Biofluid Biomarkers in Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is a chronic progressive neurodegenerative condition where new markers of disease progression are needed. So far no disease-modifying interventions have been found, and few interventions have been proven to alleviate symptoms. This may be partially explained by the lack of reliable indicators of disease severity, progression, and phenotype.Biofluid biomarkers may bring advantages in addition to clinical measures, such as reliability, reproducibility, price, accuracy, and direct quantification of pathobiological processes at the molecular level; and in addition to empowering clinical trials, they have the potential to generate useful hypotheses for new drug development.In this chapter we review biofluid biomarker reports in HD, emphasizing those we feel are likely to be closest to clinical applicability

The address connector: noninvasive synchronization of hierarchical data sources

Different databases often store information about the same or related objects in the real world. To enable collaboration between these databases, data items that refer to the same object must be identified. Residential addresses are data of particular interest as they often provide the only link between related pieces of information in different databases. Unfortunately, residential addresses that describe the same location might vary considerably and hence need to be synchronized. Non-matching street names and addresses stored at different levels of granularity make address synchronization a challenging task. Common approaches assume an authoritative reference set and correct residential addresses according to the reference set. Often, however, no reference set is available, and correcting addresses with different granularity is not possible. We present the address connector, which links residential addresses that refer to the same location. Instead of correcting addresses according to an authoritative reference set, the connector defines a lookup function for residential addresses. Given a query address and a target database, the lookup returns all residential addresses in the target database that refer to the same location. The lookup supports addresses that are stored with different granularity. To align the addresses of two matching streets, we use a global greedy address-matching algorithm that guarantees a stable matching. We define the concept of address containment that allows us to correctly link addresses with different granularity. The evaluation of our solution on real-world data from a municipality shows that our solution is both effective and efficient

The FIRST experiment at GSI

The FIRST (Fragmentation of Ions Relevant for Space and Therapy) experiment at the SIS accelerator of GSI laboratory in Darmstadt has been designed for the measurement of ion fragmentation cross-sections at different angles and energies between 100 and 1000 MeV/nucleon. Nuclear fragmentation processes are relevant in several fields of basic research and applied physics and are of particular interest for tumor therapy and for space radiation protection applications. The start of the scientific program of the FIRST experiment was on summer 2011 and was focused on the measurement of 400 MeV/nucleon 12C beam fragmentation on thin (8 mm) graphite target. The detector is partly based on an already existing setup made of a dipole magnet (ALADiN), a time projection chamber (TP-MUSIC IV), a neutron detector (LAND) and a time of flight scintillator system (TOFWALL). This pre-existing setup has been integrated with newly designed detectors in the Interaction Region, around the carbon target placed in a sample changer. The new detectors are a scintillator Start Counter, a Beam Monitor drift chamber, a silicon Vertex Detector and a Proton Tagger scintillator system optimized for the detection of light fragments emitted at large angles. In this paper we review the experimental setup, then we present the simulation software, the data acquisition system and finally the trigger strategy of the experiment