Siblings Diagnosed With Primary Neuroendocrine Tumor of the Left Hepatic Duct

Primary left hepatic duct neuroendocrine tumors are extremely rare. We describe 2 cases of siblings, a 51-year-old brother and a 48-year-old sister, who were both diagnosed with primary left hepatic duct neuroendocrine tumor. Both patients underwent successful left hepatectomy and are both alive with no recurrence. For this rare malignancy, while definitive diagnosis is made only by histopathology, a margin-free surgical resection remains the only curative treatment modality to date

Signal Propagation in Feedforward Neuronal Networks with Unreliable Synapses

In this paper, we systematically investigate both the synfire propagation and firing rate propagation in feedforward neuronal network coupled in an all-to-all fashion. In contrast to most earlier work, where only reliable synaptic connections are considered, we mainly examine the effects of unreliable synapses on both types of neural activity propagation in this work. We first study networks composed of purely excitatory neurons. Our results show that both the successful transmission probability and excitatory synaptic strength largely influence the propagation of these two types of neural activities, and better tuning of these synaptic parameters makes the considered network support stable signal propagation. It is also found that noise has significant but different impacts on these two types of propagation. The additive Gaussian white noise has the tendency to reduce the precision of the synfire activity, whereas noise with appropriate intensity can enhance the performance of firing rate propagation. Further simulations indicate that the propagation dynamics of the considered neuronal network is not simply determined by the average amount of received neurotransmitter for each neuron in a time instant, but also largely influenced by the stochastic effect of neurotransmitter release. Second, we compare our results with those obtained in corresponding feedforward neuronal networks connected with reliable synapses but in a random coupling fashion. We confirm that some differences can be observed in these two different feedforward neuronal network models. Finally, we study the signal propagation in feedforward neuronal networks consisting of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons, and demonstrate that inhibition also plays an important role in signal propagation in the considered networks.Comment: 33pages, 16 figures; Journal of Computational Neuroscience (published

From Spiking Neuron Models to Linear-Nonlinear Models

Neurons transform time-varying inputs into action potentials emitted stochastically at a time dependent rate. The mapping from current input to output firing rate is often represented with the help of phenomenological models such as the linear-nonlinear (LN) cascade, in which the output firing rate is estimated by applying to the input successively a linear temporal filter and a static non-linear transformation. These simplified models leave out the biophysical details of action potential generation. It is not a priori clear to which extent the input-output mapping of biophysically more realistic, spiking neuron models can be reduced to a simple linear-nonlinear cascade. Here we investigate this question for the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF), exponential integrate-and-fire (EIF) and conductance-based Wang-Buzsáki models in presence of background synaptic activity. We exploit available analytic results for these models to determine the corresponding linear filter and static non-linearity in a parameter-free form. We show that the obtained functions are identical to the linear filter and static non-linearity determined using standard reverse correlation analysis. We then quantitatively compare the output of the corresponding linear-nonlinear cascade with numerical simulations of spiking neurons, systematically varying the parameters of input signal and background noise. We find that the LN cascade provides accurate estimates of the firing rates of spiking neurons in most of parameter space. For the EIF and Wang-Buzsáki models, we show that the LN cascade can be reduced to a firing rate model, the timescale of which we determine analytically. Finally we introduce an adaptive timescale rate model in which the timescale of the linear filter depends on the instantaneous firing rate. This model leads to highly accurate estimates of instantaneous firing rates

Non-additive coupling enables propagation of synchronous spiking activity in purely random networks

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