Muscle synergies after stroke are correlated with perilesional high gamma.

Movements can be factored into modules termed "muscle synergies". After stroke, abnormal synergies are linked to impaired movements; however, their neural basis is not understood. In a single subject, we examined how electrocorticography signals from the perilesional cortex were associated with synergies. The measured synergies contained a mix of both normal and abnormal patterns and were remarkably similar to those described in past work. Interestingly, we found that both normal and abnormal synergies were correlated with perilesional high gamma. Given the link between high gamma and cortical spiking, our results suggest that perilesional spiking may organize synergies after stroke

Ethanol Ablation of a Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumor Presenting as a Small Bowel Obstruction.

Ethanol has historically been used as an ablative agent for a variety of lesions. One of the more common applications of this technique is celiac plexus neurolysis; however, recent reports have suggested a role for the endoscopic alcohol ablation of a variety of solid and cystic lesions. We report a novel case of endoscopic ethanol ablation of a peripheral nerve sheath tumor presenting as a small bowel obstruction

EUS-guided portal pressure gradient measurement with a simple novel device: a human pilot study.

Background and aimsPortal hypertension is a serious adverse event of liver cirrhosis. Recently, we developed a simple novel technique for EUS-guided portal pressure gradient (PPG) measurement (PPGM). Our animal studies showed excellent correlation between EUS-PPGM and interventional radiology-acquired PPGM. In this video we demonstrate the results of the first human pilot study of EUS-PPGM in patients with liver disease.MethodsEUS-PPGM was performed by experienced endosonographers using a linear echoendoscope, a 25-gauge FNA needle, and a novel compact manometer. The portal vein and hepatic vein (or inferior vena cava) were targeted by use of a transgastric or transduodenal approach. Feasibility was defined as successful PPGM in each patient. Safety was based on adverse events captured in a postprocedural interview.ResultsTwenty-eight patients underwent EUS-PPGM with 100% technical success and no adverse events. PPG ranged from 1.5 to 19 mm Hg and had excellent correlation with clinical parameters of portal hypertension, including the presence of varices (P = .0002), PH gastropathy (P = .007), and thrombocytopenia (P = .036).ConclusionThis novel technique of EUS-PPGM using a 25-gauge needle and compact manometer is feasible and appears safe. Given the availability of EUS and the simplicity of the manometry setup, EUS-guided PPG may represent a promising breakthrough for procuring indispensable information in the management of patients with liver disease

Integrating spatial and temporal approaches for explaining bicycle crashes in high-risk areas in Antwerp (Belgium)

The majority of bicycle crash studies aim at determining risk factors and estimating crash risks by employing statistics. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is to evaluate bicycle-motor vehicle crashes by using spatial and temporal approaches to statistical data. The spatial approach (a weighted kernel density estimation approach) preliminarily estimates crash risks at the macro level, thereby avoiding the expensive work of collecting traffic counts; meanwhile, the temporal approach (negative binomial regression approach) focuses on crash data that occurred on urban arterials and includes traffic exposure at the micro level. The crash risk and risk factors of arterial roads associated with bicycle facilities and road environments were assessed using a database built from field surveys and five government agencies. This study analysed 4120 geocoded bicycle crashes in the city of Antwerp (CA, Belgium). The data sets covered five years (2014 to 2018), including all bicycle-motorized vehicle (BMV) crashes from police reports. Urban arterials were highlighted as high-risk areas through the spatial approach. This was as expected given that, due to heavy traffic and limited road space, bicycle facilities on arterial roads face many design problems. Through spatial and temporal approaches, the environmental characteristics of bicycle crashes on arterial roads were analysed at the micro level. Finally, this paper provides an insight that can be used by both the geography and transport fields to improve cycling safety on urban arterial roads

On the Origin of the Standardization Sensitivity in RegEM Climate Field Reconstructions

The regularized expectation maximization (RegEM) method has been used in recent studies to derive climate field reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the last millennium. Original pseudoproxy experiments that tested RegEM [with ridge regression regularization (RegEM-Ridge)] standardized the input data in a way that improved the performance of the reconstruction method, but included data from the reconstruction interval for estimates of the mean and standard deviation of the climate field—information that is not available in real-world reconstruction problems. When standardizations are confined to the calibration interval only, pseudoproxy reconstructions performed with RegEM-Ridge suffer from warm biases and variance losses. Only cursory explanations of this so-called standardization sensitivity of RegEM-Ridge have been published, but they have suggested that the selection of the regularization (ridge) parameter by means of minimizing the generalized cross validation (GCV) function is the source of the effect. The origin of the standardization sensitivity is more thoroughly investigated herein and is shown not to be associated with the selection of the ridge parameter; sets of derived reconstructions reveal that GCV-selected ridge parameters are minimally different for reconstructions standardized either over both the reconstruction and calibration interval or over the calibration interval only. While GCV may select ridge parameters that are different from those that precisely minimize the error in pseudoproxy reconstructions, RegEM reconstructions performed with truly optimized ridge parameters are not significantly different from those that use GCV-selected ridge parameters. The true source of the standardization sensitivity is attributable to the inclusion or exclusion of additional information provided by the reconstruction interval, namely, the mean and standard deviation fields computed for the complete modeled dataset. These fields are significantly different from those for the calibration period alone because of the violation of a standard EM assumption that missing values are missing at random in typical paleoreconstruction problems; climate data are predominantly missing in the preinstrumental period when the mean climate was significantly colder than the mean of the instrumental period. The origin of the standardization sensitivity therefore is not associated specifically with RegEM-Ridge, and more recent attempts to regularize the EM algorithm using truncated total least squares could theoretically also be susceptible to the problems affecting RegEM-Ridge. Nevertheless, the principal failure of RegEM-Ridge arises because of a poor initial estimate of the mean field, and therefore leaves open the possibility that alternative methods may perform better

A New Large Super-Fast Rotator: (335433) 2005 UW163

Asteroids of size larger than 150 m generally do not have rotation periods smaller than 2.2 hours. This spin cutoff is believed to be due to the gravitationally bound rubble-pile structures of the asteroids. Rotation with periods exceeding this critical value will cause asteroid breakup. Up until now, only one object, 2001 OE84, has been found to be an exception to this spin cutoff. We report the discovery of a new super-fast rotator, (335433) 2005 UW163, spinning with a period of 1.290 hours and a lightcurve variation of $r'\sim0.8$ mag from the observations made at the P48 telescope and the P200 telescope of the Palomar Observatory. Its $H_{r'} = 17.69 \pm 0.27$ mag and multi-band colors (i.e., $g'-r' = 0.68\pm0.03$ mag, $r'-i' = 0.19\pm0.02$ mag and SDSS $i-z = -0.45$ mag) show it is a V-type asteroid with a diameter of $0.6 +0.3/-0.2$ km. This indicates (335433) 2005 UW163 is a super-fast rotator beyond the regime of the small monolithic asteroid.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table Accepted by ApJ

Asteroid Spin-Rate Study using the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory

Two dedicated asteroid rotation-period surveys have been carried out using data taken on January 6-9 and February 20-23 of 2014 by the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) in the $R$~band with $\sim 20$-min cadence. The total survey area covered 174~deg$^2$ in the ecliptic plane. Reliable rotation periods for 1,438 asteroids are obtained from a larger data set of 6,551 mostly main-belt asteroids, each with $\geq 10$~detections. Analysis of 1751, PTF based, reliable rotation periods clearly shows the "spin barrier" at $\sim 2$~hours for "rubble-pile" asteroids. We also found a new large-sized super-fast rotator, 2005 UW163 (Chang et al., 2014), and other five candidates as well. Our spin-rate distributions of asteroids with $3 < D < 15$~km shows number decrease when frequency greater than 5 rev/day, which is consistent to that of the Asteroid Light Curve Database (LCDB, Warner et al., 2009) and the result of (Masiero et al., 2009). We found the discrepancy in the spin-rate distribution between our result and (Pravec et al., 2008, update 2014-04-20) is mainly from asteroids with $\Delta m < 0.2$ mag that might be primarily due to different survey strategies. For asteroids with $D \leq 3$~km, we found a significant number drop at $f = 6$ rev/day. The YORP effect timescale for small-sized asteroid is shorter that makes more elongate objets spun up to reach their spin-rate limit and results in break-up. The K-S test suggests a possible difference in the spin-rate distributions of C- and S-type asteroids. We also find that C-type asteroids have a smaller spin-rate limit than the S-type, which agrees with the general sense that the C-type has lower bulk density than the S-type.Comment: Submitted to ApJ (Jan, 2015). Accepted by ApJ (June, 2015). The whole set of the folded lightcurves will be available on the published articl