589 research outputs found
La ley del Patrimonio Histórico Español. Comentarios sobre su aplicación arqueológica en Castilla y León
Sin resume
Temperament & Character account for brain functional connectivity at rest: A diathesis-stress model of functional dysregulation in psychosis
The online version contains supplementary material
available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-023-02039-6The human brain’s resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) provides stable trait-like measures of differences in the perceptual,
cognitive, emotional, and social functioning of individuals. The rsFC of the prefrontal cortex is hypothesized to mediate a person’s
rational self-government, as is also measured by personality, so we tested whether its connectivity networks account for
vulnerability to psychosis and related personality configurations. Young adults were recruited as outpatients or controls from the
same communities around psychiatric clinics. Healthy controls (n = 30) and clinically stable outpatients with bipolar disorder
(n = 35) or schizophrenia (n = 27) were diagnosed by structured interviews, and then were assessed with standardized protocols of
the Human Connectome Project. Data-driven clustering identified five groups of patients with distinct patterns of rsFC regardless of
diagnosis. These groups were distinguished by rsFC networks that regulate specific biopsychosocial aspects of psychosis: sensory
hypersensitivity, negative emotional balance, impaired attentional control, avolition, and social mistrust. The rsFc group differences
were validated by independent measures of white matter microstructure, personality, and clinical features not used to identify the
subjects. We confirmed that each connectivity group was organized by differential collaborative interactions among six prefrontal
and eight other automatically-coactivated networks. The temperament and character traits of the members of these groups
strongly accounted for the differences in rsFC between groups, indicating that configurations of rsFC are internal representations of
personality organization. These representations involve weakly self-regulated emotional drives of fear, irrational desire, and
mistrust, which predispose to psychopathology. However, stable outpatients with different diagnoses (bipolar or schizophrenic
psychoses) were highly similar in rsFC and personality. This supports a diathesis-stress model in which different complex adaptive
systems regulate predisposition (which is similar in stable outpatients despite diagnosis) and stress-induced clinical dysfunction
(which differs by diagnosis).EU FEDER grants through the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology
PID2021-125017OB-I00,
RTI2018-098983-B-I00,
D43 TW011793-06A1,
PID2021-125017OB-I00,
RTI2018-098983-B-I00,
D43 TW011793-06A1United States Department of Health & Human Services
National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA
R01-MH124060Psychosis-Risk Outcomes Network
U01 MH12463
Fabrication and deposition of copper and copper oxide nanoparticles by laser ablation in open air
The proximity of the “post-antibiotic era”, where infections and minor injuries could be a cause of death, there are urges to seek an alternative for the cure of infectious diseases. Copper nanoparticles and their huge potential as a bactericidal agent could be a solution. In this work, Cu and Cu oxide nanoparticles were synthesized by laser ablation in open air and in argon atmosphere using 532 and 1064 nm radiation generated by nanosecond and picosecond Nd:YVO4 lasers, respectively, to be directly deposited onto Ti substrates. Size, morphology, composition and the crystalline structure of the produced nanoparticles have been studied by the means of field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), the energy dispersive spectroscopy of X-rays (EDS), selected area electron diffraction (SAED) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The UV-VIS absorbance of the thin layer of nanoparticles was also measured, and the antibacterial capacity of the obtained deposits tested against Staphylococcus aureus. The obtained deposits consisted of porous coatings composed of copper and copper oxide nanoparticles interconnected to form chain-like aggregates. The use of the argon atmosphere contributed to reduce significantly the formation of Cu oxide species. The synthesized and deposited nanoparticles exhibited an inhibitory effect upon S. aureus.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Multi-Oriented Windowed Harmonic Phase Reconstruction for Robust Cardiac Strain Imaging
The purpose of this work is to develop a method for direct estimation of
the cardiac strain tensor by extending the harmonic phase reconstruction on
tagged magnetic resonance images to obtain more precise and robust measurements.
The extension relies on the reconstruction of the local phase of
the image by means of the windowed Fourier transform and the acquisition of
an overdetermined set of stripe orientations in order to avoid the phase interferences
from structures outside the myocardium and the instabilities arising
from the application of a gradient operator. Results have shown that increasing
the number of acquired orientations provides a signi cant improvement
in the reproducibility of the strain measurements and that the acquisition of
an extended set of orientations also improves the reproducibility when compared
with acquiring repeated samples from a smaller set of orientations.
Additionally, biases in local phase estimation when using the original harmonic
phase formulation are greatly diminished by the one here proposed.
The ideas here presented allow the design of new methods for motion sensitive
magnetic resonance imaging, which could simultaneously improve the
resolution, robustness and accuracy of motion estimates
Non-Rigid Groupwise Registration for Motion Estimation and Compensation in Compressed Sensing Reconstruc- tion of Breath-Hold Cardiac Cine MRI
Purpose: Compressed sensing methods with motion estimation and compensation techniques
have been proposed for the reconstruction of accelerated dynamic MRI. However, artifacts that
naturally arise in compressed sensing reconstruction procedures hinder the estimation of motion
from reconstructed images, especially at high acceleration factors. This work introduces a robust
groupwise non-rigid motion estimation technique applied to the compressed sensing reconstruction
of dynamic cardiac cine MRI sequences.
Theory and Methods: A spatio-temporal regularized, groupwise, non-rigid registration method
based on a B-splines deformation model and a least squares metric is used to estimate and to
compensate the movement of the heart in breath-hold cine acquisitions and to obtain a quasi-static
sequence with highly sparse representation in temporally transformed domains.
Results: Short axis in vivo datasets are used for validation, both original multi-coil as well as
DICOM data. Fully sampled data were retrospectively undersampled with various acceleration
factors and reconstructions were compared with the two well-known methods k-t FOCUSS and
MASTeR. The proposed method achieves higher signal to error ratio and structure similarity index
for medium to high acceleration factors.
Conclusions: Reconstruction methods based on groupwise registration show higher quality recon-
structions for cardiac cine images than the pairwise counterparts tested
Apoplejía paratiroidea: remisión espontánea e hipocalcemia yatrogénica
Parathyroid apoplexy is an uncommon evolution of the parathyroid adenoma, leading to a temporary or permanent resolution of primary hyperparathyroidism (HPTP) associated. We present a clinical case where our patient also suffered an acute episode of iatrogenic hypocalcaemia secondary to the use of cinacalcet.La apoplejía paratiroidea es una evolución infrecuente del adenoma de paratiroides, que conlleva a una resolución transitoria o permanente del hiperparatiroidismo primario asociado. Se expone un caso clínico donde nuestra paciente padeció además un episodio agudo de hipocalcemia yatrogénica secundaria al uso de cinacalcet
Fast 4D elastic group-wise image registration. Convolutional interpolation revisited
Background and Objective:This paper proposes a new and highly efficient implementation of 3D+t groupwise registration based on the free-form deformation paradigm. Methods:Deformation is posed as a cascade of 1D convolutions, achieving great reduction in execution time for evaluation of transformations and gradients. Results:The proposed method has been applied to 4D cardiac MRI and 4D thoracic CT monomodal datasets. Results show an average runtime reduction above 90%, both in CPU and GPU executions, compared with the classical tensor product formulation. Conclusions:Our implementation, although fully developed for the metric sum of squared differences, can be extended to other metrics and its adaptation to multiresolution strategies is straightforward. Therefore, it can be extremely useful to speed up image registration procedures in different applications where high dimensional data are involved.MEC-TEC2017-82408-
Epigenetic Regulation of Gfi1 in Endocrine-Related Cancers: A Role Regulating Tumor Growth
Prostate and breast cancer constitute the most common cancers among men and women worldwide. The aging population is one of the main risk factors for prostate and breast cancer development and accumulating studies link aging with epigenetic changes. Growth factor independence-1 (Gfi1) is a transcriptional repressor with an important role in human malignancies, including leukemia, colorectal carcinoma, and lung cancer, but its role in prostate and breast cancer is unknown. We have found that Gfi1 epigenetic silencing is a common event in prostate and breast cancer. Gfi1 re-expression in prostate and breast cancer cell lines displaying Gfi1 epigenetic silencing decreases cell proliferation, reduced colony formation density, and tumor growth in nude mice xenografts. In addition, we found that Gfi1 repress alpha 1-anti-trypsin (AAT) and alpha 1-anti-chymotrypsin (ACT) expression, two genes with important functions in cancer development, suggesting that Gfi1 silencing promotes tumor growth by increasing AAT and ACT expression in our system. Finally, Gfi1 epigenetic silencing could be a promising biomarker for prostate cancer progression because it is associated with shorter disease-free survival. In conclusion, our findings strongly indicate that Gfi1 epigenetic silencing in prostate and breast cancer could be a crucial step in the development of these two-well characterized endocrine related tumors.Instituto de Salud Carlos II
Re-irradiation of silver nanoparticles obtained by laser ablation in water and assessment of their antibacterial effect
The rapid evolution of resistant bacteria is a huge problem in medicine because makes the treatment of infections more and more difficult. The bactericidal properties of noble metal nanoparticles could be a solution.
In this work silver nanoparticles were produced by using two nanosecond Nd:YVO4 lasers operating at 1064 and 532 nm respectively to ablate a silver target submerged in pure de-ionized water. Part of the resulting colloidal solution was injected as a fine stream by a compressed air system and re-irradiated one and three times with the same laser to resize and get uniform nanoparticles.
The obtained nanoparticles by ablation and re-irradiation consisted of crystalline Ag nanoparticles with a bimodal size distribution. The particle size has been reduced by subsequent laser re-irradiation with both laser sources, reaching a 40% of mean size reduction. Inhibitory effects on the proliferation of Staphylococcus aureus was demonstrated on silver nanoparticles obtained after re-irradiation with the infrared laser.Postprint (author's final draft
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