision implementation was presented in . In thisIn , the autThe authors in  focused In the article , a novelThe papers ,6 addresIn , a novelIn , the proIn , the autIn , the autThe authors of  establis


The time at which we write these lines is a dramatic time of war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine seriously re-addresses the importance of studying and assessing bio–cultural diversities, but also of celebrating and even advocating for their dynamic preservation; this richness may, in fact, represent one of the most potent means of fostering respect for others’ cultures, social sustainability, and therefore, lasting peace.Bio–cultural diversities, or eco-diversities , are theUsing linguistic , cross-cIndeed, eco-cultural diversities need to be recognized and evaluated by the scientific community, and their evolution, complexities, and fascinating aesthetics require further research in the years to come. Celebration of the immense diversity of life in all of its forms is particularly essential across educational platforms, in order to train new generations of citizens and scholars and avoid repetition of the tragedies that are currently unfolding before our eyes.


The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) has followed a sample of one in three Wisconsin high school graduates from the class of 1957 for over 64 years, making it an excellent data source for researchers interested in linking early and midlife characteristics to a wide range of later-life outcomes. The WLS is unique among major studies of aging cohorts for its duration of follow up, the inclusion of siblings, and the combination of rich social and health information. This symposium will provide an overview of the WLS, describe recent data collection and linkages, and introduce ongoing efforts to diversify the educational and racial/ethnic composition of the study sample. WLS data cover nearly every aspect of the participants’ lives from early life socioeconomic background, schooling, family, and work, to physical and mental health, social participation, civic engagement, well-being, and cognition. The study is linked to administrative data including Medicare records, Social Security records, mortality records, and resource data on primary and secondary schools attended by participants as well as characteristics of their employers, industries, and communities of residence. Recent data collection efforts have generated a wealth of new biological and cognitive information, including genetic data collected from saliva and blood samples, measures of the gut microbiome, and derived polygenic scores for educational attainment, cognitive performance, depression, and subjective well-being. The currently-fielding ILIAD effort is implementing rigorous AD diagnostic protocols to track the progression of dementia across cognitive phenotypes. The symposium will conclude with practical information on accessing and using the data.


The health problems caused by insufficient exercise are becoming more and more serious, which is a serious threat to human health, especially the increase in patients with chronic diseases, which brings a heavy burden to medical and health care, and even triggers a public health crisis. In order to cope with the health threats people face, how to promote the synergistic effect of sports and medical health under the background of the integration of Chinese and Western medicine has become an important issue in building a healthy China life cycle. This article is aimed at studying the application of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine in pharmacy and health. Through the research of multiproblem collaborative governance of sports and medicine, the mechanism to promote multidisciplinary collaborative governance was established, and the realization of the integration of sports and medicine was promoted, extending some college students in a university in a certain city and studied the experiment of the influence of exercise on health. Experiments showed that 34.8% of students who exercise almost daily were in very healthy conditions, and 47.8% of healthy students were also unhealthy or prone to illness. The 62.1% of students exercising three to four times a week are healthy, proving that sports has a certain impact on human health and has a certain reference significance for the integration of sports and medicine. Many scholars have conducted research on the combination of Chinese and Western medicine in sports and pharmacy and have drawn many effective conclusions. Weng et al. proposed that the combination of sports and medicine can effectively reduce body fat, improve the blood lipid level of obese patients, and regulate the endocrine system and has a certain preventive effect on the occurrence of hypertension and diabetes . Wang etThis paper focuses on the health effects of exercise in modern medicine. Health management methods of sports were analyzed first, such as collaborative management methods, multidisciplinary collaborative therapy methods, and comprehensive management methods of sports and modern medicine, followed by a questionnaire survey. The design of the study experiment identified the subjects and analyzed the structure of the subjects. Finally, questionnaire experiments and extended experiments were performed to further determine the effectiveness of sport in modern medicine. It has a certain role in promoting the integration of modern medicine and sports.From the perspective of synergy and governance theory, cooperative governance is a process of using public power, reasonable regulation, and scientific methods to manage public affairs from a multifaceted perspective of society, adopting a collective cooperative governance model for governance, and ultimately enhancing public welfare. The concept of cooperative governance clearly shows that the single issue of government services has undergone a fundamental change in role. Market organizations, social organizations, and the public can all participate in the management of social public affairs. With regard to democratization, limited power, and power distribution, many problems can be resolved in depth, and there is no longer a relationship of control and dependence between people . The cooMulti-issue collaborative governance includes two words: “multiple issues” and “collaborative governance.” The basic concept is that many problems achieve the goal of collaborative governance. From the perspective of coordination theory, multientity coordination governance emphasizes the realization of the “multientity” coordination goal and the reasonable effectiveness of the interentity coordination mechanism. Traditional management is in a relatively closed, one-dimensional organizational system. Under the conditions of concepts, systems, power, and coercion, it cannot fully mobilize resources, information, technology, and interests among different issues, resulting in low management efficiency. Multiagent collaborative governance focuses on the sustainable development of society and the maximization of social public interests. Higher-level government departments and local authorities work together to protect national public interests across borders and regions. To achieve the above goals, the most basic condition is the logical distribution, operation and restriction of power among many issues. Therefore, the concept of multi-issue collaborative governance is: in the existing regulatory system, in order to achieve the goal of public interest, the government, market, society and other parties negotiate to resolve contradictions and contradictions, and continue to advance .Based on the concept of sports medicine integrated collaborative governance, sports medicine integrated collaborative governance is the practical application of the collaborative governance theory in the field of sports medicine integrated. Management agency is a way to coordinate the integration of sports and medicine .The governance bodies are diversified, and the leading government departments, functional management departments, service organizations, group organizations, and other multiple bodies collaborate to form a new institutional order, and the dimensions involved are far beyond a traditional body Governance goals are coordinated, based on the goal of maximizing health promotion benefits; government entities are guided by the top-level institutional design from the perspective of fairness and justice to lead the medical integration system; for-profit organizations are from the perspective of market efficiency; we use capital guidance mechanisms to stimulate the body, medical integration technology innovation, and service promotion; from the perspective of social welfare, social organizations use voluntary mechanisms to fill government failures and market failures Subsystems work together. From the perspective of system theory, the business structure of the integration of sports and medicine covers multiple health service fields such as disease prevention, disease nonmedical intervention, disease rehabilitation, health fitness, and sports medicine supervision. The maintenance of this system requires a “two-wheel drive” around the two main subsystems of sports and medical treatment, with multiple main bodies working together .Based on the common pursuit of value, all subjects enjoy equal governance, independence, and mutual dependence. Therefore, the concept of coordinated management of sports medicine is defined as referring to the governance system based on health promotion . Many isThrough various channels to obtain information, we adjust the research framework, find their own research direction and ideas, learn rich sports and modern medicine related information and principles, consult relevant sports policies, regulations and drugs, collect and choose influential scholars' literature, especially Chinese and Western sports literature, sports theory, theory of traditional Chinese and Western medicine comparative literature, analysis and sorting, in-depth understanding of the content, and modern medicine integration of sports and development direction, to provide theoretical support and methodology guidance for this article.Sports collaborative governance and multidisciplinary medical integration initially involved sports, medical treatment, governance and many other fields, and the discussion of their problems was the result of multidisciplinary cross and knowledge integration. Therefore, we conducted in-depth interviews with experts in sports, medicine, management, rehabilitation, and other related fields, listening to opinions and suggestions from multiple angles, trying to design a more comprehensive research path, and improving the scientificity and practicability of the research.Before designing the questionnaire, according to the purpose and importance of the research, we read relevant literature, books, and policy papers and referred to relevant domestic and foreign research, including questionnaires and research reports of relevant institutions at home and abroad. On this basis, the relevant topics are classified and analyzed, the questionnaire design is carried out through expert suggestions, and the question and answer design in the questionnaire is rationally arranged. When determining the question and answer, it is necessary to fully consider the respondent's age, culture, occupation, income, and other factors and adopt simple and clear question-and-answer options. We use two-choice and multiple-choice questions when setting answer options.After the initial completion of the questionnaire design, 50 residents were randomly selected for pre-survey, the questionnaire was returned, and through group discussions, expert interviews and other methods, some questions and answers were repeatedly considered and revised, and the questions needed to complete the questionnaire were repeatedly considered and revised. After combining the opinions of experts, the overall quality of the questionnaire was continuously improved, and the design of the questionnaire was finally completed. The content involved in the questionnaire mainly includes the basic information of the surveyed person  and issues related to sports rehabilitation cognition, attitude, and behavior.Before conducting the questionnaire survey experiment, it is necessary to estimate the sample of the experimenters participating in the experiment. The sample size estimation formula is shown as follows:π is the population rate, δ is the allowable error, and u is the standardized normal variable. Based on formula  Research Object. The survey team was divided into 6 groups, and random questionnaire surveys were conducted on several universities in a certain city. The requirements of the experimental subjects were as follows: living in a certain city for more than one year, age more than 18 years of age, clear consciousness, capable of autonomous activities, voluntarily cooperate, and be able to complete the questionnaire survey.(2) Research Methods. First, I designed the questionnaire myself based on reading of the relevant literature. The questionnaire was repeatedly revised through a preliminary survey, and the questionnaire content was finally determined by peer experts. The researchers will then have to receive uniform training. The training content mainly included the purpose and significance of the questionnaire, the specific content and method of the filling of the questionnaire, the process of the questionnaire collection, and the handling of the specific questions during the research process. The filling methods and requirements of the site questionnaire shall be distributed and returned on site. Questionnaire collectors should check the integrity of the questionnaire timely manner to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the survey.Consult with rehabilitation experts and sports rehabilitation professors to formulate interview outlines and research plans and evaluate questionnairesBefore the survey, conduct unified training and guidance for the personnel participating in the survey. The content of the training includes the meaning and content of the survey, the precautions of the questionnaire issuance, and the recovery process, and the uniform standards and methods of the survey must be ensuredAfter the questionnaires are collected, they will be sorted out in time, and questionnaires with too much information missing and not filled in as required are eliminatedA special person will verify the questionnaire and randomly select 5% of the questionnaire for verification. The criteria for rejection are as follows: the questionnaire is not filled in completely, the same answer is selected for the entire questionnaire, and the same answer is selected for 10 consecutive questions or more in the questionnaireThe questionnaire was filled out anonymously, and a total of 300 copies were distributed online and offline, of which 100 were distributed offline and 200 were distributed online. The recovery rate was 96%. The average completion time was 2 minutes and 40 seconds, of which 280 were valid answers, with 8 invalid answer sheets. The effective answer rate was 93%.(1) Gender Structure and Education Level. First, we analyze the gender institution and education level of the respondents, so as to better grasp the process of the questionnaire survey experiment at this time. The basic situation is shown in As can be seen from The results show that nearly half of the students at Jilin University use sports applications. Among them, the utilization rate of undergraduates is about 38%, and students with masters or above is about 47%. In contrast, students with a master's degree or above may prefer to use sports applications because they offer fewer courses than undergraduate students.(2) Self-Recognition of Health Status. Again, on the basis of the previous experiments, the self-identification survey of the health status of the experimental population was conducted, analyzing the structure of the health status and the proportion of the population, and analyzing the overall status of the whole experimental group.The experimental results are shown in It can be seen from (3) Cross-Analysis of Health Status and Exercise Status. After conducting a health status survey, on this basis, we conducted a cross-analysis with the experimental subjects' weekly exercise status to study the effect of physical exercise and health status. The experimental results are shown in It can be seen from In order to further study the impact of physical exercise on health, an extended experiment was conducted on 130 students who exercise less than twice and are unhealthy and easily get sick. In the experiment, the students are divided into two groups, each with 65 people. Each group will take exercise tests at least 4 times a week. The types of exercises include running, jumping, gymnastics, football, and basketball; the other group is the control group; no exercise test is required and just follow the previous lifestyle habits. A month later, we compared the physical conditions of the two groups. The results of the experiment are shown in It can be seen from With the continuous development of the society, the medical and health care system is also constantly developing and improving, the national health has also achieved results, and the people's health has also been effectively improved. However, with the rapid development of social economy, lifestyle changes, industrialization, aging, and the deterioration of the ecological environment have brought new challenges to the health work of the whole people. Although the enthusiasm for sports activity has increased in recent years, important indicators of assessing physical health tend to deteriorate year by year. In the face of complex and changeable physical health conditions, it is difficult for the existing “medication” medical system to meet the above health challenges, resulting in high financial costs. Therefore, under the context of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine, integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine has a certain practical significance.The integration of sports and modern medicine is the implementation process to meet the public health needs. In the context of the new era, it is of not only theoretical significance to study the relationship between the effects of multiple problems and the mechanism promoting the integration of sports and modern medicine. This study is closely related around the proposed questions and has provided results through systematic research but also has inevitable shortcomings. For example, when designing a research framework, measuring health is very subjective. According to factors such as time, the research plan is mainly to evaluate the health of students. It cannot really reflect the students' real physical condition. This is relatively one-sided. There are also deficiencies in regression analysis, and these defects, we hope to improve in future experiments.