The Effects of Transcutaneous Electrical Neurostimulation on Analgesia and Peripheral Perfusion

Peripheral arterial occlusive disease (PAOD) affects 8 to 12 million Americans over the age of 50. As the disease progresses, arterial occlusions arising from atherosclerotic lesions inhibit normal metabolic vasodilation in the peripheries, resulting in limb ischemia and claudication. Pharmacological and surgical treatments currently used to treat both the hemodynamic and pain symptoms associated with PAOD can involve adverse and potentially life-threatening side effects. Thus, there is a need for additional innovative therapies for PAOD. Neurostimulation has a known analgesic effect on both acute and chronic pain. Although the exact mechanisms remain under investigation, local vascular tone may be modulated by neurostimulation in addition to pain modulation. The Gate Control Theory proposes that electrical activation of mechanoreceptive afferent somatosensory nerves, specifically Aβ fibers, inhibits pain signaling to the brain by activating an inhibitory interneuron in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord which dampens signaling from afferent, C type peripheral nociceptor nerves. Interestingly, Aβ fiber activation may also inhibit norepinephrine release from sympathetic nerve terminals on efferent neurons by activating α-2 adrenergic receptors along the same dermatome, resulting in localized vasodilation in both limbs. Ultimately, electrical stimulation may decrease mean blood pressure and increase local blood flow. The focus of this study was to optimize protocols and perform a small scale clinical study to investigate hemodynamic and analgesic responses to neurostimulation during acute ischemia. We hypothesized that ganglial transcutaneous electrical neurostimulation (TENS) and interferential current (IFC) treatments would decrease pain perception and vascular resistance in the periphery in young, healthy subjects. We further hypothesized that IFC may have a greater hyperemic and analgesic effect on acute ischemia than TENS as its current waveform may be more efficient at overcoming skin impedance. Interestingly, we found trends suggesting that TENS and IFC may increase vascular resistance (VR) and have no noticeable analgesic effect, though TENS may have a slightly lower increase in VR associated with an increase in pain. Further work characterizing the hemodynamic effects of different stimulus waveforms is needed to inform future research into possible neuromodulation therapies for ischemic disease

Instanton dominance of topological charge fluctuations in QCD?

We consider the local chirality of near-zero eigenvectors from Wilson-Dirac and clover improved Wilson-Dirac lattice operators as proposed recently by Horv\'ath et al. We studied finer lattices and repaired for the loss of orthogonality due to the non-normality of the Wilson-Dirac matrix. As a result we do see a clear double peak structure on lattices with resolutions higher than 0.1 fm. We found that the lattice artifacts can be considerably reduced by exploiting the biorthogonal system of left and right eigenvectors. We conclude that the dominance of instantons on topological charge fluctuations is not ruled out by local chirality measurements.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

FASTCUDA: Open Source FPGA Accelerator & Hardware-Software Codesign Toolset for CUDA Kernels

Using FPGAs as hardware accelerators that communicate with a central CPU is becoming a common practice in the embedded design world but there is no standard methodology and toolset to facilitate this path yet. On the other hand, languages such as CUDA and OpenCL provide standard development environments for Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) programming. FASTCUDA is a platform that provides the necessary software toolset, hardware architecture, and design methodology to efficiently adapt the CUDA approach into a new FPGA design flow. With FASTCUDA, the CUDA kernels of a CUDA-based application are partitioned into two groups with minimal user intervention: those that are compiled and executed in parallel software, and those that are synthesized and implemented in hardware. A modern low power FPGA can provide the processing power (via numerous embedded micro-CPUs) and the logic capacity for both the software and hardware implementations of the CUDA kernels. This paper describes the system requirements and the architectural decisions behind the FASTCUDA approach

The Ginzburg-Landau Free Energy Functional of Color Superconductivity at Weak Coupling

We derive the Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional of color superconductivity in terms of the thermal diagrams of QCD in its perturbative region. The zero mode of the quadratic term coefficient yields the same transition temperature, including the pre-exponential factor, as the one obtained previously from the Fredholm determinant of the two quark scattering amplitude. All coefficients of the free energy can be made identical to those of a BCS model by setting the Fermi velocity of the latter equal to the speed of light. We also calculate the induced symmetric color condensate near $T_c$ and find that it scales as the cubic power of the dominant antisymmetric color component. We show that in the presence of an inhomogeneity and a nonzero gauge potential, while the color-flavor locked condensate dominates in the bulk, the unlocked condensate, the octet, emerges as a result of a simultaneous color-flavor rotation in the core region of a vortex filament or at the junction of super and normal phases.Comment: 32 pages, Plain Tex, 3 figure

Comparison of techniques for handling missing covariate data within prognostic modelling studies: a simulation study

Background: There is no consensus on the most appropriate approach to handle missing covariate data within prognostic modelling studies. Therefore a simulation study was performed to assess the effects of different missing data techniques on the performance of a prognostic model. Methods: Datasets were generated to resemble the skewed distributions seen in a motivating breast cancer example. Multivariate missing data were imposed on four covariates using four different mechanisms; missing completely at random (MCAR), missing at random (MAR), missing not at random (MNAR) and a combination of all three mechanisms. Five amounts of incomplete cases from 5% to 75% were considered. Complete case analysis (CC), single imputation (SI) and five multiple imputation (MI) techniques available within the R statistical software were investigated: a) data augmentation (DA) approach assuming a multivariate normal distribution, b) DA assuming a general location model, c) regression switching imputation, d) regression switching with predictive mean matching (MICE-PMM) and e) flexible additive imputation models. A Cox proportional hazards model was fitted and appropriate estimates for the regression coefficients and model performance measures were obtained. Results: Performing a CC analysis produced unbiased regression estimates, but inflated standard errors, which affected the significance of the covariates in the model with 25% or more missingness. Using SI, underestimated the variability; resulting in poor coverage even with 10% missingness. Of the MI approaches, applying MICE-PMM produced, in general, the least biased estimates and better coverage for the incomplete covariates and better model performance for all mechanisms. However, this MI approach still produced biased regression coefficient estimates for the incomplete skewed continuous covariates when 50% or more cases had missing data imposed with a MCAR, MAR or combined mechanism. When the missingness depended on the incomplete covariates, i.e. MNAR, estimates were biased with more than 10% incomplete cases for all MI approaches. Conclusion: The results from this simulation study suggest that performing MICE-PMM may be the preferred MI approach provided that less than 50% of the cases have missing data and the missing data are not MNAR

Reaction of potato cultivars to Meloidogyne Hapla and M. Morocciensis.

Edição dos Proceedings do 6th International Congress of Nematology, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2014

Transient absorption and reshaping of ultrafast XUV light by laser-dressed helium

We present a theoretical study of transient absorption and reshaping of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses by helium atoms dressed with a moderately strong infrared (IR) laser field. We formulate the atomic response using both the frequency-dependent absorption cross section and a time-frequency approach based on the time-dependent dipole induced by the light fields. The latter approach can be used in cases when an ultrafast dressing pulse induces transient effects, and/or when the atom exchanges energy with multiple frequency components of the XUV field. We first characterize the dressed atom response by calculating the frequency-dependent absorption cross section for XUV energies between 20 and 24 eV for several dressing wavelengths between 400 and 2000 nm and intensities up to 10^12 W/cm^2. We find that for dressing wavelengths near 1600 nm, there is an Autler-Townes splitting of the 1s ---> 2p transition that can potentially lead to transparency for absorption of XUV light tuned to this transition. We study the effect of this XUV transparency in a macroscopic helium gas by incorporating the time-frequency approach into a solution of the coupled Maxwell-Schr\"odinger equations. We find rich temporal reshaping dynamics when a 61 fs XUV pulse resonant with the 1s ---> 2p transition propagates through a helium gas dressed by an 11 fs, 1600 nm laser pulse.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, RevTeX4, revise

Diquark Masses from Lattice QCD

We present first results for diquark correlation functions calculated in Landau gauge on the lattice. Masses have been extracted from the long distance behaviour of these correlation functions. We find that the ordering of diquark masses with spin 0 and 1 states in colour anti-triplet and sextet channels is in accordance with instanton motivated interaction models. Although we find evidence for an attractive interaction in colour anti-triplet states with a splitting between spin 0 and spin 1 diquarks that can account for the mass splitting between the nucleon and the delta, there is no evidence for a deeply bound diquark state.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX2e uses revtex, 3 EPS-figures, small corrections, references update

Quantifying barriers to monovalent anion transport in narrow non-polar pores

The transport of anionic drinking water contaminants (fluoride, chloride, nitrate and nitrite) through narrow pores ranging in effective radius from 2.5 to 6.5 Å was systematically evaluated using molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the magnitud

Non-Relativistic Gravitation: From Newton to Einstein and Back

We present an improvement to the Classical Effective Theory approach to the non-relativistic or Post-Newtonian approximation of General Relativity. The "potential metric field" is decomposed through a temporal Kaluza-Klein ansatz into three NRG-fields: a scalar identified with the Newtonian potential, a 3-vector corresponding to the gravito-magnetic vector potential and a 3-tensor. The derivation of the Einstein-Infeld-Hoffmann Lagrangian simplifies such that each term corresponds to a single Feynman diagram providing a clear physical interpretation. Spin interactions are dominated by the exchange of the gravito-magnetic field. Leading correction diagrams corresponding to the 3PN correction to the spin-spin interaction and the 2.5PN correction to the spin-orbit interaction are presented.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. v2: published version. v3: Added a computation of Einstein-Infeld-Hoffmann in higher dimensions within our improved ClEFT which partially confirms and partially corrects a previous computation. See notes added at end of introductio