Applications of the PowerGlove

The hand is important in many daily life activities. During aging, quality of fine motor control of hand and fingers is decreasing. Also motor symptoms of the hand are important to define for instance the neurological state of a Parkinson’s disease patient. Although objective and reliable measurement of hand and finger dynamics is of interest, current measurement systems are limited. This paper describes the application of the PowerGlove, a new measurement system based on miniature inertial and magnetic sensors, to study the finger interdependency in healthy elderly and objectively quantify hand motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. Results of pilot experiments in young healthy subjects are shown to evaluate the feasibility of the applications

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Electroencephalography and survival in patients with Alzheimer's disease

In their interesting article,1 Lopez et al. present data on the association between quantitative spectral EEG and subsequent cognitive and functional decline and survival in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). The authors report that patients with abnormal EEGs reach the defined endpoints for cognitive function and activities of daily living sooner than patients with normal EEGs. Abnormal EEG results were not related to an increased risk of mortality in these patients. Based on these results, the authors conclude that abnormal EEG results predict disease progression but not physical survival. We have two main methodologic problems with the interpretation of

Selectively stimulating neural populations in the subthalamic region using a novel deep brain stimulation lead design

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the Subthalamic Nucleus (STN) is widely used in advanced stages of Parkinson's disease(PD) and has proven to be an effective treatment of the various motor symptoms. The therapy involves implanting a lead consisting of multiple electrodes in the STN through which continues high frequency electric pulses are delivered. The clinical outcome highly depends on the location of the electrodes within the STN. However, despite careful plannin