Hypertrophic reversed palmaris longus muscle: a cadaveric finding

Variations of the forearm musculature are vastly described in the literature. The palmaris longus muscle is one of the most variable structures of the human body. It usually arises from the medial epicondyle of the humerus and inserts itself into the palmar aponeurosis. Anatomy textbooks and recent papers state that this muscle may act as a weak wrist flexor. The present work aims to report an anatomical variation where the palmaris longus muscle was abnormally hypertrophied and was completely fleshy throughout the whole forearm. Anatomical variations of the palmaris longus may induce symptoms of neurovascular bundle compression, especially of the median nerve. The palmaris longus muscle may be used in tendon graft or muscle graft, due to its lack of apparent function. Furthermore, it is one of the anatomical landmarks for local anaesthesia procedures. (Folia Morphol 2018; 77, 2: 403–405

Is the right testis more affected by cryptorchidism than the left testis? An ultrasonographic approach in dogs of different sizes and breeds

Background: Considered the most common congenital testicular abnormality of companion animals and a predisposition factor to the development of testicular neoplasia, cryptorchidism is defined as the non-descent of one or both testes to their normal anatomical location. Data on the occurrence of cryptorchidism in Brazil are scarce. The purpose of this work was to verify the occurrence of cryptorchidism in dogs of different sizes and breeds. Materials and methods: Cryptorchidism identification was carried out by ultrasound scanning, from November, 1994 to March, 2007, at the Centre for Veterinarian Diagnosis and Support (Centro de Apoio e Diagnóstico Veterinário — CAD), in Rio de Janeiro. 4924 male dogs of different breeds were examined, revealing 403 (8.2%) cryptorchidism. Results: In this study, occurrence took place more often on the right testicle (59.5%), more frequently displaying inguinal localisation (59.5%) and unilateral occurrence (70%). Regarding bilateral presentation, the symmetrical form was the most common (86.8%). Cryptorchidism was more common in the inguinal region of dog of small sized breeds and in the abdominal region in dogs of medium- and large-sized breeds. Conclusions: Ultrasound scan proved a valuable diagnosis tool for cryptorchid testes, giving precise localisation and parenchymal changes thus leading to a safe clinical treatment

A Robin Hood approach to forced alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the segment level, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for phonetic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few well-documented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data. For at least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by automatic alignment with minimal training data. Consonants provided significantly more challenges for forced alignment

Pairing Nurses and Social Workers in Schools: North Carolina's School-Based Child and Family Support Teams

No Abstract

The affective modulation of motor awareness in anosognosia for hemiplegia : Behavioural and lesion evidence

© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).The possible role of emotion in anosognosia for hemiplegia (i.e., denial of motor deficits contralateral to a brain lesion), has long been debated between psychodynamic and neurocognitive theories. However, there are only a handful of case studies focussing on this topic, and the precise role of emotion in anosognosia for hemiplegia requires empirical investigation. In the present study, we aimed to investigate how negative and positive emotions influence motor awareness in anosognosia. Positive and negative emotions were induced under carefully-controlled experimental conditions in right-hemisphere stroke patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia (n = 11) and controls with clinically normal awareness (n = 10). Only the negative, emotion induction condition resulted in a significant improvement of motor awareness in anosognosic patients compared to controls; the positive emotion induction did not. Using lesion overlay and voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping approaches, we also investigated the brain lesions associated with the diagnosis of anosognosia, as well as with performance on the experimental task. Anatomical areas that are commonly damaged in AHP included the right-hemisphere motor and sensory cortices, the inferior frontal cortex, and the insula. Additionally, the insula, putamen and anterior periventricular white matter were associated with less awareness change following the negative emotion induction. This study suggests that motor unawareness and the observed lack of negative emotions about one's disabilities cannot be adequately explained by either purely motivational or neurocognitive accounts. Instead, we propose an integrative account in which insular and striatal lesions result in weak interoceptive and motivational signals. These deficits lead to faulty inferences about the self, involving a difficulty to personalise new sensorimotor information, and an abnormal adherence to premorbid beliefs about the body.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio