371 research outputs found
Analytical validation of innovative magneto-inertial outcomes: a controlled environment study.
peer reviewe
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil
THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF BLAST EXPOSURE AND MILD TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY IN SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES SOLDIERS
Introduction: Special Operations Forces (SOF) Soldiers sustain frequent low-level occupational blast and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The cumulative impact of blast exposure and mTBI on long-term neurological health is poorly understood. Tracking changes in physiological outcomes that quantify brain tissue damage may elucidate early neurophysiological alterations linking neurotraumatic exposures to chronic neurodegenerative sequalae. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of occupational blast exposure and the interaction effect of mTBI on changes to regional brain volumes, structural connectivity, and blood biomarkers UCH-L1, NSE, t-tau, NfL and GFAP in SOF Soldiers. Methods: Soldiers (n=88) underwent neuroimaging assessments including T1, T2, and diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging at two timepoints. Time between visits varied between participants from 13 to 131 months. Cortical reconstruction, volumetric segmentation, and structural connectivity matrix construction was performed. A subset (n=16) had biomarker serum concentrations quantified. Months of blast exposure between visits was used to predict change in neuroimaging and blood biomarker outcomes between visits using general linear models. Post-hoc subgroup analyses and interactions were assessed. Results: Greater occupational blast exposure predicted increased lateral ventricular volume (F1,86= 5.45; p=0.022), left frontal lobe gray matter volume (F1,86=4.06; p=0.047), right parietal lobe gray matter volume (F1,86=4.15; p=0.045), decreased cerebellum gray matter volume (F1,86=5.70; p=0.019), and decreased serum t-tau (F1,14=6.42; p=0.02; B=-3.85 pg/mL; R2=0.31) Although mTBI did not moderate these relationships, trends suggest that brain volume changes attributed to blast exposure might be exacerbated by mTBI. Conclusion: Specific neurostructural changes and biomarker decreases are associated with chronic exposure to occupational blast. Sustained mTBI may intensify blast-related structural changes. Increasing lateral ventricle volume and decreasing t-tau both implicate glymphatic dysfunction as a possible blast exposure consequence and a target for future research. Biomarker concentrations in this SOF samples exceeded civilian brain injury levels, rendering current clinical cut-offs unusable. Replication is a needed in a larger sample. The observed cerebellum cortex loss should be investigated further with clinical and performance measures for coordination and balance. These findings may guide prevention, treatment, and inform neurodegenerative consequence risk prediction, ultimately leading to improved long-term neurological health outcomes for SOF Soldiers.Doctor of Philosoph
Contributions of Human Prefrontal Cortex to the Recogitation of Thought
Human beings have a unique ability to not only verbally articulate past and present experiences, as well as potential future ones, but also evaluate the mental representations of such things. Some evaluations do little good, in that they poorly reflect facts, create needless emotional distress, and contribute to the obstruction of personal goals, whereas some evaluations are the converse: They are grounded in logic, empiricism, and pragmatism and, therefore, are functional rather than dysfunctional. The aim of non-pharmacological mental health interventions is to revise dysfunctional thoughts into more adaptive, healthier ones; however, the neurocognitive mechanisms driving cognitive change have hitherto remained unclear. Therefore, this thesis examines the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in this aspect of human higher cognition using the relatively new method of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 1 advances recogitation as the mental ability on which cognitive restructuring largely depends, concluding that, as a cognitive task, it is a form of open-ended human problem-solving that uses metacognitive and reasoning faculties. Because these faculties share similar executive resources, Chapter 2 discusses the systems in the brain involved in controlled information processing, specifically the nature of executive functions and their neural bases. Chapter 3 builds on these ideas to propose an information-processing model of recogitation, which predicts the roles of different subsystems localized within the PFC and elsewhere in the context of emotion regulation. This chapter also highlights several theoretical and empirical challenges to investigating this neurocognitive theory and proposes some solutions, such as to use experimental designs that are more ecologically valid. Chapter 4 focuses on a neuroimaging method that is best suited to investigating questions of spatial localization in ecological experiments, namely functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Chapter 5 then demonstrates a novel approach to investigating the neural bases of interpersonal interactions in clinical settings using fNIRS. Chapter 6 explores physical activity as a ‘bottom-up’ approach to upregulating the PFC, in that it might help clinical populations with executive deficits to regulate their mental health from the ‘top-down’. Chapter 7 addresses some of the methodological issues of investigating clinical interactions and physical activity in more naturalistic settings by assessing an approach to recovering functional events from observed brain data. Chapter 8 draws several conclusions about the role of the PFC in improving psychological as well as physiological well-being, particularly that rostral PFC is inextricably involved in the cognitive effort to modulate dysfunctional thoughts, and proposes some important future directions for ecological research in cognitive neuroscience; for example, psychotherapy is perhaps too physically stagnant, so integrating exercise into treatment environments might boost the effectiveness of intervention strategies
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil.Translated by Beverly Victoria Young and Karl Stephan Mokross
Internet and Biometric Web Based Business Management Decision Support
Internet and Biometric Web Based Business Management Decision Support
MICROBE
MOOC material prepared under
IO1/A5 Development of the MICROBE personalized MOOCs content and teaching materials
Prepared by:
A. Kaklauskas, A. Banaitis, I. Ubarte
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania
Project No: 2020-1-LT01-KA203-07810
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