Changes in spinal reflex and locomotor activity after a complete spinal cord injury: a common mechanism?

Locomotor activity and spinal reflexes (SRs) show common features in different mammals, including humans. Here we report the time-course of the development of locomotor activity and SRs after a complete spinal cord injury in humans. SRs evoked by tibial nerve stimulation were studied, as was the leg muscle electromyography activity evoked by mechanically assisted locomotion (Lokomat) in biceps femoris, rectus femoris, tibialis anterior and gastrocenmius medialis. Around 8 weeks after the injury, an early SR component (latency 60-120 ms) appeared, as in healthy subjects, and a well-organized leg muscle activity was present during assisted locomotion. At around 6 months after injury an additional, late reflex component (latency 120-450 ms) appeared, which remained even 15 years after the spinal cord injury. In contrast, the early component had markedly decreased at 18 months after injury. These changes in SR were associated with a loss of electromyography activity and a successively stronger electromyography exhaustion (i.e. decline of electromyography amplitude), when comparing the level of electromyography activity at 2 and 10 min, respectively, during assisted locomotion. These changes in electromyography activity affected mainly the biceps femoris, gastrocenmius medialis and tibialis anterior but less so the rectus femoris. When the amplitude relationship of the early to late SR component was calculated, there was a temporal relationship between the decrease of the early component and an increase of the late component and the degree of exhaustion of locomotor activity. In chronic, severely affected but sensori-motor incomplete spinal cord injury subjects a late SR component, associated with an electromyography exhaustion, was present in subjects who did not regularly perform stepping movements. Our data are consistent with the proposal of a common mechanism underlying the changes in SR activity and locomotor activity after spinal cord injury. These findings should be taken into consideration in the development of novel rehabilitation schemes and programs to facilitate regeneration-inducing therapies in spinal cord injury subject

Social, cultural and experiential patterning of attitudes and behaviour towards assisted suicide in Switzerland: evidence from a national population-based study.

Switzerland has the longest history of the legal practice of non-physician assisted suicide of any country. Assisted suicide is not very tightly regulated in Switzerland, and almost all assisted suicides are supported by a right-to-die organisation. Our study investigates older adults’ attitudes and behaviour towards assisted suicide, and the associations of these with the individuals’ sociodemographic and cultural characteristics, as well as with their own health status and healthcare-related experiences in Switzerland. We performed weighted prevalence and multivariable logistic regression estimation on a nationally representative sample of adults aged 55 and over from wave 6 (2015) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) in Switzerland (n = 2168). Overall, 81.7% of respondents supported the legality of assisted suicide, as is currently the case in Switzerland, and 60.9% stated that they would potentially consider asking for assisted suicide under certain circumstances; 28.2% of respondents reported either that they are already or that they are likely to become a member of a right-to-die organisation, with 4.9% of respondents reporting to already be a member of such an organisation at the time of the survey. Higher levels of education and previous experience as a healthcare proxy were positively associated with more favourable attitudes and behaviour towards assisted suicide. Compared to individuals aged 55–64, adults aged 65–74 generally showed more favourable attitudes and behaviour towards assisted suicide. By contrast, religious persons displayed more negative attitudes and behaviour towards assisted suicide. Attitudes towards assisted suicide were also more negative in the oldest age group (75+) in comparison to adults aged 55–64, and among persons living in French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland compared to those living in German-speaking Switzerland. While approval for assisted suicide is high overall in Switzerland, more vulnerable population groups, such as older or less educated individuals, have less favourable attitudes towards assisted suicide. In addition, cultural sensitivities to and personal experiences with death and dying are likely to shape the approval or rejection of assisted suicide as it is currently implemented in Switzerland

Perioperative factor concentrate therapy

Transfusion of allogeneic plasma has been a life-saving measure for decades in patients with severe trauma or suffering from major surgical blood loss. The safety of allogeneic blood components has improved in terms of pathogen transmission, but haemostatic efficacy of plasma is hindered by the large volume and time required for thawing and infusion. Several plasma-derived and recombinant factor concentrates are clinically available and indicated for targeted replacement of missing coagulation elements in hereditary disorders of thrombosis and haemostasis. When used appropriately, factor concentrate therapy can rapidly restore deficient factor(s) without causing volume overload. The haemostatic defect in perioperative patients is often multifactorial, and therefore careful clinical judgement and timely coagulation testing must be exercised before the administration of factor concentrates. In this review, the rationale for including factor concentrates in perioperative haemostatic management will be discussed in conjunction with the limitations of plasma transfusio

Unsatisfying forecast of a Mediterranean cyclone: a verification study employing state-of-the-art techniques

International audienceOn 16?17 November 2000, a relatively intense precipitation event on the north-western Italy was heavily underestimated, mainly due to shifting error, by three operational 10-km limited area models (LAMs) which differ about basic equations, domain size, and parameterisation schemes. The scope of the work is to investigate possible common error-sources independent from the single model, in particular the effect of initialisation. Thus, the complex evolution over the western Mediterranean Sea of the cyclone responsible for the event was investigated. Several objective and subjective verification techniques have been employed to check one of the LAMs' forecast against the available observations (precipitation from rain gauge and retrieved from ground-based radar, and satellite-retrieved atmospheric humidity patterns). Despite a clear statement is not achieved, results indicate that high sensitivity to the initial conditions, and the inadequacy of the observational network on the southern Mediterranean area, can play a major role in producing the forecast shifting error on the target area

Mediolateral Damping of an Overhead Body Weight Support System Assists Stability During Treadmill Walking

Background Body weight support systems with three or more degrees of freedom (3-DoF) are permissive and safe environments that provide unloading and allow unrestricted movement in any direction. This enables training of walking and balance control at an early stage in rehabilitation. Transparent systems generate a support force vector that is near vertical at all positions in the workspace to only minimally interfere with natural movement patterns. Patients with impaired balance, however, may benefit from additional mediolateral support that can be adjusted according to their capacity. An elegant solution for providing balance support might be by rendering viscous damping along the mediolateral axis via the software controller. Before use with patients, we evaluated if control-rendered mediolateral damping evokes the desired stability enhancement in able-bodied individuals. Methods A transparent, cable-driven robotic body weight support system (FLOAT) was used to provide transparent body weight support with and without mediolateral damping to 21 able-bodied volunteers while walking at preferred gait velocity on a treadmill. Stability metrics reflecting resistance to small and large perturbations were derived from walking kinematics and compared between conditions and to free walking. Results Compared to free walking, the application of body weight support per-se resulted in gait alterations typically associated with body weight support, namely increased step length and swing phase. Frontal plane dynamic stability, measured by kinematic variability and nonlinear dynamics of the center of mass, was increased under body weight support, indicating reduced balance requirements in both damped and undamped support conditions. Adding damping to the body weight support resulted in a greater increase of frontal plane stability. Conclusion Adding mediolateral damping to 3-DoF body weight support systems is an effective method of increasing frontal plane stability during walking in able-bodied participants. Building on these results, adjustable mediolateral damping could enable therapists to select combinations of unloading and stability specifically for each patient and to adapt this in a task specific manner. This could extend the impact of transparent 3-DoF body weight support systems, enabling training of gait and active balance from an early time point onwards in the rehabilitation process for a wide range of mobility activities of daily life

Effect of environmental assessment on primary energy of modular prefabricated panel for building renovation in Portugal

While facing increasingly strict regulations regarding energy efficiency, the construction sector should also adopt sustainable solutions in terms of new constructions and renovations of buildings. In particular, energy renovation of existing buildings has specific technical and economic constraints that are generally addressed through implementation of new materials and building integrated systems, whose environmental impact should be considered when assessing the most adequate solution. Within the context of the More-Connect Project, which aims to develop modular prefabricated solutions for energy renovation of buildings, several renovation scenarios for a pilot building in Portugal were assessed using a methodology to compare the cost-effectiveness of renovation measures. The article explores the use of lifecycle assessment to analyse the effect of considering embodied primary energy in cost-effectiveness calculations.The MORE-CONNECT project is funded by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 program

ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts

Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model's ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/ScanDL

Virtopsy: Zukunftsträchtige Forschung in der Rechtsmedizin

Computed tomography techniques have been developed over the last 10 years and have found various applications in the forensic field. The most recent development is multislice computed tomography combined with photogrammetry-based surface optical scanning and image rendering techniques. This combination of techniques can be used to produce 3-dimensional images of injury patterns for comparison with suspect weapons and also to screen for pathological conditions in the living or deceased. This technology provides a minimally invasive procedure for capturing forensically relevant images which can be produced in the courtroom. The rapid developments in imaging techniques could provide an alternative to conventional autopsy procedures in the futur

ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts

Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model's ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/ScanDL.Comment: EMNLP 202