CLINICAL-MORPHOMETRIC RATIO OF DEGENERATIVE-DYSTROPHIC PROCESSES OF THE CERVICAL SPINE IN HUMANS AND ANIMALS IN SPINAL CHANNEL STENOSIS

Relevance. Spinal stenosis is a common manifestation of degenerative-dystrophic lesions of the cervical spine (CS). In most cases it occurs with the development of neurological complications in the form of secondary spondylogenic myelopathy, radicular dysfunction, pain. Isolated studies indicate that this type of damage occurs in some animals. Objective: a comparative analysis of clinical, radiological and morphometric data on degenerative-dystrophic lesions in human and domestic animals on the background of degenerative changes in bone structures that provoke stenosis of the spinal canal with the development of spondylogenic myelopathy. Material and methods. The retrospective analysis included 65 patients (25 men, 40 women) with neurological symptoms who underwent computed tomography during 2018-2021. Prospectively, a study was performed with the participation of 75 domestic animals with similar symptoms (19 dogs of large breeds weighing more 20 kg, 42 dogs of small and medium breeds weighing less 20 kg, and 14 cats. Results. There was a close correlation of symptoms in humans and large dogs in the presence and degree of narrowing of the canal: in cases of stenosis of the ventricles in humans (75.3%), large breeds of dogs (78.9%), patients had similar neurological symptoms. The maximum decrease in the sagittal diameter of the spinal canal was found more at the level of the C6 vertebral body in both humans and animals, weighing more than 20 kg. The mass share of stenotic changes was mainly registered in men (84.0% vs. 70.0% in women). In addition, according to the Pavlov-Torg morphometric index, the width of the spinal canal in men was smaller than in women. Stenosis of the spinal canal was mainly registered in large breeds of dogs (78.9%), which almost completely coincided with the morphometry in humans (75.4%). Conclusions. The data of our research indicate the possibility of using large breeds of dogs in predicting the course of degenerative-dystrophic changes in humans, because physiological and pathophysiological processes in dogs are on average 7 times faster than in humans. The severity of the process, the clinic and morphometric data of CS animals depend on the species, breed, weight, age, and common factors in the development of degenerative-dystrophic changes in humans and some groups of animals may be aging in general and the spine in particular

Fragmentation and Multifragmentation of 10.6A GeV Gold Nuclei

We present the results of a study performed on the interactions of 10.6A GeV gold nuclei in nuclear emulsions. In a minimum bias sample of 1311 interac- tions, 5260 helium nuclei and 2622 heavy fragments were observed as Au projec- tile fragments. The experimental data are analyzed with particular emphasis of target separation interactions in emulsions and study of criticalexponents. Multiplicity distributions of the fast-moving projectile fragments are inves- tigated. Charged fragment moments, conditional moments as well as two and three -body asymmetries of the fast moving projectile particles are determined in terms of the total charge remaining bound in the multiply charged projectile fragments. Some differences in the average yields of helium nuclei and heavier fragments are observed, which may be attributed to a target effect. However, two and three-body asymmetries and conditional moments indicate that the breakup mechanism of the projectile seems to be independent of target mass. We looked for evidence of critical point observable in finite nuclei by study the resulting charged fragments distributions. We have obtained the values for the critical exponents gamma, beta and tau and compare our results with those at lower energy experiment (1.0A GeV data). The values suggest that a phase transition like behavior, is observed.Comment: latex, revtex, 28 pages, 12 figures, 3tables, submitted to Europysics Journal

Reconstruction of 3D structures from protein contact maps

Proteins are large organic compounds made of amino acids arranged in a linear chain (primary structure). Most proteins fold into unique three-dimensional (3D) structures called interchangeably tertiary, folded, or native structures. Discovering the tertiary structure of a protein (Protein Folding Problem) can provide important clues about how the protein performs its function and it is one of the most important problems in Bioinformatics. A contact map of a given protein P is a binary matrix M such that Mi,j = 1 iff the physical distance between amino acids i and j in the native structure is less than or equal to a pre-assigned threshold t. The contact map of each protein is a distinctive signature of its folded structure. Predicting the tertiary structure of a protein directly from its primary structure is a very complex and still unsolved problem. An alternative and probably more feasible approach is to predict the contact map of a protein from its primary structure and then to compute the tertiary structure starting from the predicted contact map. This last problem has been recently proven to be NP-Hard [6]. In this paper we give a heuristic method that is able to reconstruct in a few seconds a 3D model that exactly matches the target contact map. We wish to emphasize that our method computes an exact model for the protein independently of the contact map threshold. To our knowledge, our method outperforms all other techniques in the literature [5,10,17,19] both for the quality of the provided solutions and for the running times. Our experimental results are obtained on a non-redundant data set consisting of 1760 proteins which is by far the largest benchmark set used so far. Average running times range from 3 to 15 seconds depending on the contact map threshold and on the size of the protein. Repeated applications of our method (starting from randomly chosen distinct initial solutions) show that the same contact map may admit (depending on the threshold) quite different 3D models. Extensive experimental results show that contact map thresholds ranging from 10 to 18 \uc5ngstrom allow to reconstruct 3D models that are very similar to the proteins native structure. Our Heuristic is freely available for testing on the web at the following url: http://vassura.web.cs.unibo.it/cmap23d

Comparative results of surgical, combined and comprehensive treatment of newly onset medulloblastoma in children

The authors present the outcomes of treatment of 107 patients with histologically verified diagnosis of medulloblastoma. Of these, 22 children were subjected only to surgical treatment, 25 – operative and radiotherapy, and 60 – polychemotherapy as a stage of a comprehensive or combined treatment. It was determined that survival of children with medulloblastoma was influenced by such factors as the presence of polychemotherapy and radiotherapy, a residual tumour following nonradical removal thereof, involvement of the brain stem into the tumour process, as well as tumour cells in the lumbal liquor. Carrying out ventriculoperitoneal by-pass decreases survival of patients with medulloblastoma. © 2002, Fund - Doctors, Innovations,Science for Children. All rights reserved