Verification of Successful Kainic Acid Injections in a Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Mouse Model

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most prominent form of partial epilepsy in adults. Reproductive endocrine comorbidities appear in patients with TLE at significantly higher rates than in the general population. These comorbidities include polycystic ovary syndrome, hypothalamic amenorrhea, hyperandrogenism, irregular menstrual cycle, lower testosterone levels, hypogonadism, erectile dysfunction, and decreased semen motility. It is believed that gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons in the hypothalamus play an important role in the development of these comorbidities. The kainic acid (KA) mouse model is used to study epilepsy-associated changes in GnRH neurophysiology. Our lab recently observed that the activity of GnRH neurons is altered in KA-injected mice (Li et al., eNeuro 2018). To ensure validity of the data, we must verify the success of all KA injections as indicated by the presence of sclerosis and/or gliosis in the hippocampus. Nissl (Cresyl violet) staining is used to visually verify the presence of sclerosis. This research seeks to determine if all KA injections effectively trigger seizures and later development of hippocampal damage and to identify effectiveness of the different methods of verification

Thermal Conductivity of Sand-Silt Mixtures

Heat flow controls the design and operation of a wide range of engineered geosystems. This study uses transient thermal probe measurements to determine the evolution of the thermal conductivity of air-dry and water-saturated sand–silt mixtures as a function of effective stress. Results confirm that the thermal conductivity of soils varies with state of stress, dry mass density, mineralogy, and pore fluid properties and highlight the effect of thermal contact resistance on the thermal conductivity of granular materials. Thermal conductivity follows a linear relationship with the logarithm of effective stress as a consequence of fabric compaction, increased coordination number, contact deformation, and reduced thermal contact resistance. The bulk thermal conductivity of water-saturated soils is more than seven times that of air-dry soils for the same fines content (FC) and effective stress. Pore-filling fines contribute conduction paths and interparticle coordination; the peak in thermal conductivity takes place at FC ≈ 0.4; this mixture range corresponds to the transition from fines-controlled to coarse-controlled mechanical response (i.e., both fines and coarse grains are load bearing), in agreement with the revised soil classification system

Using an alignment approach to enhance product development performance

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-212).In an attempt to improve their Product Development Processes (PDPs), many companies make considerable investments to have available cutting-edge technology such as virtual tools. While some companies have increased their productivity and time to market with them, some others have not. There seem to be fundamental factors above and beyond the use of these tools that can obstruct the PDP and one of them appears to be the misalignment between the product architecture and the organizational interactions of the actors working on it. While there has been significant work addressing the technical and social concerns of a PDP independently, the nature of the misalignment requires an integrated analysis of the product architecture and the organization. The present work studies them in an integrated approach by making use of network analyses. The research for this thesis was conducted in a Global Product Development (GPD) project of an automotive manufacturer. By first using as a reference the Multidisciplinary System Design Optimization (MSDO) to decompose the architecture of a product and then, using a specific type of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) [43] called N2 Diagram to identify the interfaces of the architecture, a network called theoretical sociogram was created. In addition, the relative sensitivity of some objectives describing the functioning of the product's systems was calculated to classify the strength of the ties in two levels: strong for those above an absolute relative sensitivity of 0.5, and weak for those with an absolute relative sensitivity lower or equal than 0.5.(cont.) Furthermore, through surveys and interviews, the organizational interactions for two different phases of the project were mapped to construct a new set of networks called actual sociograms. By comparing the sociograms and utilizing metrics that deal with the centrality of the actors in the network, the misalignments were identified. The misalignments provided guidance to identify the enablers and obstacles influencing the PDP. It was observed that, in some cases, when the sensitivity among variables was weak, engineering teams tend to use intermediaries to share information. In some other circumstances the direct interaction doesn't occur, due to reasons including cultural aspects, complexity of the information, the way the information is structured and organizational fuzziness, among others. Based on these findings, some recommendations based on literature review, lessons learned from other industries and conversations with Product Development (PD) actors, are provided.by J. Adrian Diaz Garcia.S.M

A Comprehensive Study on Pain Assessment from Multimodal Sensor Data

Pain assessment is a critical aspect of healthcare, influencing timely interventions and patient well-being. Traditional pain evaluation methods often rely on subjective patient reports, leading to inaccuracies and disparities in treatment, especially for patients who present difficulties to communicate due to cognitive impairments. Our contributions are three-fold. Firstly, we analyze the correlations of the data extracted from biomedical sensors. Then, we use state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to analyze videos focusing on the facial expressions of the patients, both per-frame and using the temporal context. We compare them and provide a baseline for pain assessment methods using two popular benchmarks: UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain Expression Archive Database and BioVid Heat Pain Database. We achieved an accuracy of over 96% and over 94% for the F1 Score, recall and precision metrics in pain estimation using single frames with the UNBC-McMaster dataset, employing state-of-the-art computer vision techniques such as Transformer-based architectures for vision tasks. In addition, from the conclusions drawn from the study, future lines of work in this area are discussed

Node-by-node disassembly of a mutualistic interaction web driven by species introductions

Interaction webs summarize the diverse interactions among species in communities. The addition or loss of particular species and the alteration of key interactions can lead to the disassembly of the entire interaction web, although the nontrophic effects of species loss on interaction webs are poorly understood. We took advantage of ongoing invasions by a suite of exotic species to examine their impact in terms of the disassembly of an interaction web in Patagonia, Argentina. We found that the reduction of one species (a host of a keystone mistletoe species) resulted in diverse indirect effects that led to the disassembly of an interaction web through the loss of the mistletoe, two key seed-dispersers (a marsupial and a bird), and a pollinator (hummingbird). Our results demonstrate that the gains and losses of species are both consequences and drivers of global change that can lead to underappreciated cascading coextinctions through the disruption of mutualisms.Fil: Rodriguez Cabal, Mariano Alberto. University Of Tennessee; Estados Unidos. University Of British Columbia; CanadáFil: Barrios Garcia Moar, Maria Noelia. University Of Tennessee; Estados Unidos. University Of British Columbia; CanadáFil: Amico, Guillermo Cesar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Aizen, Marcelo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Sanders, Nathan J.. University Of Tennessee; Estados Unidos. Natural History Museun Of Copenhague; Dinamarc

Higher Free Triiodothyronine Is Associated With Higher HDL Particle Concentration and Smaller HDL Particle Size

Context Thyroid function status has effects on the development of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease by affecting lipid metabolism, but associations of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) particle concentrations and subfractions with thyroid hormone levels within the reference range remain elusive. Objective The aim of the present study was to determine the associations of free triiodothyronine (FT3), free thyroxine (FT4) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels with HDL particle characteristics in euthyroid individuals. Methods This cross-sectional study on the associations of thyroid hormones with HDL particle concentrations, HDL subfractions, and HDL particle size included 5844 euthyroid individuals (FT3, FT4, and TSH levels within the reference range and no medication use affecting thyroid function), participating in the Prevention of REnal and Vascular ENd-stage Disease (PREVEND) study. HDL particles and subfractions were measured by nuclear magnetic resonance using an optimized version of the NMR LipoProfile Test (LP4). Results In multivariable linear regression analyses, FT3 was positively associated with total HDL particle concentration (std.beta = 0.14; P < 0.001) and with small (std.beta = 0.13; P < 0.001) and medium-sized HDL particles (std.beta = 0.05; P = 0.001). Conversely, FT3 was inversely associated with large HDL particles (std.beta = -0.07; P < 0.001) and with HDL particle size (std.beta = -0.08; P < 0.001). Such associations with FT4 or reciprocally with TSH were less pronounced or nonsignificant. Conclusion In euthyroid individuals, higher FT3 is cross-sectionally associated with higher total HDL particle concentration and with lower HDL particle size. These associations may be relevant to better understand the role of HDL in thyroid function-associated atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease

An intuitionistic approach to scoring DNA sequences against transcription factor binding site motifs

Background: Transcription factors (TFs) control transcription by binding to specific regions of DNA called transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs). The identification of TFBSs is a crucial problem in computational biology and includes the subtask of predicting the location of known TFBS motifs in a given DNA sequence. It has previously been shown that, when scoring matches to known TFBS motifs, interdependencies between positions within a motif should be taken into account. However, this remains a challenging task owing to the fact that sequences similar to those of known TFBSs can occur by chance with a relatively high frequency. Here we present a new method for matching sequences to TFBS motifs based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) theory, an approach that has been shown to be particularly appropriate for tackling problems that embody a high degree of uncertainty. Results: We propose SCintuit, a new scoring method for measuring sequence-motif affinity based on IFS theory. Unlike existing methods that consider dependencies between positions, SCintuit is designed to prevent overestimation of less conserved positions of TFBSs. For a given pair of bases, SCintuit is computed not only as a function of their combined probability of occurrence, but also taking into account the individual importance of each single base at its corresponding position. We used SCintuit to identify known TFBSs in DNA sequences. Our method provides excellent results when dealing with both synthetic and real data, outperforming the sensitivity and the specificity of two existing methods in all the experiments we performed. Conclusions: The results show that SCintuit improves the prediction quality for TFs of the existing approaches without compromising sensitivity. In addition, we show how SCintuit can be successfully applied to real research problems. In this study the reliability of the IFS theory for motif discovery tasks is proven

Pressure-Driven Metallization in Hafnium Diselenide

The quest for new transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) with outstanding electronic properties operating at ambient conditions draws us to investigate the 1T-HfSe2 polytype under hydrostatic pressure. Diamond anvil cell (DAC) devices coupled to in- situ synchrotron X-ray, Raman and optical (VIS-NIR) absorption experiments along with density functional theory (DFT) based calculations prove that: (i) bulk 1T-HfSe2 exhibits strong structural and vibrational anisotropies, being the interlayer direction especially sensitive to pressure changes, (ii) the indirect gap of 1T-HfSe2 trend to vanish by a -0.1 eV/GPa pressure rate, slightly faster than MoS2 or WS2, (iii) the onset of the metallic behavior appears at Pmet ~10 GPa, which is to date the lowest pressure among common TMDs, and finally (iv) the electronic transition is explained by the bulk modulus B0-Pmet correlation, along with the pressure coefficient of the band gap, in terms of the electronic overlap between chalcogenide p-type and metal d-type orbitals