Effective fisheries management instrumental in improving fish stock status.

Marine fish stocks are an important part of the world food system and are particularly important for many of the poorest people of the world. Most existing analyses suggest overfishing is increasing, and there is widespread concern that fish stocks are decreasing throughout most of the world. We assembled trends in abundance and harvest rate of stocks that are scientifically assessed, constituting half of the reported global marine fish catch. For these stocks, on average, abundance is increasing and is at proposed target levels. Compared with regions that are intensively managed, regions with less-developed fisheries management have, on average, 3-fold greater harvest rates and half the abundance as assessed stocks. Available evidence suggests that the regions without assessments of abundance have little fisheries management, and stocks are in poor shape. Increased application of area-appropriate fisheries science recommendations and management tools are still needed for sustaining fisheries in places where they are lacking.

Dual-lens system in enlarging the viewing angle for the Michelson interferometer.

Shearography has been widely accepted as a non-destructive evaluation tool in engineering. However, the field of view is usually limited due to the use of the Michelson optical arrangement if the working distance is strictly constrained. In order to improve efficiency, we propose a dual-lens system to expand the view angle of the Michelson optical arrangement. Two imaging lenses, which are entitled as the objective lens and camera lens, are placed in front of and behind the Michelson interferometer, respectively. The optical arrangement has been set up and compared with the well-known 4f optical system. It is found that the proposed optical arrangement is simple to construct, and the brightness distribution is uniform over the whole image. The new setup has been applied to the inspection of a cylindrical steel shell with a rubber plate bonding on its inside surface. The debonding defects have been evaluated using the proposed shearography system at a working distance of 200 mm. By selecting an objective lens with a focal length of 2.8 mm, the viewing angle was enlarged in inspecting a field with 500 mm by 500 mm at one shot.

Opportunity for marine fisheries reform in China.

China's 13th Five-Year Plan, launched in March 2016, provides a sound policy platform for the protection of marine ecosystems and the restoration of capture fisheries within China's exclusive economic zone. What distinguishes China among many other countries striving for marine fisheries reform is its size-accounting for almost one-fifth of global catch volume-and the unique cultural context of its economic and resource management. In this paper, we trace the history of Chinese government priorities, policies, and outcomes related to marine fisheries since the 1978 Economic Reform, and examine how the current leadership's agenda for "ecological civilization" could successfully transform marine resource management in the coming years. We show how China, like many other countries, has experienced a decline in the average trophic level of its capture fisheries during the past few decades, and how its policy design, implementation, and enforcement have influenced the status of its wild fish stocks. To reverse the trend in declining fish stocks, the government is introducing a series of new programs for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, with greater traceability and accountability in marine resource management and area controls on coastal development. As impressive as these new plans are on paper, we conclude that serious institutional reforms will be needed to achieve a true paradigm shift in marine fisheries management in China. In particular, we recommend new institutions for science-based fisheries management, secure fishing access, policy consistency across provinces, educational programs for fisheries managers, and increasing public access to scientific data.

A database of mapped global fishing activity 1950-2017.

A new database on historical country-level fishing fleet capacity and effort is described, derived from a range of publicly available sources that were harmonized, converted to fishing effort, and mapped to 30-min spatial cells. The resulting data is comparable with widely used but more temporally-limited satellite-sourced Automatic Identification System (AIS) datasets for large vessels, while also documenting important smaller fleets and artisanal segments. It ranges from 1950 to 2017, and includes information on number of vessels, engine power, gross tonnage, and nominal effort, categorized by vessel length, gear type and targeted functional groups. The data can be aggregated to Large Marine Ecosystem, region and/or fishing country scales and provides a temporally and spatially explicit source for fishing effort and fleet capacity for studies aimed at understanding the implications of long-term changes in fishing activity in the global ocean.

A composite fishing index to support the monitoring and sustainable management of world fisheries.

Overfishing has severe social, economic, and environmental ramifications. Eliminating global overfishing is one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs require effective policy and progress monitoring. However, current indicators are issue-specific and cannot be utilized to measure fisheries efficacy holistically. This study develops a comprehensive index that takes into account the inputs, outputs, and ecological implications of fisheries. These components are then merged to form a single composite fishing index that evaluates both total fishing pressure on the ecosystem and historical patterns. The global fishing intensity grew by a factor of eleven between 1950 and 2017, and geographical differences emerged. The fishing intensity of developed countries peaked in 1997 and has since fallen due to management, but developing countries' fishing intensity has increased continuously over the whole research period, with quasi-linear growth after 1980. Africa has experienced the most rapid expansion in fishing activity and now has the highest fishing intensity. This index takes a more comprehensive and objective look at fisheries. Its worldwide spatial-temporal comparison enables the identification of similar temporal trends across countries or regions, as well as areas of uneven development and hotspot sites for targeted policy action.

Analysis of mental health status and related factors in patients with acute cerebral infarction.

BACKGROUND: Acute cerebral infarction (ACI) is characterized by a high incidence of morbidity, disability, recurrence, death and heavy economic burden, and has become a disease of concern in global researchers. As ACI has serious effects on patients' physical status, life and economy, often causing anxiety, depression and other psychological problems, these problems can lead to the aggravation of physical symptoms; thus, it is very important to understand the factors affecting the mental health of these patients. AIM: To understand the elements that affect the mental health of patients who have suffered an ACI. METHODS: A questionnaire survey was conducted among patients with ACI admitted to three tertiary hospitals (Quanzhou First Hospital, Fuqing City Hospital Affiliated to Fujian Medical University, and the 900 Hospital of the Joint Service Support Force of the People's Liberation Army of China) in Fujian Province from January 2022 to December 2022 using the convenience sampling method. ACI inpatients who met the inclusion criteria were selected. Informed consent was obtained from the patients before the investigation, and a face-to-face questionnaire survey was conducted using a unified scale. The questionnaire included a general situation questionnaire, Zung's self-rating depression scale and Zung's self-rating anxiety scale. All questionnaires were checked by two researchers and then the data were input and sorted using Excel software. The general situation of patients with ACI was analyzed by descriptive statistics, the influence of variables on mental health by the independent sample t test and variance analysis, and the influencing factors on psychological distress were analyzed by multiple stepwise regression. RESULTS: The average age of the 220 patients with ACI was 68.64 ± 10.74 years, including 142 males and 78 females. Most of the patients were between 60 and 74 years old, the majority had high school or technical secondary school education, most lived with their spouse, and most lived in cities. The majority of patients had a personal income of 3001 to 5000 RMB yuan per month. The new rural cooperative medical insurance system had the largest number of participants. Most stroke patients were cared for by their spouses and of these patients, 52.3% had previously smoked. Univariate analysis showed that gender, age, residence, course of disease, number of previous chronic diseases and smoking history were the main factors affecting the anxiety scores of patients with ACI. Age, living conditions, monthly income, course of disease and knowledge of disease were the primary variables influencing the depression score in patients with ACI. The findings of multivariate analysis revealed that the course of disease and gender were the most important factors influencing patients' anxiety scores, and the course of disease was also the most important factor influencing patients' depression scores. CONCLUSION: Long disease course and female patients with ACI were more likely to have psychological problems such as a high incidence of emotional disorders. These groups require more attention and counseling.

Fully connected network with multi-scale dilation convolution module in evaluating atrial septal defect based on MRI segmentation.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Atrial septal defect (ASD) is a common congenital heart disease. During embryonic development, abnormal atrial septal development leads to pores between the left and right atria. ASD accounts for the largest proportion of congenital heart disease. Therefore, the design and implementation of an ASD intelligent auxiliary segmentation system based on deep learning segmentation of the atria has very important practical significance, which we aim to achieve in this paper. METHODS: This study proposes a multi-scale dilated convolution module, which is composed of three parallel dilated convolutions with different expansion coefficients. The original FCN network usually adopts bilinear interpolation or deconvolution methods when upsampling, both of which lead to information loss to a certain extent. In order to make up for the loss of information, it is expected that the final segmentation result can be directly connected to the deep features in the cardiac MRI. This study uses a dense upsampling convolution module, and in order to obtain the shallow position information, the original FCN jump connection module is still retained. In this research, a deep convolutional neural network for multi-scale feature extraction is designed through the multi-scale expansion convolution module. At the same time, this paper also implements two traditional machine learning segmentation methods (K-means and Watershed algorithms) and a deep learning algorithm (U-net) for comparison. RESULTS: The intelligent auxiliary segmentation algorithm for atrial images proposed in this framework based on multi-scale expansion convolution and adversarial learning can achieve superior results. Among them, the segmentation algorithm based on multi-scale expansion convolution can extract the associated features of pixels in multiple ranges, and can obtain deeper feature information when using a limited downsampling layer. According to the experimental results of the multi-scale expanded convolutional network on the data set, the Proportion of Greater Contour (PGC) index of the multi-scale expanded convolutional network is 98.78, the value of Average Perpendicular Distance (ADP) is 1.72mm, and the value of Overlapping Dice Metric (ODM) is 0.935, which are higher than other models. CONCLUSION: The experimental results show that compared with other segmentation models, the model based on multi-scale expansion convolution has significantly improved the accuracy of segmentation. Our technique will be able to assist in the segmentation of ASD, evaluation of the extent of the defect and enhance surgical planning via atrial septal occlusion.

Contrasting global trends in marine fishery status obtained from catches and from stock assessments.

There are differences in perception of the status of fisheries around the world that may partly stem from how data on trends in catches over time have been used. On the basis of catch trends, it has been suggested that about 70% of all stocks are overexploited due to unsustainable harvesting and 30% of all stocks have collapsed to <10% of unfished levels. Catch trends also suggest that over time an increasing number of stocks will be overexploited and collapsed. We evaluated how use of catch data affects assessment of fisheries stock status. We analyzed simulated random catch data with no trend. We examined well-studied stocks classified as collapsed on the basis of catch data to determine whether these stocks actually were collapsed. We also used stock assessments to compare stock status derived from catch data with status derived from biomass data. Status of stocks derived from catch trends was almost identical to what one would expect if catches were randomly generated with no trend. Most classifications of collapse assigned on the basis of catch data were due to taxonomic reclassification, regulatory changes in fisheries, and market changes. In our comparison of biomass data with catch trends, catch trends overestimated the percentage of overexploited and collapsed stocks. Although our biomass data were primarily from industrial fisheries in developed countries, the status of these stocks estimated from catch data was similar to the status of stocks in the rest of the world estimated from catch data. We conclude that at present 28-33% of all stocks are overexploited and 7-13% of all stocks are collapsed. Additionally, the proportion of fished stocks that are overexploited or collapsed has been fairly stable in recent years.