Differential diagnosis between Parkinson's disease and essential tremor using the smartphone's accelerometer

Background: The differential diagnosis between patients with essential tremor (ET) and those with Parkinson's disease (PD) whose main manifestation is tremor may be difficult unless using complex neuroimaging techniques such as 123I-FP-CIT SPECT. We considered that using smartphone's accelerometer to stablish a diagnostic test based on time-frequency differences between PD an ET could support the clinical diagnosis. Methods: The study was carried out in 17 patients with PD, 16 patients with ET, 12 healthy volunteers and 7 patients with tremor of undecided diagnosis (TUD), who were re-evaluated one year after the first visit to reach the definite diagnosis. The smartphone was placed over the hand dorsum to record epochs of 30 s at rest and 30 s during arm stretching. We generated frequency power spectra and calculated receiver operating characteristics curves (ROC) curves of total spectral power, to establish a threshold to separate subjects with and without tremor. In patients with PD and ET, we found that the ROC curve of relative energy was the feature discriminating better between the two groups. This threshold was then used to classify the TUD patients. Results: We could correctly classify 49 out of 52 subjects in the category with/without tremor (97.96% sensitivity and 83.3% specificity) and 27 out of 32 patients in the category PD/ET (84.38% discrimination accuracy). Among TUD patients, 2 of 2 PD and 2 of 4 ET were correctly classified, and one patient having PD plus ET was classified as PD. Conclusions: Based on the analysis of smartphone accelerometer recordings, we found several kinematic features in the analysis of tremor that distinguished first between healthy subjects and patients and, ultimately, between PD and ET patients. The proposed method can give immediate results for the clinician to gain valuable information for the diagnosis of tremor. This can be useful in environments where more sophisticated diagnostic techniques are unavailable

Plant diversity patterns in neotropical dry forests and their conservation implications

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Association for the Advancement of Science via the DOI in this record.Seasonally dry tropical forests are distributed across Latin America and the Caribbean and are highly threatened, with less than 10% of their original extent remaining in many countries. Using 835 inventories covering 4660 species of woody plants, we show marked floristic turnover among inventories and regions, which may be higher than in other neotropical biomes, such as savanna. Such high floristic turnover indicates that numerous conservation areas across many countries will be needed to protect the full diversity of tropical dry forests. Our results provide a scientific framework within which national decision-makers can contextualize the floristic significance of their dry forest at a regional and continental scale.This paper is the result of the Latin American and Caribbean Seasonally Dry Tropical Forest Floristic Network (DRYFLOR), which has been supported at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by a Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant (IN-074). This work was also supported by the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/I028122/1; Colciencias Ph.D. scholarship 529; Synthesys Programme GBTAF-2824; the NSF (NSF 1118340 and 1118369); the Instituto Humboldt (IAvH)–Red colombiana de investigación y monitoreo en bosque seco; the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI; Tropi-Dry, CRN2-021, funded by NSF GEO 0452325); Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR); and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). The data reported in this paper are available at www.dryflor.info. R.T.P. conceived the study. M.P., A.O.-F., K.B.-R., R.T.P., and J.W. designed the DRYFLOR database system. K.B.-R. and K.G.D. carried out most analyses. K.B.-R. R.T.P., and K.G.D. wrote the manuscript with substantial input from A.D.-S., R.L.-P., A.O.-F., D.P., C.Q., and R.R. All the authors contributed data, discussed further analyses, and commented on various versions of the manuscript. K.B.-R. thanks G. Galeano who introduced her to dry forest research. We thank J. L. Marcelo, I. Huamantupa, C. Reynel, S. Palacios, and A. Daza for help with fieldwork and data entry in Peru

Loop corrections to celestial amplitudes

International audienceWe study the effect of loop corrections to conformal correlators on the celestial sphere at null infinity. We first analyze finite one-loop celestial amplitudes in pure Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity. We then turn to our main focus: infrared divergent loop amplitudes in planar N=4 super–Yang-Mills theory. We compute the celestial one-loop amplitude in dimensional regularization and show that it can be recast as an operator acting on the celestial tree-level amplitude. This extends to any loop order, and the resummation of all planar loops enables us to write down an expression for the all-loop celestial amplitude. Finally, we show that the exponentiated all-loop expression given by the Bern-Dixon-Smirnov (BDS) formula gets promoted on the celestial sphere to an operator acting on the tree-level conformal correlation function, thus yielding, the celestial BDS formula

Electric Power Generation From Combustion In Porous Media

Combustion of lean air/fuel mixtures in an inert porous medium provides an efficient way to convert chemical energy of hydrocarbons into thermal energy. The porous medium effectively redistributes the heat allowing the reacting mixture to be preheated before the combustion front. For a lean propane/air mixture (equivalence ratio Φ∼ 0.6), the combustion front is steady and the combustion temperature is subadiabatic. At lower equivalence ratios the heat wave in the porous media and the combustion front can move synchronously downstream developing superadiabatic temperatures. This superadiabatic effect allows to operate at the range of ultralean mixtures (Φ∼ 0.1). Thermal energy generated by the combustion process can be converted into electricity by thermoelectric modules (TEMs). In this work, a cylindrical porous burner is designed to absorb the heat of combustion of lean propane/air mixtures. The burner is inserted in a rectangular steel block. The surface of the block is covered by a set of operating TEMs. Confining the combustion front is stabilized by using porous media with different pore sizes. Temperatures are recorded in different regions of the burner by using surface and immersion thermocouples. Adjusting the equivalence ratio, the flow rate of the gaseous mixture, the properties of the porous media, and the TEM characteristics, a quasi-static burn rate is achieved with the surrounding surface at the nominal temperatures required by the TEMs. The maximum electrical power of 9.42 W and the overall conversion efficiency of 2.93% are reached with a voltage of 5.93 V and a current of 1.59 A using a setup of four TEMs electrically connected in series