Connectome-Based Neurosurgery in Primary Intra-Axial Neoplasms: Beyond the Traditional Modular Conception of Brain Architecture for the Preservation of Major Neurological Domains and Higher-Order Cognitive Functions.

Despite the therapeutical advancements in the surgical treatment of primary intra-axial neoplasms, which determined both a significative improvement in OS and QoL and a reduction in the incidence of surgery-induced major neurological deficits, nowadays patients continue to manifest subtle post-operative neurocognitive impairments, preventing them from a full reintegration back into social life and into the workforce. The birth of connectomics paved the way for a profound reappraisal of the traditional conception of brain architecture, in favour of a model based on large-scale structural and functional interactions of a complex mosaic of cortical areas organized in a fluid network interconnected by subcortical bundles. Thanks to these advancements, neurosurgery is facing a new era of connectome-based resections, in which the core principle is still represented by the achievement of an ideal onco-functional balance, but with a closer eye on whole-brain circuitry, which constitutes the foundations of both major neurological functions, to be intended as motricity; language and visuospatial function; and higher-order cognitive functions such as cognition, conation, emotion and adaptive behaviour. Indeed, the achievement of an ideal balance between the radicality of tumoral resection and the preservation, as far as possible, of the integrity of local and global brain networks stands as a mandatory goal to be fulfilled to allow patients to resume their previous life and to make neurosurgery tailored and gentler to their individual needs

Post Traumatic Glioma: An association questioned

Post traumatic glioma has been a matter of debate. Few reports favor its occurrence in previous head injury scar, subsequently developing into glioma. Here we report a case of young patient presented with headache, seizures and gradual loss of vision. On investigation found to have brain tumor. Patient had head injury occurred 3 yrs back. It fulfills all the criteria required to establish traumatic origin, further supporting the association

First occurrence of foot rot of chickpea caused by Operculella padwickii in Bangladesh and Nepal

hile conducting diagnostic surveys in March 1999 to determine the chickpea disease prevalence in the rice-wheat cropping systems of Bangladesh and Nepal, a new disease of chickpea showing symptoms of foot rot (O. padwickii [Phacidiopycnis padwickii]) was observed. Dark brown to black sunken lesions on cotyledons and collar region of the plant were observed. Later, the lesions enlarged, became sunken, dark brown to black, extending to the epicotyl and basal tap root of the plant. In advanced stages of disease development, a complete girdling of the plant in the collar region took place, resulting in the wilting and death of the plants. Leaves were pale green and finally became straw-coloured. In culture, the fungus produced white mycelium and pycnidia. Long and short conidiophores were observed. The pathogen was confirmed as O. padwickii. Pathogenicity tests were conducted and the pathogen was reisolated from the infected plants. This is thought to be the first report of O. padwickii on chickpea in Bangladesh and Nepal

Choosing the most suitable classifier For supporting assistive technology adoption In people with Parkinson’s disease: a fuzzy Multi-criteria approach

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder which requires a long-term, interdisciplinary disease management. While there remains no cure for Parkinson’s disease, treatments are available to help reduce the main symptoms and maintain quality of life for as long as possible. Owing to the global burden faced by chronic conditions such as PD, Assistive technologies (AT’s) are becoming an increasingly common prescribed form of treatment. Low adoption is hampering the potential of digital technologies within health and social care. It is then necessary to employ classification algorithms have been developed for differentiating adopters and non-adopters of these technologies; thereby, potential negative effects on people with PD and cost overruns can be further minimized. This paper bridges this gap by extending the Multi-criteria decision-making approach adopted in technology adoption modeling for people with dementia. First, the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is applied to estimate the initial relative weights of criteria and sub-criteria. Then, the Decisionmaking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is used for evaluating the interrelations and feedback among criteria and sub-criteria. The Technique for Order of Preferences by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is finally implemented to rank three classifiers (Lazy IBk – knearest neighbors, Naïve bayes, and J48 decision tree) according to their ability to model technology adoption. A real case study considering is presented to validate the proposed approach

Improving Management of Natural Resources for Sustainable Rainfed Agriculture in Ringnodia Micro-watershed

The current productivity of rainfed lands in Madhya Pradesh, India is about 1.0 t ha-1 although there is scope to obtain >3 t ha-1. To assess and evaluate the potential of improved soil, water, and nutrient management options through integrated watershed management at Ringnodia in Indore in western Madhya Pradesh, a micro-watershed of 390 ha was delineated. Soybean is a major crop during the rainy season and yield of <1 t ha-1 is obtained in the micro-watershed. Landholdings in the watershed are generally small. The input use is low with little soil and water conservation measures in vogue among farmers. About 30–40% of the total rainfall is lost through runoff, carrying productive soils and nutrients while crops experienced drought stress in the rainy as well as postrainy seasons. With a critical advisory support from scientists, the watershed farmers could augment water storage capacity in the village through construction of percolation/storage tanks and renovation of existing ponds. For safe disposal of water from the watershed, waterways were developed and wire mesh bound boulder structures were constructed to reduce soil loss and runoff. These water storage structures could store up to 30 ha-m water representing about 70% of total runoff from 100 ha cultivated area and thus reduce runoff and soil losses. This increased groundwater recharge, which manifested in increased water table in most wells including the abandoned ones. The scenario analysis suggested various cropping options for enhanced yield with limited irrigation (soybean-wheat) or under rainfed conditions (pigeonpea/sorghum intercrop). Sorghum/pigeonpea intercrop was, however, less popular amongst the farmers. The introduction of extra-short-duration pigeonpea opened avenues for diversification and its adoption is likely to increase. Under rainfed conditions, double cropping could be practiced in two out of three postrainy seasons. Soybean yields increased marginally by gypsum application and also by planting on mini-ridges. The medium-duration chickpea cultivar JG 218 gave higher yield than short-duration cultivars ICCV 2 and ICCC 37 indicating sufficient moisture for the traditional types. Pests were the major yield reducers in soybean and adoption of integrated pest management options nearly tripled soybean yield. In another micro-watershed at the College of Agriculture, Indore interaction between land and water conservation measures and efficient cropping systems was examined. Soybean/pigeonpea strip crop and soybean-wheat systems were more productive than soybean-chickpea and soybean-linseed systems. Chickpea and wheat could easily be established with minimum tillage when planted in moist seed zone at 15 cm depth after the harvest of soybea

Identifying the most appropriate classifier for underpinning assistive technology adoption for people with dementia: an integration of Fuzzy AHP and VIKOR methods

Recently, the number of People with Dementia (PwD) has been rising exponentially across the world. The main symptoms that PwD experience include AQ1 impairments of reasoning, memory, and thought. Owing to the burden faced by this chronic condition, Assistive Technology-based solutions (ATS) have been prescribed as a form of treatment. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that low adoption rates of ATS have hampered their benefits within a health and social care context. It is then necessary to effectively discriminate between adopters and non-adopters of such solutions to avoid cost implications, improve the life quality of adopters, and find intervention alternatives for non-adopters. Several classifiers have been proposed as advancement towards the personalisation of self-management interventions for dementia in a scalable way. As multiple algorithms have been developed, an important step in technology adoption is to select the most appropriate classification alternative based on different criteria. This paper presents the integration of Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) and VIKOR to address this challenge. First, FAHP was used to calculate the criteria and sub-criteria weights under uncertainty and then VIKOR was implemented to rank the classifiers. A case study considering a mobile-based self-management and reminding solution for PwD is described to validate the proposed approach. The results revealed that Easiness of interpretation (GW = 0.192) and Handling of missing data (GW = 0.145) were the two most important criteria. Furthermore, SVM (Qj = 1.0) and AB (Qj = 0.891) were concluded to be the most suitable classifiers for supporting ATS adoption in PwD

Capture, Reconstruction, and Representation of the Visual Real World for Virtual Reality

We provide an overview of the concerns, current practice, and limitations for capturing, reconstructing, and representing the real world visually within virtual reality. Given that our goals are to capture, transmit, and depict complex real-world phenomena to humans, these challenges cover the opto-electro-mechanical, computational, informational, and perceptual fields. Practically producing a system for real-world VR capture requires navigating a complex design space and pushing the state of the art in each of these areas. As such, we outline several promising directions for future work to improve the quality and flexibility of real-world VR capture systems

Exploration of two methods for quantitative Mitomycin C measurement in tumor tissue in vitro and in vivo

Two methods of quantifying Mitomycin C in tumor tissue are explored. A method of ultraviolet-visible absorption microscopy is developed and applied to measure the concentration of Mitomycin C in preserved mouse tumor tissue, as well as in gelatin samples. Concentrations as low as 60 μM can be resolved using this technique in samples that do not strongly scatter light. A novel method for monitoring the Mitomycin C concentrations inside a tumor is developed, based on microdialysis and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. A pump is used to perfuse a microdialysis probe with Ringer’s solution, which is fed to a flow cell to determine intratumor concentrations in real time to within a few μM. The success and limitations of these techniques are identified, and suggestions are made as to further development. To the authors’ knowledge these are the first attempts made to quantify Mitomycin C concentrations in tumor tissue

Application of prolonged microdialysis sampling in carboplatin-treated cancer patients

Purpose: To better understand the mechanisms underlying (in)sensitivity of tumors to anticancer drugs, assessing intra-tumor drug pharmacokinetics (PKs) could be important. We explored the feasibility of microdialysis in tumor tissue for multiple days in a clinical setting, using carboplatin as model drug. Methods: Plasma and microdialysate samples from tumor and adipose normal tissues were collected up to 47 h after dosing in eight carboplatin-treated patients with an accessible (sub)cutaneous tumor. Results: Pharmacokinetics were evaluable in tumor tissue in 6/8 patients and in adipose normal tissue in 3/8 patients. Concentration-time curves of unbound platinum in both the tissues followed the pattern of the curves in plasma, with exposure ratios of tissue versus plasma ranging from 0.64 to 1.46. Conclusions: Microdialysis can be successfully employed in ambulant patients for multiple days, which enables one to study tissue PK of anticancer drugs in normal and malignant tissues in more detail

ProteoLens: a visual analytic tool for multi-scale database-driven biological network data mining

Background New systems biology studies require researchers to understand how interplay among myriads of biomolecular entities is orchestrated in order to achieve high-level cellular and physiological functions. Many software tools have been developed in the past decade to help researchers visually navigate large networks of biomolecular interactions with built-in template-based query capabilities. To further advance researchers' ability to interrogate global physiological states of cells through multi-scale visual network explorations, new visualization software tools still need to be developed to empower the analysis. A robust visual data analysis platform driven by database management systems to perform bi-directional data processing-to-visualizations with declarative querying capabilities is needed. Results We developed ProteoLens as a JAVA-based visual analytic software tool for creating, annotating and exploring multi-scale biological networks. It supports direct database connectivity to either Oracle or PostgreSQL database tables/views, on which SQL statements using both Data Definition Languages (DDL) and Data Manipulation languages (DML) may be specified. The robust query languages embedded directly within the visualization software help users to bring their network data into a visualization context for annotation and exploration. ProteoLens supports graph/network represented data in standard Graph Modeling Language (GML) formats, and this enables interoperation with a wide range of other visual layout tools. The architectural design of ProteoLens enables the de-coupling of complex network data visualization tasks into two distinct phases: 1) creating network data association rules, which are mapping rules between network node IDs or edge IDs and data attributes such as functional annotations, expression levels, scores, synonyms, descriptions etc; 2) applying network data association rules to build the network and perform the visual annotation of graph nodes and edges according to associated data values. We demonstrated the advantages of these new capabilities through three biological network visualization case studies: human disease association network, drug-target interaction network and protein-peptide mapping network. Conclusion The architectural design of ProteoLens makes it suitable for bioinformatics expert data analysts who are experienced with relational database management to perform large-scale integrated network visual explorations. ProteoLens is a promising visual analytic platform that will facilitate knowledge discoveries in future network and systems biology studies