795 research outputs found
Predictions for high energy neutrino cross-sections from the ZEUS global PDF fits
We have updated predictions for high energy neutrino and antineutrino charged
current cross-sections within the conventional DGLAP formalism of NLO QCD using
a modern PDF fit to HERA data, which also accounts in a systematic way for PDF
uncertainties deriving from both model uncertainties and from the experimental
uncertainties of the input data sets. Furthermore the PDFs are determined using
an improved treatment of heavy quark thresholds. A measurement of the neutrino
cross-section much below these predictions would signal the need for extension
of the conventional formalism as in BFKL resummation, or even gluon
recombination effects as in the colour glass condensate model.Comment: 10 pages (RevTeX4), 6 figures; expanded discussion of additional
theoretical uncertainties at low x; accepted for publication in JHE
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Clinical effectiveness of a manual based coping strategy programme (START, STrAtegies for RelaTives) in promoting the mental health of carers of family members with dementia: pragmatic randomised controlled trial
Objective
To assess whether a manual based coping strategy compared with treatment as usual reduces depression and anxiety symptoms in carers of family members with dementia.
Design
Randomised, parallel group, superiority trial.
Setting
Three mental health community services and one neurological outpatient dementia service in London and Essex, UK.
Participants
260 carers of family members with dementia.
Intervention
A manual based coping intervention comprising eight sessions and delivered by supervised psychology graduates to carers of family members with dementia. The programme consisted of psychoeducation about dementia, carersâ stress, and where to get emotional support; understanding behaviours of the family member being cared for, and behavioural management techniques; changing unhelpful thoughts; promoting acceptance; assertive communication; relaxation; planning for the future; increasing pleasant activities; and maintaining skills learnt. Carers practised these techniques at home, using the manual and relaxation CDs.
Main outcome measures
Affective symptoms (hospital anxiety and depression total score) at four and eight months. Secondary outcomes were depression and anxiety caseness on the hospital anxiety and depression scale; quality of life of both the carer (health status questionnaire, mental health) and the recipient of care (quality of life-Alzheimerâs disease); and potentially abusive behaviour by the carer towards the recipient of care (modified conflict tactics scale).
Results
260 carers were recruited; 173 were randomised to the intervention and 87 to treatment as usual. Mean total scores on the hospital anxiety and depression scale were lower in the intervention group than in the treatment as usual group over the eight month evaluation period: adjusted difference in means â1.80 points (95% confidence interval â3.29 to â0.31; P=0.02) and absolute difference in means â2.0 points. Carers in the intervention group were less likely to have case level depression (odds ratio 0.24, 95% confidence interval 0.07 to 0.76) and there was a non-significant trend towards reduced case level anxiety (0.30, 0.08 to 1.05). Carersâ quality of life was higher in the intervention group (difference in means 4.09, 95% confidence interval 0.34 to 7.83) but not for the recipient of care (difference in means 0.59, â0.72 to 1.89). Carers in the intervention group reported less abusive behaviour towards the recipient of care compared with those in the treatment as usual group (odds ratio 0.47, 95% confidence interval 0.18 to 1.23), although this was not significant.
Conclusions
A manual based coping strategy was effective in reducing affective symptoms and case level depression in carers of family members with dementia. The carersâ quality of life also improved.
Trial registration
Current Controlled Trials ISCTRN70017938
Affective Man-Machine Interface: Unveiling human emotions through biosignals
As is known for centuries, humans exhibit an electrical profile. This profile is altered through various psychological and physiological processes, which can be measured through biosignals; e.g., electromyography (EMG) and electrodermal activity (EDA). These biosignals can reveal our emotions and, as such, can serve as an advanced man-machine interface (MMI) for empathic consumer products. However, such a MMI requires the correct classification of biosignals to emotion classes. This chapter starts with an introduction on biosignals for emotion detection. Next, a state-of-the-art review is presented on automatic emotion classification. Moreover, guidelines are presented for affective MMI. Subsequently, a research is presented that explores the use of EDA and three facial EMG signals to determine neutral, positive, negative, and mixed emotions, using recordings of 21 people. A range of techniques is tested, which resulted in a generic framework for automated emotion classification with up to 61.31% correct classification of the four emotion classes, without the need of personal profiles. Among various other directives for future research, the results emphasize the need for parallel processing of multiple biosignals
Overexpression of human wild-type FUS causes progressive motor neuron degeneration in an age- and dose-dependent fashion
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) are relentlessly progressive neurodegenerative disorders with overlapping clinical, genetic and pathological features. Cytoplasmic inclusions of fused in sarcoma (FUS) are the hallmark of several forms of FTLD and ALS patients with mutations in the FUS gene. FUS is a multifunctional, predominantly nuclear, DNA and RNA binding protein. Here, we report that transgenic mice overexpressing wild-type human FUS develop an aggressive phenotype with an early onset tremor followed by progressive hind limb paralysis and death by 12Â weeks in homozygous animals. Large motor neurons were lost from the spinal cord accompanied by neurophysiological evidence of denervation and focal muscle atrophy. Surviving motor neurons in the spinal cord had greatly increased cytoplasmic expression of FUS, with globular and skein-like FUS-positive and ubiquitin-negative inclusions associated with astroglial and microglial reactivity. Cytoplasmic FUS inclusions were also detected in the brain of transgenic mice without apparent neuronal loss and little astroglial or microglial activation. Hemizygous FUS overexpressing mice showed no evidence of a motor phenotype or pathology. These findings recapitulate several pathological features seen in human ALS and FTLD patients, and suggest that overexpression of wild-type FUS in vulnerable neurons may be one of the root causes of disease. Furthermore, these mice will provide a new model to study disease mechanism, and test therapies
Symmetries of a class of nonlinear fourth order partial differential equations
In this paper we study symmetry reductions of a class of nonlinear fourth
order partial differential equations \be u_{tt} = \left(\kappa u + \gamma
u^2\right)_{xx} + u u_{xxxx} +\mu u_{xxtt}+\alpha u_x u_{xxx} + \beta u_{xx}^2,
\ee where , , , and are constants. This
equation may be thought of as a fourth order analogue of a generalization of
the Camassa-Holm equation, about which there has been considerable recent
interest. Further equation (1) is a ``Boussinesq-type'' equation which arises
as a model of vibrations of an anharmonic mass-spring chain and admits both
``compacton'' and conventional solitons. A catalogue of symmetry reductions for
equation (1) is obtained using the classical Lie method and the nonclassical
method due to Bluman and Cole. In particular we obtain several reductions using
the nonclassical method which are no} obtainable through the classical method
Observing many body effects on lepton pair production from low mass enhancement and flow at RHIC and LHC energies
The spectral function at finite temperature calculated using the
real-time formalism of thermal field theory is used to evaluate the low mass
dilepton spectra. The analytic structure of the propagator is studied
and contributions to the dilepton yield in the region below the bare
peak from the different cuts in the spectral function are discussed. The
space-time integrated yield shows significant enhancement in the region below
the bare peak in the invariant mass spectra. It is argued that the
variation of the inverse slope of the transverse mass () distribution can
be used as an efficient tool to predict the presence of two different phases of
the matter during the evolution of the system. Sensitivity of the effective
temperature obtained from the slopes of the spectra to the medium effects
are studied
How Gibbs distributions may naturally arise from synaptic adaptation mechanisms. A model-based argumentation
This paper addresses two questions in the context of neuronal networks
dynamics, using methods from dynamical systems theory and statistical physics:
(i) How to characterize the statistical properties of sequences of action
potentials ("spike trains") produced by neuronal networks ? and; (ii) what are
the effects of synaptic plasticity on these statistics ? We introduce a
framework in which spike trains are associated to a coding of membrane
potential trajectories, and actually, constitute a symbolic coding in important
explicit examples (the so-called gIF models). On this basis, we use the
thermodynamic formalism from ergodic theory to show how Gibbs distributions are
natural probability measures to describe the statistics of spike trains, given
the empirical averages of prescribed quantities. As a second result, we show
that Gibbs distributions naturally arise when considering "slow" synaptic
plasticity rules where the characteristic time for synapse adaptation is quite
longer than the characteristic time for neurons dynamics.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure
Uncovering precision phenotype-biomarker associations in traumatic brain injury using topological data analysis
Background: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex disorder that is traditionally stratified based on clinical signs and symptoms. Recent imaging and molecular biomarker innovations provide unprecedented opportunities for improved TBI precision medicine, incorporating patho-anatomical and molecular mechanisms. Complete integration of these diverse data for TBI diagnosis and patient stratification remains an unmet challenge.
Methods and findings: The Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) Pilot multicenter study enrolled 586 acute TBI patients and collected diverse common data elements (TBI-CDEs) across the study population, including imaging, genetics, and clinical outcomes. We then applied topology-based data-driven discovery to identify natural subgroups of patients, based on the TBI-CDEs collected. Our hypothesis was two-fold: 1) A machine learning tool known as topological data analysis (TDA) would reveal data-driven patterns in patient outcomes to identify candidate biomarkers of recovery, and 2) TDA-identified biomarkers would significantly predict patient outcome recovery after TBI using more traditional methods of univariate statistical tests. TDA algorithms organized and mapped the data of TBI patients in multidimensional space, identifying a subset of mild TBI patients with a specific multivariate phenotype associated with unfavorable outcome at 3 and 6 months after injury. Further analyses revealed that this patient subset had high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and enrichment in several distinct genetic polymorphisms associated with cellular responses to stress and DNA damage (PARP1), and in striatal dopamine processing (ANKK1, COMT, DRD2).
Conclusions: TDA identified a unique diagnostic subgroup of patients with unfavorable outcome after mild TBI that were significantly predicted by the presence of specific genetic polymorphisms. Machine learning methods such as TDA may provide a robust method for patient stratification and treatment planning targeting identified biomarkers in future clinical trials in TBI patients
Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC
provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of
lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated
luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with
a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the
transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the
anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the
nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of
the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp.
Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in
the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies
smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating
nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and
transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of
inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous
measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables,
submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are
available at
http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02
Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in âs = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector
A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fbâ1 of protonâproton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results
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