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Sea areas where need special attention for the protection of the marine environment from various pollutants are widely distributed throughout the European Regions. In the meantime, the EU has adopted various directives to implement International Maritime Organization (IMO) instruments effectively and uniformly over foreign vessels in European waters so as to ensure ships’ safety and prevent vessel-source pollution. These EU regulatory regimes are conducive to maximizing the legal effect for the implementation of IMO instruments. In addition, the EU has exerted a great influence on the decision-making process of the IMO in adopting regulatory instruments for the prevention of vessel-source marine pollution due to the region’s strong commercial leverage in the global shipping industry. The study of the EU regulatory instruments over the prevention of vessel-source marine pollution will give the states that needs regional cooperative regimes a good example such as how they can establish regional cooperation to effectively prevent vessel-source pollution in sharing sea areas.

Humans have constructed the offshore installations to acquire oil and gas resources in oceans around the world. However, their life cycles have 30 years and approximately 30% of the offshore installations still remains a waste after their life cycles are over. Developed countries have long discussed to deal with decommission installations issues whether these decommissioned installations may be scrapped on shore or converted to another use. For instance, the United States and European countries have dismantled drilling installations through the ‘rig to reefs’ policy. The global market for offshore decommissioning is expected to increase over approximately 5% of compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2025. Of these, the Chinese offshore decommissioning market, which is one of the fastest growing offshore installation decommissioning industries in the world, is predicted to grow to an estimated 1.6 billion dollars by 2027. Against these backgrounds, this research aims to explore in-depth the international legal framework that attempts to regulate the decommissioning of offshore installations and its problems, along with Chinese laws and regulations.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea admitted legislation and enforcement jurisdiction carried out by the flag state. However, the emergence of substandard ships and the growing number of ship accidents at sea indicate that flag state jurisdiction is far from effective. Four aspects of these failures are examined in this paper. Confronted with the failure of flag state jurisdiction, port states have devised a subsidiary remedy to ensure their national interests and restore the effectiveness of flag state jurisdiction. A problem hereunder arises because non-explicit permission was given to port states to prosecute substandard ships. Thus, this paper further analyses four aspects of port state jurisdiction. The authors aim to analyse the failures and remedies associated with state jurisdiction over ships. It reviews the scope and deficiency of state jurisdiction in combatting substandard ships and illicit activities at sea. This paper also addresses the importance of port state control, regional memorandums of understanding and international conventions.

Precision livestock management requires animal traceability and disease trajectory, for which discriminating between or re-identifying individual animals is of significant importance. Existing re-identification (re-ID) methods are mostly proposed for persons and vehicles, compared with which animals are extraordinarily more challenging to be re-identified because of subtle visual differences between individuals. In this paper, we focus on image-based re-ID of yaks (Bos grunniens), which are indispensable livestock in local animal husbandry economy in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. We establish the first yak re-ID dataset (called YakReID-103) which contains 2, 247 images of 103 different yaks with bounding box, direction-based pose, and identity annotations. Moreover, according to the characteristics of yaks, we modifiy several person re-ID and animal re-ID methods as baselines for yak re-ID. Experimental results of the baselines on YakReID-103 demonstrate the challenges in yak re-ID. We expect that the proposed benchmark will promote the research of animal biometrics and extend the application scope of re-ID techniques.

Tibetan medicine entity recognition is a primary task of medical entity recognition. Building a Tibetan medicine knowledge graph is the preliminary work of medical big data research. In this paper, Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM-CRF) is used for automatic recognition of Tibetan medicine entities. Then we construct a Tibetan medicine knowledge graph based on Nodejs. Entity recognition in medical documents and electronic medical lay a solid foundation for the research of medical big data.

Objective To evaluate the early and midterm outcomes of surgical correction for severe dystrophic cervical kyphosis in patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF-1) and analyze the pathomechanics and the influence on surgical efficacy of related systemic skeletal dystrophy. Methods Ten patients who underwent surgical correction for NF-1–related severe dystrophic cervical kyphosis were reviewed. Radiographic parameters, including local and global Cobb angle, sagittal vertical axis, and T-1 slope, were measured. The visual analog scale score, Japanese Orthopaedic Association score, Neck Disability Index, Patient Satisfaction Index, and complications were evaluated. Results The average follow-up was 50.6 months. The local and global Cobb angle improved from the preoperative average of 82.0° and 54.9° to an average of 35.6° and 29.8°, respectively, at the time of final follow-up. The C2-7 sagittal vertical axis averaged 5.8 mm before surgery and 8.9 mm at the final follow-up. The average T1 slope was –12.3° before surgery and –1.6° at the final follow-up. The visual analog scale score, Japanese Orthopaedic Association score, and Neck Disability Index improved significantly, and the overall satisfaction rate was 90.0%. One death and 4 instrumentation failures occurred, 3 patients showed progression of the kyphosis, and 2 fusion failures were observed. Conclusions Surgical correction, specifically the combined anteroposterior procedure, is essential and effective for management of NF-1–related severe dystrophic cervical kyphosis. However, high incidences of instrumentation failure, kyphosis progression, and fusion failure were observed. NF-1–related continuous skeletal dystrophy caused by multiple metabolic factors remarkably affected the midterm outcomes. Early prevention and targeted pharmacotherapy may be necessary.

PurposeTo systematically compare the efficacy and safety of lumbar total disc replacement (TDR) with the efficacy and safety of anterior lumbar interbody fusion (ALIF) for the treatment of lumbar degenerative disc disease (LDDD).MethodsThe electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library were searched for the period from the establishment of the databases to March 2018. The peer-reviewed articles that investigate the safety and efficacy of TDR and ALIF were retrieved under the given search terms. Quality assessment must be done independently by two authors according to each item of criterion. The statistical analyses were performed using RevMan (version 5.3) and Stata (version 14.0). The random-effect model was carried out to pool the data. The I2 statistic was used to evaluate heterogeneity. The sensitivity analysis was carried out to assess the robustness of the results of meta-analyses by omitting the articles one by one.ResultsSix studies (5 randomized controlled trials (RCT) and 1 observational study) involving 1093 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The risk of bias of the studies could be considered as low to moderate. Operative time (MD = 4.95; 95% CI -18.91-28.81; P = 0.68), intraoperative blood loss (MD = 4.95; 95% CI -18.91-28.81; P = 0.68), hospital stay (MD = -0.33; 95% CI, -0.67-0.01; P = 0.05), complications (RR = 0.96; 95% CI 0.91-1.02; P = 0.18) and re-operation rate (RR = 0.54; 95% CI 0.14-2.12; P = 0.38) were without significant clinical difference between groups. Patients in the TDR group had higher postoperative satisfaction (RR = 1.19; 95% CI 1.07-1.32; P = 0.001) and, better improvements in ODI (MD = -10.99; 95% CI -21.50- -0.48; P = 0.04), VAS (MD = -10.56; 95% CI -19.99- -1.13; P = 0.03) and postoperative lumbar mobility than did patients in the ALIF group.ConclusionsThe results showed that TDR has significant superiority in term of reduced clinical symptoms, improved physical function and preserved range of motion for the treatment of LDDD compared to ALIF. TDR may be an ideal alternative for the selected patients with LDDD in the short-term. However, the results of this study cannot suggest the use of TDR instead of ALIF in lumbar spine treatment only in the light of short term results. More studies that are well-designed, that are of high-quality and that have larger samples are needed to further evaluate the efficacy and safety of TDR with at the long-term follow-up.Level of evidenceTherapeutic Level 3.