Search Results (13,104)

Background/Objectives: Sarcopenia adversely affects outcomes after liver transplantation. The CT-based skeletal muscle index (SMI) is a validated prognostic measure but requires dedicated image analysis. We evaluated the diagnostic performance of creatinine/cystatin C-based serum muscle indices for identifying CT-defined sarcopenia and their prognostic value for graft failure in living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) recipients. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 802 LDLT recipients (January 2023–April 2026). Using serum creatinine- and cystatin C-based equations, we calculated total body muscle mass (TBMM), appendicular skeletal muscle mass (ASM), and predicted SMI, and derived height-squared-normalized indices (TBMMI, ASMI); the creatinine-to-cystatin C ratio served as a non-equation-based comparator. CT-defined sarcopenia was classified using sex-specific reference cutoffs (males < 39.9, females < 28.9 cm²/m²). Diagnostic accuracy was assessed with sex-stratified ROC curves and DeLong test. The primary outcome was graft failure (recipient death or re-transplantation); its association with the best-performing index at 180 days, 1 year, and 3 years was evaluated using multivariable Cox models. Results: TBMMI showed the strongest correlation with SMI (r = 0.75). TBMMI discriminated CT-defined sarcopenia well (AUC 0.845 in males, 0.828 in females). After multivariable adjustment, each 1 kg/m² decrease in TBMMI was independently associated with graft failure at 180 days (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 1.42, 95% CI, 1.14–1.78), 1 year (HR 1.28, 1.05–1.56), and 3 years (HR 1.20, 1.02–1.40) (all p < 0.05). Conclusions: TBMMI is an accessible, non-imaging surrogate for SMI in LDLT recipients, and a lower TBMMI is independently associated with postoperative graft failure. Full article

Background/Objectives: Periodontal inflammation has been implicated in respiratory disease, but longitudinal evidence regarding chronic bronchitis (CB) remains limited. This study examined the association between claims-based periodontal status and newly recorded CB in a nationally representative Korean cohort. Methods: This retrospective cohort study used Korean National Health Insurance Service–National Sample Cohort data from 2002 to 2015. Periodontal status was assessed during 2002–2004, and 189,274 adults were followed during 2005–2015. Participants were classified as No PD, Gingivitis (K05.0–K05.1), or Periodontitis-related (K05.2–K05.6). Periodontal treatment was defined as recorded scaling or root planing. Cox models estimated adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: During follow-up, 52,955 participants (28.0%) had newly recorded CB. Periodontitis-related diagnoses were associated with a modestly higher CB risk than No PD (aHR = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.02–1.08), whereas Gingivitis was not (aHR = 1.01, 95% CI = 0.99–1.03). The association was observed among adults aged 40–59 years (aHR = 1.06, 95% CI = 1.02–1.11) and those without recorded periodontal treatment (aHR = 1.08, 95% CI = 1.03–1.12). No significant association was observed among treated participants (aHR = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.74–1.01). Conclusions: Periodontitis-related diagnoses were associated with a small increase in newly recorded CB risk, whereas Gingivitis was not. Treatment-stratified findings were exploratory and should not be interpreted as evidence that periodontal treatment prevents CB. Full article

Background: The diagnosis of adult growth hormone (GH) deficiency (GHD) relies on demonstrating a reduced GH response to stimulation tests. Excess body weight, an increasingly prevalent condition, is associated with a blunted GH response to all types of stimulation tests. Therefore, establishing body mass index (BMI)-dependent cut-offs is essential for accurate interpretation. This study aimed to identify BMI-specific diagnostic thresholds for the insulin tolerance test (ITT), using residual pituitary function as the clinical gold standard. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 105 patients with hypothalamic-pituitary disorders who underwent ITT. GHD was defined by the presence of at least three pituitary hormone deficiencies, while preserved somatotropic function was defined by the absence of other pituitary deficits and an insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) standard deviation score ≥ 0. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to determine optimal BMI-stratified cut-offs, defined as those maximizing sensitivity (SE) and specificity (SP). Results: The optimal GH cut-off was 2.8 μg/L for patients with normal weight (SE 84.6%, SP 97.4%) and those with overweight (SE 100%, SP 92.3%), and 2.1 μg/L for patients with obesity (SE 88.2%, SP 87.5%). The area under the ROC curve was 0.968, 0.957, and 0.897 for patients with normal weight, overweight, and obesity, respectively. Conclusions: This is the first study to define GH diagnostic thresholds for the ITT according to BMI, using a clinical definition of GHD as reference. More restrictive cut-offs in patients with obesity are needed to avoid GHD overdiagnosis and potential overtreatment. These findings should be considered hypothesis-generating and require prospective external validation before routine clinical implementation. Full article

Monocular 3D human pose estimation is sensitive to depth ambiguity and upstream 2D-detector error. We investigate a detector-conditioned virtual 2D pose as an auxiliary hypothesis rather than an independent physical measurement. Joint reliability combines training-subject-only monotonic confidence calibration with detector-, joint-, and confidence-specific residual risk before a compact pose lifter. A four-arm factorial design separates observed-only (O), observed plus virtual (OV), observed plus reliability (OR), and observed plus virtual plus reliability (OVR). Across three subject-disjoint splits, three seeds, two RGB detectors, and 48 subject–sequence–camera clusters, OVR improved mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) by 3.049 mm (95% cluster-aware confidence interval (CI): 0.583–4.976); reliability-only improvement was supported, whereas the conditional virtual increment and interaction were not. Validation-only sensitivity covered eight yaw/pitch hypotheses and five multi-view policies; no multi-view policy improved primary MPJPE over the locked $-{15}^{\circ }$ view. A component-level audit of two synchronized directed camera pairs favored the generator over the observed-pose baseline in all 24 stratified rows, with only two sequence clusters per row. The locked MPI-INF-3DHP Official TS1–TS6 result improved MPJPE by approximately 0.97%, below its prespecified 2% practical threshold, with a CI crossing zero. On an additional external 3DPW cohort (13,579 eligible frames, 24 sequences, YOLO11L-Pose only), OVR improved MPJPE by 1.004 mm (95% CI: −2.965–5.016), while its Procrustes-aligned MPJPE point estimate worsened by 0.640 mm; neither contrast was conclusive. Thus, calibrated reliability is the most consistently supported mechanism, whereas virtual-view dominance, official superiority, and cross-dataset superiority are not established. Full article

Early in ovo sex identification is important for improving hatchery resource utilization; however, sex-related optical differences are weak during early embryonic development and exhibit clear stage dependence. In this study, longitudinal visible–near-infrared transmission spectra were acquired from 1600 fertilized pink-shelled eggs of Bashang Long-tailed chickens across four independent incubation batches during incubation days 1–7. Before model development, 200 eggs were reserved as a fixed internal hold-out test set, while the remaining 1400 eggs were used for exploratory incubation-day and feature screening, five-fold cross-validation, and model comparison. Among all 21 dual-day combinations, D2 + D5 achieved the highest exploratory validation AUC of 0.951. The selected scheme required separate measurements on D2 and D5, with the final sex classification completed on D5. Further incorporation of the signed difference spectrum ΔS and relative change rate R increased the AUC to 0.965, demonstrating the incremental discriminative value of longitudinal developmental-change information. After the input scheme had been fixed, DSSF-Net achieved the numerically highest performance among the evaluated models under unified egg-level stratified five-fold cross-validation, with an accuracy of 0.915 ± 0.015, an AUC of 0.974 ± 0.012, and an F1-score of 0.915 ± 0.014. The final model achieved an accuracy of 0.915 and an empirical AUC of 0.966 (95% CI: 0.940–0.987) on the fixed internal hold-out test set. Complete four-round leave-one-batch-out validation yielded mean accuracy and AUC values of 0.846 ± 0.014 and 0.926 ± 0.012, respectively, indicating that the longitudinal spectral information from D2 + D5 maintained relatively stable discriminative performance across incubation batches within the investigated population. These results demonstrate the feasibility of longitudinal spectral modeling for early sex identification in fertilized pink-shelled eggs of Bashang Long-tailed chickens. Systematic offline validation was completed under laboratory conditions, including evaluation on the fixed internal hold-out test set and four-round leave-one-batch-out validation, supporting the effectiveness and batch-level stability of D2 + D5 longitudinal developmental spectra. Post hoc wavelength-level interpretation further identified 594–620 nm and 660–675 nm as two candidate spectral regions with relatively high predictive value. Collectively, these findings provide a reliable longitudinal spectral modeling framework for early non-destructive in ovo sex identification and establish an experimental and methodological foundation for wavelength selection, device development, and subsequent engineering validation of multispectral detection systems under hatchery conditions. Full article

Foamed concrete is susceptible to drying shrinkage and environmental deterioration because of its porous structure. This study evaluated the effects of fly ash–ground granulated blast-furnace slag blends and polyvinyl alcohol fibres on the dimensional stability and durability of FC. Sixteen mixtures with SCM replacement levels of 0–35% and PVA fibre contents of 0–0.3 vol.% were tested for accelerated drying shrinkage, freeze–thaw resistance, sulfate wet–dry resistance, chloride penetration, and visible pore structure. A normalised multi-criteria evaluation was used to compare the mixtures across five performance indicators, with sensitivity analysis performed for six weighting schemes. Increasing SCM replacement generally increased the drying shrinkage but reduced the chloride penetration depth by 26.7%, 33.3%, and 56.7% at 15%, 25%, and 35% replacement, respectively. At 25% SCM replacement, PVA fibres reduced freeze–thaw-induced compressive strength loss by 62.12–98.48% relative to the corresponding fibre-free mixture. Optical microscopy identified a local stratified region in one of three C0.3 specimens, which was not considered a systematic feature. C0.3 achieved the highest overall score under equal weighting and remained among the top three mixtures under all six weighting schemes. Within the investigated mixture range, C0.3 showed consistently high overall performance, although longer-term durability assessment is required. Full article

Background/Objectives: Early-onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC), diagnosed before age 50 years, is increasing in many populations and usually arises outside routine screening pathways. We synthesized clinical, demographic, familial, and genetic evidence relevant to risk-stratified early detection. Methods: Two core PubMed searches covering publications from 1 January 2010 through 1 June 2026 were supplemented by targeted PubMed searches and reference-list screening. The present review cited 82 journal publications and synthesized the findings qualitatively; no formal risk-of-bias assessment, certainty-of-evidence grading, or de novo quantitative pooling was performed. Results: EOCRC commonly involves the distal colon or rectum and presents with hematochezia, abdominal pain, altered bowel habits, or iron-deficiency anemia, with diagnostic intervals of several months. Screening colonoscopy in average-risk adults aged 45–49 years has a clinically relevant yield, although generally lower than in older adults, and direct evidence of reduced incidence or mortality remains limited. Risk rises with age before 50; sex and race or ethnicity provide limited, context-dependent discrimination. Family history is a consistent marker, although most cases lack documented familial aggregation. Pathogenic germline variants explain a minority, and polygenic risk scores are not established for routine practice. Conclusions: Early detection should combine timely investigation of warning signs, assessment of family history, equitable access to diagnostics, germline testing for patients with EOCRC, cascade testing, and prospective validation of population-specific models. Full article

Reliable optical sensing of smoke and flames in high-rise buildings is challenging due to weak early cues, vertical smoke diffusion, facade occlusions, nighttime illumination, and fire-like urban interferences. We propose CDU-YOLO, a scene-aware real-time detection framework built upon YOLOv8n. Rather than relying on indiscriminate network scaling, task-oriented integration of existing modules is introduced: dynamic point-sampling (DySample) to preserve blurred boundaries of distant micro-targets, an enlarged receptive field (UniRepLKNet) to capture large-scale vertical propagation, and a dynamic bounding-box regression loss (WIoU) to handle occlusions. Experiments on a custom high-rise fire dataset and two public datasets demonstrate 94.9% mAP@0.5 and 56.7% mAP@0.5:0.95. In a dedicated flame-only size-stratified evaluation, CDU-YOLO improves AP@0.5 for small flames from 79.6% to 91.7% and reduces their miss rate from 25.2% to 11.3% relative to YOLOv8n. Under a unified desktop protocol (RTX 3080, PyTorch FP16, $640\times 640$, batch size 1, no TensorRT), end-to-end throughput increases from 41 FPS to 55 FPS. A separate Jetson Orin NX deployment benchmark reaches 92 FPS using TensorRT FP16. The explicit introduction of an “others” category during training contributes to reducing false positive predictions against fire-like distractors. These results support the use of CDU-YOLO as a supplementary visual sensing component for early situational awareness. Nevertheless, residual misses on small and ultra-distant flames, continuous video-stream validation, and long-term field testing remain to be addressed before safety-critical online deployment. Full article

The increasing sophistication of cyber threats and severe class imbalance in network traffic continue to challenge traditional intrusion detection systems. This study proposes a hybrid framework that integrates SMOTE and CTGAN for minority-class augmentation, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network for supervised traffic classification, and a benign-trained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for validating low-confidence predictions. The framework was evaluated on the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset. On a final holdout test partition of 2,759,227 network flows, it achieved a binary accuracy of 98.51%, an F1-score of 92.59%, and a ROC-AUC of 0.9935. In the 15-class evaluation, it achieved 98.50% accuracy and a weighted F1-score of 98.42%, while stratified 10-fold cross-validation yielded a mean accuracy of 98.79%. The VAE was activated for 519,389 low-confidence flows, representing 18.82% of the complete holdout test partition, and primarily reduced false-positive predictions, although this improvement was accompanied by a measurable reduction in attack recall. SHAP analysis was applied to the supervised Bi-LSTM component to provide feature-level interpretability. The framework also achieved a mean inference latency of 0.5195 ms per network flow. These findings demonstrate strong aggregate detection performance, stable generalisation, effective false-alarm reduction, and low inference latency, while highlighting continuing challenges in rare-class and open-set detection. Full article

Tropical cyclone (TC) intensity estimation over the western North Pacific remains affected by uncertainties in satellite observations, best-track records, and rapidly evolving inner-core structures. To further exploit information on cloud-system vertical structure and its temporal evolution, this study introduces FY-4A/B cloud-top height (CTH) products and develops CTH-TCNet, a three-branch gated-fusion model that integrates infrared brightness temperature, CMORPH precipitation, and multidimensional CTH information for TC intensity estimation. The model consists of a CNN-based spatial branch, an LSTM-based temporal branch representing CTH evolution over the preceding 12 h, and a shortcut branch preserving current-time CTH statistics. Systematic ablation experiments show that the contribution of CTH is closely related to its representation and fusion strategy. Directly adding a single-time-step two-dimensional CTH field as an additional spatial channel provides no further performance gain, whereas historical CTH evolution and current-time CTH statistics provide complementary information. Jointly representing these two types of information through the temporal and shortcut branches yields the best performance. The final model achieves an MAE of 6.26 kt and an RMSE of 7.41 kt on the test sets. Intensity-stratified results further show that CTH generally provides larger improvements for TY, STY, and Super TY than for TS. Interpretability analyses indicate that, as TC intensity increases, the model exhibits greater reliance on CTH temporal evolution and structural information from the inner-core and eyewall-adjacent regions, with these dependence patterns being broadly consistent with known characteristics of TC inner-core convective organization and eyewall-related structures. These results indicate that FY-4A/B CTH provides valuable complementary structural and temporal information for satellite-based TC intensity estimation. Full article

Aim: This study addressed two research questions. First, which sociodemographic, behavioral, and psychological factors are independently associated with elevated depressive symptoms among Korean women aged 20–59 years? Second, does subjective perception of one’s own body size retain an independent association with depressive symptoms after these factors are taken into account, and does this pattern differ between younger and midlife women? The primary outcome was elevated depressive symptoms, defined as a PHQ-9 score of 5 or above. Design: This cross-sectional study used pooled data from the four Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey cycles in which the PHQ-9 was administered (2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020). All estimates incorporate the complex survey design and therefore refer to the national population of Korean women aged 20–59 years. Methods: We analysed data from Korean women aged 20–59 years who completed the PHQ-9 (n = 7595). Elevated depressive symptoms were defined as a PHQ-9 score of 5 or above, indicating mild or greater symptomatology. Design-based multivariable logistic regression models were constructed in sequential blocks: demographic variables (Model 1); behavioural and psychological factors added (Model 2); and perceived body size, entered as indicator contrasts against average body size, added (Model 3). Analyses were stratified by age group (20–39 and 40–59 years), and age-group interaction terms were fitted in a pooled model to test formally whether associations differed across the female lifespan. Results: The weighted prevalence of elevated depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 ≥ 5) was 24.1% (95% CI 22.8–25.3). In bivariate analyses, perceived body size differed significantly between women with and without elevated depressive symptoms (p < 0.001). After adjustment for behavioural and psychological factors, neither perceived thinness nor perceived obesity was associated with depressive symptoms in either age group (20–39 years, thin: OR 1.25, 95% CI 0.92–1.69; obese: OR 1.05, 95% CI 0.85–1.30; 40–59 years, thin: OR 1.21, 95% CI 0.84–1.73; obese: OR 0.99, 95% CI 0.80–1.22), and the joint two-degree-of-freedom test was non-significant in both groups. Perceived stress (OR 5.15 and 4.93), poor subjective health (OR 2.11 and 2.55), and lifetime smoking experience (OR 1.75 and 1.79) showed the strongest and most consistent associations in both groups (all p < 0.001). Lower household income was associated with depressive symptoms among women aged 40–59 years and heavy episodic drinking among those aged 20–39 years; in formal interaction testing, household income showed only a non-significant trend towards effect modification by age (p = 0.060), so the age differences are described rather than established. Conclusions: The crude association between perceived body size and depressive symptoms did not persist after adjustment for behavioral and psychological factors. Because perceived stress and subjective health may lie on a causal pathway from body size perception to depressive symptoms, this attenuation is consistent with either confounding or an indirect pathway, and the present cross-sectional design cannot distinguish between them. Perceived stress and subjective health showed the strongest associations across age groups, while lower household income remained an independent correlate in midlife. This finding points to a material condition that individual-level screening cannot by itself address. Full article

Mapping mountain surfaces requires spatial units that represent both hillslope-scale structure and local within-slope terrain heterogeneity. Hydrological slope units provide limited representation of within-slope objects, whereas general object-based segmentation is sensitive to fragmentation and scale selection. We developed a homogeneous terrain unit extraction framework based on superpixel segmentation and multiscale region merging (SSM-HTU), in which initial slope units serve as local statistical references and within-slope terrain objects are generated through slope-unit-conditioned morphometric representation, superpixel initialization, distribution-sensitive region merging, and a nested partition hierarchy. The framework was applied to the 5136 km² Yuqu River Basin in southeastern Tibet. Of 971 expert-interpreted reference HTUs, 680 were reserved for independent geometric evaluation; 1329 historical landslides were additionally used for supplementary spatial association analysis across mapping-unit schemes. Relative to the eCognition Multiresolution Segmentation (MSS) baseline, SSM-HTU showed a slight decrease in Precision from 0.8432 to 0.8340, while Recall (directional reference-object coverage) increased from 0.7615 to 0.8011, area-weighted IoU from 0.6710 to 0.6945, and Boundary F1 at a 12.5 m tolerance from 0.5980 to 0.6810, indicating greater reference-object coverage, spatial overlap, and boundary correspondence without uniform improvement across all geometric metrics. Across four geomorphological zones, area-weighted IoU ranged from 0.671 to 0.724 and Boundary F1 from 0.651 to 0.709, with non-monotonic regional variation. Mapping-unit schemes also yielded factor-dependent spatially stratified associations, underscoring the importance of spatial support in downstream statistical analysis. SSM-HTU therefore provides an object-based mapping framework for representing local within-slope terrain heterogeneity within a hillslope-scale statistical context in deeply incised valleys. Full article

Background/Objectives: Clinical outcomes with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), such as nivolumab, vary among patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The Lung Immune Prognostic Index (LIPI) may help stratify prognosis. This study evaluated the prognostic significance of LIPI in patients receiving second- or third-line nivolumab and developed a nomogram for individualized survival estimation. Methods: This single-center retrospective study included 142 patients with metastatic NSCLC who received second- or third-line nivolumab between February 2022 and December 2024, after progression on platinum-based chemotherapy. LIPI was calculated from baseline values obtained within 14 days before nivolumab initiation, based on a derived neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (dNLR) > 3 and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) > 225 U/L (institutional upper limit of normal), classifying patients as good-, intermediate-, or poor-risk (0, 1, or 2 factors, respectively). Overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were estimated by the Kaplan–Meier method; independent prognostic factors were assessed by multivariable Cox regression, and a prognostic nomogram combining ECOG performance status, serum albumin, and LIPI was developed and internally validated. Results: By LIPI, 34.5%, 45.1%, and 20.4% of patients were at good, intermediate, and poor risk, respectively. Objective response and disease control rates were 29.6% and 55.6%. Median OS and PFS were 19.3/8.0/3.1 and 8.6/3.1/2.5 months across good, intermediate, and poor LIPI groups (log-rank p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, ECOG 2 (hazard ratio [HR], 4.94), albumin per 1 g/dL (HR 0.27), and poor versus good LIPI (HR 3.74) were independently associated with OS. A nomogram combining these three factors showed acceptable discrimination (optimism-corrected Harrell C-statistic 0.742). Conclusions: LIPI was independently associated with prognosis in this cohort. Combining LIPI with ECOG and albumin may aid individualized risk assessment, pending external validation. Full article

Background: Minimally invasive cardiac valve surgery (MIVS) provides distinct clinical advantages, yet annular suturing remains a technically demanding step. Automated annular suturing devices (RAM^®) have been developed to standardize suture placement during valve replacement. This study evaluates the initial clinical feasibility, technical safety, and operational integration of automated suturing during its institutional adoption phase. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 43 consecutive patients undergoing MIVS supported by the RAM^® system (2021–2025), stratified into mitral valve replacements (RAM-MVR, n = 26) and aortic valve replacements (RAM-AVR, n = 17). Technical parameters, procedural safety metrics, and perioperative outcomes were descriptively analyzed and contextualized against our broader institutional MIVS platform using percutaneous femoral cannulation (n = 182). Results: Automated annular suturing achieved a 100% technical feasibility rate (43/43, 95% CI: 91.8–100.0%) with zero mechanical device failures or intraoperative suture-line disruptions (0%, 95% CI: 0.0–8.2%). In the RAM-MVR cohort, median cross-clamp and cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) times were 73.0 min (IQR 64.0–91.0) and 114.5 min (IQR 94.8–129.5), respectively. In RAM-AVR, median cross-clamp time was 75.0 min (IQR 71.0–83.0). Thirty-day mortality was 4.7% (2/43, 95% CI: 0.6–15.8%), secondary to non-device-related medical complications in high-risk baseline patients. Postoperative echocardiography demonstrated no paravalvular regurgitation (0%, 95% CI: 0.0–8.2%). Conclusions: Initial institutional experience demonstrates that automated annular suturing is technically feasible and safe in minimally invasive mitral and aortic valve replacement. The system enables consistent procedural execution across valve positions. These observational data support automated suturing as a feasible alternative to manual suturing in MIVS workflows. Full article

Wildfire impact assessment requires information on both burned areas and the biomass exposed within burned landscapes. We developed a field-calibrated, multi-source remote-sensing framework to estimate above-ground biomass (AGB) and quantify annual wildfire-related potential AGB exposure across the boreal forests of Quebec and Ontario, Canada, during 2018–2024. The dataset comprised 3725 plot-year AGB observations linked to optical, Sentinel-1 C-band, ALOS L-band synthetic aperture radar, environmental, and geographic predictors. Product-wise screening reduced the 91 candidate predictors to 28. An optimized extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model was evaluated using five-fold grouped cross-validation, with repeated observations from each plot assigned to a single fold. The model achieved an RMSE of 25.08 ± 0.36 t ha⁻¹, an MAE of 20.89 ± 0.39 t ha⁻¹, and an R² of 0.53 ± 0.02. The full multi-source configuration outperformed all reduced-source and source-only configurations, while removing ALOS L-band SAR or environmental/geographic predictors produced among the largest performance declines. The model was applied to 9937 land-cover-stratified points within wildfire polygons using predictors from the year preceding each fire. Under the complete-loss assumption, cumulative potential AGB exposure was 269.20 Mt across 6.66 Mha of effective burned area, with a 95% bootstrap interval of 254.19–284.06 Mt reflecting finite-point sampling uncertainty and an area-weighted mean exposure intensity of 40.43 t ha⁻¹. The 2023 fire season accounted for 206.44 Mt, representing 76.7% of cumulative exposure and 73.2% of effective burned area. Effective burned area and total potential exposure were strongly correlated (r = 0.99), whereas exposure intensity followed a distinct pattern and peaked in 2022 at 46.86 t ha⁻¹. Thus, burned area was the primary correlate of regional potential biomass exposure, whereas exposure intensity reflected variation in pre-fire biomass among burned landscapes. These estimates represent potential exposure rather than measured combustion, mortality, or carbon emissions and demonstrate the value of integrating spatially explicit pre-fire AGB with wildfire perimeters. Full article