Correlation between Pineal Activation and Religious Meditation Observed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The human brain possesses plenty of functions but little is known about its scientific relationship with mind and spirit. Conferences^1,2^ focused on the connection between science and religion were held very recently in which neuroscientists, Buddhist scholars and Dalai Lama discussed attention, mental imagery, emotion, mind, brain functions and meditation, suggesting religious meditation offers an effective means to investigate the mystery of mind and spirit. In the past decade, scientists struggled to obtain brain mappings for various meditation styles using different brain imaging techniques and stimulating results have been observed^3-17^. In this letter we report that, together with other brain regions, pineal body exhibit significant activation during meditation process, supporting the long lasting speculation that pineal plays an important role in the intrinsic awareness which might concern spirit or soul. Pineal is known as an endocrine organ which produces substrates including melatonin and has been ascribed numerous even mysterious functions but its activation during meditation has never been observed by brain imaging technique. In seventeenth century, based on anatomic observation, Descartes ventured to suggest that pineal serves as the principal seat of the soul^18-20^. Inspired by its geometric center in the brain, physiologists, psychologists, philosophers and religionists have been speculating for centuries about pineal's function relevant to spirit and soul. In this study, we chose Chinese Original Quiet Sitting, one style of meditation, to explore this long lasting speculation by functional magnetic resonance imaging technique. Our results demonstrate a correlation between pineal activation and religious meditation which might have profound implications in physiological understanding of the intrinsic awareness

Efficient Neural Network Robustness Certification with General Activation Functions

Finding minimum distortion of adversarial examples and thus certifying robustness in neural network classifiers for given data points is known to be a challenging problem. Nevertheless, recently it has been shown to be possible to give a non-trivial certified lower bound of minimum adversarial distortion, and some recent progress has been made towards this direction by exploiting the piece-wise linear nature of ReLU activations. However, a generic robustness certification for general activation functions still remains largely unexplored. To address this issue, in this paper we introduce CROWN, a general framework to certify robustness of neural networks with general activation functions for given input data points. The novelty in our algorithm consists of bounding a given activation function with linear and quadratic functions, hence allowing it to tackle general activation functions including but not limited to four popular choices: ReLU, tanh, sigmoid and arctan. In addition, we facilitate the search for a tighter certified lower bound by adaptively selecting appropriate surrogates for each neuron activation. Experimental results show that CROWN on ReLU networks can notably improve the certified lower bounds compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm Fast-Lin, while having comparable computational efficiency. Furthermore, CROWN also demonstrates its effectiveness and flexibility on networks with general activation functions, including tanh, sigmoid and arctan.Comment: Accepted by NIPS 2018. Huan Zhang and Tsui-Wei Weng contributed equall

Case Report of Human Infection with \u3ci\u3eCapillaria philippinensis\u3c/i\u3e

In July 1988, a case of human infection with Capillaria philippinensis, so-called the intestinal capillariasis, was discovered at the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH). This is the first case reported in Taiwan. Capillaria philippinesis is a parasite of fish-eating birds In nature it has a fish-bird life cycle. When human populations disrupt the natural cycle by eating raw fish infected with the larvae of C. philippinensis, they may acquire the disease

Role of galectin-3 in liver progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation

Liver progenitor cells (LPCs) respond to hepatic injury when hepatocyte division is impaired in chronic or severe injury. The LPCs are intimately surrounded by myofibroblasts, macrophages and laminin, thus constituting a potential progenitor cell niche. Laminin has been proposed to maintain LPCs in an undifferentiated state within the LPC niche. LPCs differentiate once they leave the laminin niche. However, mechanisms regulating this process have not been completely investigated. I hypothesized that cell membrane proteins which are implicated in intergin activation and mediation of cell adhesion to laminin such as galectin-3 and CD98 may be involved in this mechanism. Galectin-3 is a carbohydrate-binding protein which plays an important role in various cell functions, including cell growth, proliferation, adhesion, and differentiation. Galectin-3 has been reported to bind integrins and regulates β1 mediated adhesion to ECM. In addition, galectin-3 may also indirectly mediate β1 integrin activation by binding to and activating the heterodimeric transmembrane amino acid transporter CD98. However a role for galectin-3 in regulating LPC behavior has not been demonstrated. In this thesis, the mechanisms of galectin-3 mediating LPC proliferation and differentiation were investigated in an experimental model of LPC induction, the CDE diet, by using mutant mice lacking the gene encoding galectin-3. I have found galectin-3 is important for LPC induction and proliferation in vivo. In addition, galectin-3 is crucial for the LPC proliferation but is a negative regulator of LPC differentiation in vitro in a laminin dependent manner, suggesting that galectin-3 is required for LPC to maintain in an undifferentiated state on laminin. Moreover, the 2 extracellular binding activity of galectin-3 is important for LPC proliferation and adhesion to laminin. Furthermore, in the absence of galectin-3, LPCs down-regulate cyclin-D1 and the cyclin inhibitors p21 and p16 are elevated. Finally I suggest that integrin-β1 and CD98 are involved in regulating LPC proliferation. There is an increasing literature examining the role of LPC niche in regulating LPC behavior. My work suggests that galectin-3 is required for the expansion of LPCs in the injured adult liver. Galectin-3 enhances LPC adhesion to laminin. Galectin-3 is a crucial factor for LPCs to maintain in an undifferentiated state on laminin. My findings not only emphasize the requirement of LPCs to interact with their extracellular environment to expand but also propose that galectin-3 is a key signalling intermediary in the LPC niche, regulating homeostatic balance between proliferation and differentiation of LPCs, thus controlling regeneration

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE PHYSICIANS’ BEHAVIORAL INTENTION WITH ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEMS IN TAIWAN

Currently in healthcare organizations paper-based patient record management faces many challenges. Most countries are promoting the full implementation of electronic medical records in every hospital. Medical environments change frequently and dramatically, which makes full acceptance of electronic medical records (EMR) by physicians an important issue. This empirical study combines the theory on reasoned action (TRA) and information technology acceptance model (TAM) resulted in a modified TAM to find what critical factors influence the acceptance behavior of EMR by physicians. To test these hypotheses, this study administered a cross-sectional mailed questionnaire survey during the period of three months in 2012. The survey was deployed to1000 physicians randomly from the estimated total 2000 physicians of 50 regional acute hospitals (more than 300 beds) in Taiwan currently. From these, 252effective responses were received, resulting in a net response rate of 25%. These research findings indicate that four variables significantly positively impact the intention to adopt EMR. Among these, attitude has the most significant positive impact on adoption intentions. Moreover, it shows that the professional autonomy might play an important role to moderate the attitude with significant statistics. These results maintain enough explanatory power (R2 =78.4%) to help explain the attitudes and intentions of physicians in adopting electronic medical record information systems. Our analysis revealed the importance of the perception usefulness which moderated by professional autonomy and pragmatism by physicians for their adoption electronic medical record systems in clinical practice