Background Of Regions Research Articles

On the Interpretation of Mid-infrared Absorption Lines of Gas-phase H2O as Observed by JWST/MIRI

Rovibrational absorption lines of H2O in the 5–8 μm wavelength range selectively probe gas against the mid-infrared continuum-emitting background of the inner regions of young stellar objects and active galactic nuclei and deliver important information about these warm, dust-obscured environments. JWST/Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) detects these lines in many lines of sight at a moderate spectral resolving power of R ∼ 3500 (full width at half-maximum of 85 km s−1). Based on our analysis of high-resolution SOFIA/EXES observations, we find that the interpretation of JWST/MIRI absorption spectra can be severely hampered by the blending of individual transitions and the lost information on the intrinsic line width or the partial coverage of the background continuum source. In this paper, we point out problems such as degeneracy that arise in deriving physical properties from an insufficiently resolved spectrum. This can lead to differences in the column density by 2 orders of magnitude. We emphasize the importance of weighting optically thin and weak lines in spectral analyses and provide recipes for breaking down the coupled parameters. We also provide an online tool to generate the H2O absorption line spectra that can be compared to observations.

Subjective Well-Being and Standard of Living in the Kaliningrad Region

The article provides a conjugated analysis of an objectified picture of the living conditions and subjective well-being of the population in the Kaliningrad region as one of the Russian border regions, characterized by the strengthening of the role of the border as a dividing marker against the background of intense cross-border interactions in the recent past. The study is based on a comparison of the socio-economic indicators of the neighboring border regions of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania with quantitative (representative survey) and qualitative sociological data (focus groups and semi-structured interviews) obtained by the authors in Kaliningrad region in 2020–2022. It is shown that subjective well-being and perception of the quality of life, as well as a comparison of one’s own standard of living with that achieved in neighboring Poland and Lithuania, are determined by the socio-economic polarization of the region and the heterogeneity of the Kaliningrad society, including differences in lifestyle, mobility, and activity of residents. An imbalance between the relative material well-being of the inhabitants of the exclave against the background of other Russian regions and their poor social well-being caused by an unfavorable comparison of themselves with neighboring EU countries was revealed. Differences across the border are assessed primarily through the prism of general admiration for Europe, envy of goods and comfort, although most respondents are not familiar with the realities of life on the other side of the border. At the same time, the main referents of unfavorable comparisons are not only neighbors, but also the most wealthy and successful groups of the population.

INFLUENCE OF ASSOCIATED PETROLEUM GAS COMBUSTION VOLUMES ON AVERAGE ANNUAL SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE INCREASE IN WESTERN SIBERIA

On April 2016, Russia signed the Paris Climate Agreement, under which by 2030 it pledged to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to no more than 70 % of 1990 levels annually. However, this may be hindered by a number of factors, in particular the significant increase in oil production at new oil and gas fields being brought into commercial development. Most of these facilities are concentrated in inaccessible areas with poor infrastructure, which significantly complicates the process of associated petroleum gas utilization and calls into question the fulfillment of commitments made. At the moment, carbon regulation in Russia is at the initial stage: in 2018, the level of greenhouse gas emissions from Russia amounted to only 52 % of the 1990 level. This has a significant contribution to the change in the temperature background of oil-producing regions, the main one being Western Siberia. Therefore, the study of such a massive anthropogenic impact on the environment, such as the mass flaring of associated petroleum gas on an industrial scale, is confidently correlated with Russia's stated strategic goals to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

The concept of sustainable development: implementation opportunities at the regional level (based on the example of the East Kazakhstan region)

Sustainable development of the territory allows overcoming crisis situations in the economy and social sphere. The essence of the concept of sustainable development derives from the concept of "triple bottom line", which implies a balance between environmental sustainability, which aims to maintain the quality of the environment necessary for economic activity and the quality of life of people; social sustainability, which seeks to ensure human rights and equality, respect for cultural diversity, race and religion; economic sustainability, which is necessary to maintain natural, social and human capital relevant for income generation. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to assessing the sustainable development of a territory, reflecting the characteristics of Kazakhstan’s regions and testing the proposed methodology using the example of the East Kazakhstan region. The authors of the article in this study are based on the application of deduction and induction methods, a comprehensive approach to the study of the research object, methods of general economic analysis – comparison, average values, methods of factor analysis. As a result of the analysis of socio-economic and environmental development of the East-Kazakhstan region, the authors found that the social and economic indicators of the region are in a relatively satisfactory condition. The region occupies a leading position among the regions with predominantly industrially oriented economy. In addition, the use of natural potential allows the region to maintain a strong position against the background of regions with a relatively agrarian-oriented economy. However, the analysis of the environmental component of sustainable development has shown that the relatively high performance of the region in terms of economic and social development was made possible by ignoring the value of the environmental potential. Consequently, the current development of the region is contrary to the principles of the sustainable development concept. In this regard, it is necessary to create mechanisms of state regulation to implement policies aimed at overcoming this trend. Based on the results of the study, the authors proposed practical recommendations to improve the mechanism of realisation of sustainable development goals of the territory.

CGS‐Net: A classification‐guided framework for automated infection segmentation of COVID‐19 from CT images

AbstractAutomated segmentation of lung lesions in CT images of COVID‐19 based on deep learning holds great potential for comprehending the advancement of the disease and establishing suitable treatment approaches. However, the complex background, indistinct boundaries, varying sizes and distributions of infected regions, and high similarity to other lung diseases pose substantial challenges. To address these issues, we propose a joint deep learning‐based framework, named Classification‐Guided Segmentation Network (CGS‐Net), for COVID‐19 segmentation. The framework comprises a classification and a segmentation sub‐network, which are trained sequentially. Initially, the classification sub‐network learns the feature information of COVID‐19 and other pneumonia classifications. Subsequently, the trained classification sub‐network assists in the training of the segmentation sub‐network. In addition, several key modules are employed to construct the network, including the Multi‐scale Feature Mapping Module (MSFM), the Context Information Module (Context), and the Axial Attention Fusion Module (AAFM). The MSFM employs dilated convolutions to extract multi‐scale features with an emphasis on spatial and channel information. The Context combines strip pooling and average pooling to aggregate contextual and global information. Finally, the AAFM is employed to incorporate contextual information through an axial attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms competing approaches in the segmentation task.

Hybrid CNN-transformer network for interactive learning of challenging musculoskeletal images

Background and objectivesSegmentation of regions of interest (ROIs) such as tumors and bones plays an essential role in the analysis of musculoskeletal (MSK) images. Segmentation results can help with orthopaedic surgeons in surgical outcomes assessment and patient's gait cycle simulation. Deep learning-based automatic segmentation methods, particularly those using fully convolutional networks (FCNs), are considered as the state-of-the-art. However, in scenarios where the training data is insufficient to account for all the variations in ROIs, these methods struggle to segment the challenging ROIs that with less common image characteristics. Such characteristics might include low contrast to the background, inhomogeneous textures, and fuzzy boundaries. Methodswe propose a hybrid convolutional neural network – transformer network (HCTN) for semi-automatic segmentation to overcome the limitations of segmenting challenging MSK images. Specifically, we propose to fuse user-inputs (manual, e.g., mouse clicks) with high-level semantic image features derived from the neural network (automatic) where the user-inputs are used in an interactive training for uncommon image characteristics. In addition, we propose to leverage the transformer network (TN) – a deep learning model designed for handling sequence data, in together with features derived from FCNs for segmentation; this addresses the limitation of FCNs that can only operate on small kernels, which tends to dismiss global context and only focus on local patterns. ResultsWe purposely selected three MSK imaging datasets covering a variety of structures to evaluate the generalizability of the proposed method. Our semi-automatic HCTN method achieved a dice coefficient score (DSC) of 88.46 ± 9.41 for segmenting the soft-tissue sarcoma tumors from magnetic resonance (MR) images, 73.32 ± 11.97 for segmenting the osteosarcoma tumors from MR images and 93.93 ± 1.84 for segmenting the clavicle bones from chest radiographs. When compared to the current state-of-the-art automatic segmentation method, our HCTN method is 11.7%, 19.11% and 7.36% higher in DSC on the three datasets, respectively. ConclusionOur experimental results demonstrate that HCTN achieved more generalizable results than the current methods, especially with challenging MSK studies.

Economic and social consequences of the ban on the employment of foreign workers (example of the Central Federal District)

The article for the first time examines the experience of regulating international migration by imposing bans on attracting foreign citizens who work on the basis of patents in certain types of economic activity. The study was conducted on the basis of a comparison of the socio-economic indicators of the regions of the Central Federal District that use this tool (Tver and Voronezh regions), never used it (Moscow) and recently joined the practice (Kaluga region). The statistic for 2014-2022, reflecting the dynamics of external migration flows, the state of internal labor resources and individual sectors of the economy, as well as the level of crime among migrants, is analyzed. Conclusions about the prohibitive practice as a practice, which has little effect on the studied indices of protectionist regions and weakly distinguishes them from the background of other regions, are drawn. The number of issued patents in the Tver region is declining with a slight decrease in international labor migration in general, which indicates a change in the proportion of the foreign labor force in favor of a category, that does not require a patent. The dynamics of the gross regional product indicators for the groups of economic activities forbidden for the employment of foreign citizens coincides with the general upward trend due to an increase in labor productivity in all the subjects under consideration. Crime among foreign citizens in the Tver region before the pandemic was declining with an increase in the number of crimes committed against foreigners, which corresponded to the dynamics in Moscow and in the district as a whole. It seems promising to confirm or refute the obtained conclusions based on the results of studying the indices of all protectionist regions of the Russian Federation, which will improve the methods of forecasting and managing migration processes. It is also noted the need to expand the range of available data by forming a single digital database that makes it possible to trace the process of attracting foreign citizens at control points: medical (passing a medical examination), educational (passing an exam in the Russian language, Russian history and the basics of Russian legislation), financial (payment indicators monthly imputed patent tax).

Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Investment in Education—in the Background of Chinese Provinces and Regions

With the rapid development of social productivity and science and technology, the importance of education has become increasingly prominent and the relationship between education and the economy has become increasingly close. This paper uses regression analysis to correlate the level of investment in education with the number of enterprise development projects and the gross domestic product through the R language and a series of quantitative analyses. It is concluded that the level of education shows a positive relationship with the number of enterprise projects and the gross product, and the phenomenon is illustrated by data visualisation with the long-term development of the country as the goal.

Improved U-Net based on contour prediction for efficient segmentation of rectal cancer

Background and objectiveSegmentation of rectal cancerous regions using 2D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is a critical step in radiation therapy. The shape of rectal cancer has significant variations and the shape of some surrounding organs is similar to that of rectal cancer; these conditions significantly affect the segmentation accuracy of rectal cancer and lead to incorrect segmentation. Therefore, automatic segmentation of rectal cancer is urgently needed, and it is a great challenge. For this task, the existing deep learning-based approaches have two shortcomings: 1) The U-Net network plays an important role in the field of medical segmentation. However, the designs of encoders and decoders in traditional U-Net networks are relatively simple and cannot extract good features, resulting in incorrect segmentation results. 2) Conventional neural networks extract high-level features that often do not include sufficient high-resolution contour information, resulting in ambiguity in contour segmentation. In this paper, we propose an improved U-Net network based on contour prediction, aiming at effective segmentation of rectal cancer. MethodsWe designed a new U-Net network by improving the traditional U-Net network. We made four improvements: 1) We replaced the encoders with the SENet network. 2) A global pooling layer was added after the last encoder. 3) We added the Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation (SCSE) attention mechanism module to each decoder. 4) We concatenated the output results of each decoder. In addition, the model implemented content segmentation and contour segmentation for rectal cancer in parallel, so that both the content and contour information was learned by the network to enhance the segmentation accuracy. ResultsOur data were obtained from the Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital and included 3773 2D MRI rectal cancer images. The proposed method achieved an Mean Intersection over Union of 0.894 (MIoU) on the test set. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method had the best performance on the test set, and its MIoU metric was 0.123 higher than that of the second-best model. At the same time, the effectiveness of the improvements to our method was demonstrated through ablation experiments. ConclusionsOur method can help radiologists to segment effectively, save their time and energy, and enable them to focus on cases that are not easily segmented because of the complex shape of rectal cancer.

Mapping of EU Support for High Nature Value Farmlands, from the Perspective of Natural and Landscape Regions

Decoupling economic growth from the exploitation of natural resources, protecting vulnerable ecosystems, restoring habitats and species, and supporting areas used for organic farming are, along with achieving climate neutrality, key tenets of the European Green Deal (EGD)—the EU’s new sustainable economic strategy. One direction of activities to implement several of these goals simultaneously is the provision of financial support for agricultural activities aimed at protecting valuable plant and animal habitats and species. This study aims to present research results that include an analysis of the spatial diversification of EU support for nature value habitats in Poland against the background of physico-geographical regions. To date, no such studies have been conducted; instead, analyses of the spatial differentiation in how selected forms of EU funding are taken up in Poland and other European countries have mainly referred to regional or local territorial divisions, and not to regions distinguished based on natural environmental features. Payments from Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds to support farms using nature value habitats were selected for the analysis. The analysis employed data from the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA), as a disburser of EU funds for agriculture in Poland; the data related to two packages (No. 4 and 5) of Agri-Environment-Climate Measures (AECM), which constitute one of the measures of the Rural Development Programme (RDP) 2014–2020. The spatial and statistical analyses not only supported a general description of EU support for the protection of nature value habitats in Poland but also allowed a detailed evaluation of the distribution and areal coverage of nature value habitats subsidised by RDP funds to be presented, and a comprehensive assessment of the scale of support for the natural habitats covered by the programme.

Family Values of the Population of Bashkortostan Against the Background of Other Russian Regions: Between Tradition and Modernity

The article discusses the values and attitudes in the field of family and marriage, common among the population of 17–49 years. The survey was conducted in 2020 in 10 regions of the Russian Federation, including the Republic of Bashkortostan. The institutions of marriage and the family, and the values on which they are based, have undergone significant changes in recent decades. Their transformations are interpreted as a departure from the so-called traditional attitudes and behaviours and the transition to modern modernization or postmodernization. It is concluded that the population of the Republic has, on average, more traditional family and marriage attitudes and values than the population of the Russian regions that participated in the study. They manifest themselves in the chosen scenarios of marriage, in its motivation, in the ideas of a happy family. It cannot be argued that this is happening at the expense of the rural population, that it is definitely more conservative than the urban population. Although many views of the villagers are more traditional (attitude to the marriage contract, same-sex marriage and some others). The opinion of urban residents on many issues is often polarized, they are clearly divided into supporters of traditional values and modern ones. The polarity of opinions may explain the presence among them of recent immigrants from the village, who have not fully accepted the new values for themselves. Older groups – 30–49 years old, 40–49 years old on some issues, as well as women – are distinguished by great traditionalism. Among representatives of the youngest group, 17–29 years old, who have already entered or will enter the age of active marriage in the next few years, traditionalism is noticeably reduced.

ИНДИВИДУАЛЬНЫЕ ИНВЕСТИЦИОННЫЕ СЧЕТА НА ФИНАНСОВОМ РЫНКЕ: РЕГИОНАЛЬНЫЙ АСПЕКТ

The article examines the features of distribution of a new investment instrument for the country – individual investment accounts (IIAs) – in the regions of Russia in 2015–2019. The author believes that the introduction of IIAs as an instrument for private investment in the domestic financial market was associated with the need to more actively attract domestic investment to the national economy when access to external financing was seriously limited. The article analyzes data on the number of open and declared individual investment accounts of types A and B in Russia, draws conclusions about regional imbalances in their development, identifies leading and outsider regions, and outlines the prospects for further research of the problem. IIAs are a completely new and one of the “youngest” financial and investment instruments on the Russian securities market. The emergence of IIAs as an instrument for private investment in the securities market was seen as a significant increase in the openness of the Russian stock market for private investors and as a promising way to attract domestic investment in the national economy of Russia. IIA is an excellent opportunity to diversify one’s investments; however, simple calculations show that the percentage of funds recoverable from the amount of assets on the IIA is significantly small. Summarizing the results of the comparative analysis, it can be stated that at the moment IIAs have not yet become a widespread and massive instrument in Russia for attracting domestic investment to the country’s economy. Today, only 0.07% of the working-age population of the Russian Federation owns such accounts. There are regions with only single cases of opening and declaring IIAs by citizens, and some regions do not have a single IIA opened during the five years of this instrument’s existence on the market. In general, the IMS market is characterized by significant imbalances. Against the background of outsider regions, there are also leading regions in which the opening of IIAs has become a fairly widespread phenomenon. These are the Central and Volga Federal Districts, and among the constituent entities of the federation are Moscow, Moscow Oblast, and Tatarstan. One of the pressing problems today is identifying the reasons for the existence of such disproportions and taking measures to popularize IIAs as an instrument for internal investment in Russia, especially in the regions that are outsiders of the investment process.

Big data: New tend to sustainable consumption research

Abstract Growing consumption has brought a series of environmental problems. Sustainable consumption patterns which could meet human needs, improve the quality of lives, and reduce pollutants in the product life cycle emerge and develop. With the development and application of information and network technology, the scale and variety of data are increasing rapidly; advances in data analytics have made the economy, and consumption, quantifiable and visible. At present, many scholars rely on a big-data background and carry out research on sustainable consumption. Therefore, we called for sustainable and consumption papers for special volume of Journal of Cleaner Production (JCLPRO). We received submissions from all over the world and eventually accepted 45. This Special Issue forming a study on sustainable energy consumption, low-carbon transportation, waste recovery and recycling, climate change cost assessment, application and policy modelling for big data and sustainable consumption to promote sustainable development in the fields of energy consumption, low-carbon transportation, waste recovery, and so on. The authors have analysed the problems of pollution and carbon emission in different regions and product production cycles, according to the background of specific regions and enterprises, through data mining, measurement models, and an evaluation index system. Some suggestions are provided for urban construction and enterprise development according to the results.

Single Image Snow Removal via Composition Generative Adversarial Networks

Snowflakes attached to the camera lens can severely affect the visibility of the background scene and compromise the image quality. In this paper, we solve this problem by visually removing snowflakes to convert the snowy image into a clean one. The problem is troublesome; the information about the background of the occluded regions is completely lost for the most part. For removing snowflakes from a single image, we proposed a composition generative adversarial network. Different from the previous generative adversarial networks, our generator network comprises clean background module and a snow mask estimate module. The clean background module aims to generate a clear image from an input snowy image, and snow mask estimate module is used to produce the snow mask in an input image. During the training step, we put forward a composition loss between the input snowy image and composition of the generated clean image and estimated snow mask. We use a dataset named Snow100K2 including indoor and outdoor scenes to train and test the proposed method. The extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images show that our network has a good effect and it is superior to the other state-of-the-art methods.

Industrial heritage and post-industrial situation in the post-transformation era in Lower Silesia (Poland)

Abstract This descriptive paper outlines the post-industrial setting and industrial heritage in both a concrete case – south-western Poland – and some general respects, with the aim of contributing to the available knowledge about the contemporary post-industrial areas in Central Eastern Europe. To produce such an outline and to offer such a contribution, the paper offers an overview of the changes that happened in Poland since the transformation of 1989/90 with the special focus put on the industrial sector in the small- and medium-sized towns in the south-western border region of Poland. Moreover, the paper describes how the political and economic changes have impacted industry in Poland immediately after the transformation, as well as how the evolution of the political and economic situation has been shaping the industrial sector along the years until today. Further, to solidify the broad background of post-industrial regions, the paper touches upon topics that are more specific and interconnected: location of industry, employment rate changes, regional development policies, local development inequalities, and vocational schooling system. The most specific descriptions in the paper focus on the industrial heritage in the towns and cities in the region of Lower Silesia. Apart from reviewing the industrial history of Poland and of the selected western regions, this paper looks into the future by commenting on the transition between the so-called 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 industry phases and discusses whether small- and medium-sized towns in the Polish border areas are able to become connected to the future industrial network.

Evaluation of ecological and genetic condition of Rivne city for Micronucleus Test

Bioindication evaluation of air condition in the city of Rivne has been carried out using the micronucleus (MN) test on the oral mucous in under-school-age children. The highest maximum values of MN indices were determined for children who live in the studied test ranges, where the content of CO (carbon oxide) exceeds the maximum permissible concentration. Cytogenetic indicators vary in a wide range of numerical values; moreover, the level of cytogenetic damage is an informative bioindicational feature. With the monitoring purpose, the researched urban area of Rivne was divided into 12 test ranges with different anthropogenic load; a number of large and small manufacturing firms are situated there. The analysis of statistical and analytical data on the traffic intensity in the city was conducted. The study was also based on the analysis of personal researches, obtained through a comprehensive survey carried out on 167 children in 12 test ranges in 12 preschools, the average age of children was 6-7 years. A total of 64,950 mucosal epithelial cells were explored. It has been shown that the deterioration of ecological and genetic conditions of the urban environment in test ranges I, II, VI, VII, VIII, XI based on the cell damage level was below average, the condition of the children's organism was alarming but the state of the environment has changed from “excellent” to “satisfactory”. This kind of research can enable observations of the mutagenic background of regions, genetic health, and genetic threats to humans due to harmful factors.

Planning and development activities in functional regions – the hungarian case

The paper provides a short overview of the legal and institutional background of functional regions in Hungary, analyses the impact of EU cohesion policy and presents dilemmas concerning the management structures in territorial units crossing administrative borders. The Hungarian case demonstrates that although the need for a place based, territorially sensitive and integrated approach has become one of the most highlighted issues over the last decade, the overall impacts of EU cohesion policy on planning and development activities in functional regions have proved to be controversial. The paper partly relies on the case study of Central Hungary developed in the framework of the ESPON COMPASS project.

Analysis of the Incidence of Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C and Association with Socio-Economic Factors in Various Regions in China

The incidence of liver cancer in China accounts for more than half of the world, and the majority of them is caused by hepatitis B and hepatitis C. China is known as a great contributor to hepatitis. The Chinese government has implemented a series of preventive measures to solve this problem, especially the policy of free hepatitis B vaccination for newborn babies and effectively reduced the incidence of hepatitis. The incidence of infectious diseases is often related to socio-economic factors. Therefore, we used data on the incidence of hepatitis B and C and socioeconomic factors to analyze and find out the relationship among them in various regions. There were high incidence areas and low incidence areas in China, and the high incidence area of hepatitis B was also the high incidence area of hepatitis C. Especially in Xinjiang, the highest incidence of hepatitis B and hepatitis C was observed at the same time. The incidence of hepatitis B and hepatitis C was more affected by regional economic factors. The economic factors in low incidence areas of hepatitis were better than those in high incidence areas. There was a negative correlation between economic factors and the incidence of hepatitis. In conclusion, in economically developed areas, the government has invested more money and resources in public health and people’s health awareness in comparison to underdeveloped areas. In the future, various preventive strategies should be carried out according to the background of different regions.

Prospect and Suggestions on the Development of Wave Energy Resource in the South China Sea

Against the background of many countries and regions in the world facing energy crisis in the modern society, the development of renewable energy is an inevitable choice. As a non-polluting, renewable, large reserve, widely distributed energy, the development and utilization of renewable wave energy will become the focus. In order to cast a brick to attract jade, this article intends to a preliminary research on the advantage of wave energy, the evaluation on wave energy resource. At last, we also assess the characteristic of wave energy resource in the South China Sea. We hope this study can provide reference for the evaluation of developing wave energy, especially the sustainable development of remote islands.

Hypothesis, modern researches and clinical applications of cutaneous regions in traditional Chinese medicine

As one of the most important concepts in traditional Chinese medicine, cutaneous regions have a close relationship with skin in modern medicine. According to the doctrine of traditional Chinese medicine, the cutaneous regions are the corresponding projections of twelve meridians in the superficial layer of the body and play an important role in body surface-viscera correlation. The symptoms of visceral disorders will reflect on cutaneous regions and one of the major patterns of manifestation is referred visceral pain accompanied by tenderness and hyperalgesia on the body surface. On the contrary, cutaneous regions participate in the treatment of visceral disorders. As major clinical applications of the cutaneous regions hypothesis, superficial acupuncture, subcutaneous needling, massage (tuina), moxibustion, and wrist-ankle acupuncture have achieved favorable therapeutic outcomes in clinical practice. Modern researches have gained insights into the biological background of cutaneous regions, however, further studies are needed to clarify the mechanisms.