The ENIGMA Stroke Recovery Working Group: Big data neuroimaging to study brain–behavior relationships after stroke

The goal of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta‐Analysis (ENIGMA) Stroke Recovery working group is to understand brain and behavior relationships using well‐powered meta‐ and mega‐analytic approaches. ENIGMA Stroke Recovery has data from over 2,100 stroke patients collected across 39 research studies and 10 countries around the world, comprising the largest multisite retrospective stroke data collaboration to date. This article outlines the efforts taken by the ENIGMA Stroke Recovery working group to develop neuroinformatics protocols and methods to manage multisite stroke brain magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral and demographics data. Specifically, the processes for scalable data intake and preprocessing, multisite data harmonization, and large‐scale stroke lesion analysis are described, and challenges unique to this type of big data collaboration in stroke research are discussed. Finally, future directions and limitations, as well as recommendations for improved data harmonization through prospective data collection and data management, are provided

The Grizzly, September 11, 2003

Unique Organizations Attract New Members at Activities Fair • To Party or Not to Party: How is the Question • Reflections on the Post-September 11th World • An Anniversary Like No Other • A Major Decision • A Day in the Life: Lounge Living • Student Spotlight: Locks for Love • Activities Coming to You • Family Day at UC • John Mayer & Counting Crows • Opinions: Please Read: E-mail Abuse is Annoying; A Continuing Story: Out of the Middle East; The [De] Stabilized Situation in Iraq • 9/11: Reliving the Tragedy • SIGI Plus to the Rescue • UC on File Sharing: Joining the Bandwagon • Party Etiquette 101 • Price Comparison: Popular CDs • The Wit and Wisdom of J. D. Salinger • Bears Knock Out Susquehanna, 24-17 • Volleyball Team Makes it Three in a Row • TCNJ Field Hockey Blanks Ursinus • Men\u27s Soccer Comes out Even • Ursinus Women Dominate Soccer Classic • The Kobe Bryant Sagahttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1540/thumbnail.jp

Potential impacts of climate change on agriculture and fisheries production in 72 tropical coastal communities

Climate change is expected to profoundly affect key food production sectors, including fisheries and agriculture. However, the potential impacts of climate change on these sectors are rarely considered jointly, especially below national scales, which can mask substantial variability in how communities will be affected. Here, we combine socioeconomic surveys of 3,008 households and intersectoral multi-model simulation outputs to conduct a sub-national analysis of the potential impacts of climate change on fisheries and agriculture in 72 coastal communities across five Indo-Pacific countries (Indonesia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, and Tanzania). Our study reveals three key findings: First, overall potential losses to fisheries are higher than potential losses to agriculture. Second, while most locations (> 2/3) will experience potential losses to both fisheries and agriculture simultaneously, climate change mitigation could reduce the proportion of places facing that double burden. Third, potential impacts are more likely in communities with lower socioeconomic status

A large, curated, open-source stroke neuroimaging dataset to improve lesion segmentation algorithms.

Accurate lesion segmentation is critical in stroke rehabilitation research for the quantification of lesion burden and accurate image processing. Current automated lesion segmentation methods for T1-weighted (T1w) MRIs, commonly used in stroke research, lack accuracy and reliability. Manual segmentation remains the gold standard, but it is time-consuming, subjective, and requires neuroanatomical expertise. We previously released an open-source dataset of stroke T1w MRIs and manually-segmented lesion masks (ATLAS v1.2, N = 304) to encourage the development of better algorithms. However, many methods developed with ATLAS v1.2 report low accuracy, are not publicly accessible or are improperly validated, limiting their utility to the field. Here we present ATLAS v2.0 (N = 1271), a larger dataset of T1w MRIs and manually segmented lesion masks that includes training (n = 655), test (hidden masks, n = 300), and generalizability (hidden MRIs and masks, n = 316) datasets. Algorithm development using this larger sample should lead to more robust solutions; the hidden datasets allow for unbiased performance evaluation via segmentation challenges. We anticipate that ATLAS v2.0 will lead to improved algorithms, facilitating large-scale stroke research

Blood transfusion in cardiac surgery is a risk factor for increased hospital length of stay in adult patients

Abstract\ud \ud \ud \ud Background\ud \ud Allogeneic red blood cell (RBC) transfusion has been proposed as a negative indicator of quality in cardiac surgery. Hospital length of stay (LOS) may be a surrogate of poor outcome in transfused patients.\ud \ud \ud \ud Methods\ud \ud Data from 502 patients included in Transfusion Requirements After Cardiac Surgery (TRACS) study were analyzed to assess the relationship between RBC transfusion and hospital LOS in patients undergoing cardiac surgery and enrolled in the TRACS study.\ud \ud \ud \ud Results\ud \ud According to the status of RBC transfusion, patients were categorized into the following three groups: 1) 199 patients (40%) who did not receive RBC, 2) 241 patients (48%) who received 3 RBC units or fewer (low transfusion requirement group), and 3) 62 patients (12%) who received more than 3 RBC units (high transfusion requirement group). In a multivariable Cox proportional hazards model, the following factors were predictive of a prolonged hospital length of stay: age higher than 65 years, EuroSCORE, valvular surgery, combined procedure, LVEF lower than 40% and RBC transfusion of > 3 units.\ud \ud \ud \ud Conclusion\ud \ud RBC transfusion is an independent risk factor for increased LOS in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. This finding highlights the adequacy of a restrictive transfusion therapy in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.\ud \ud \ud \ud Trial registration\ud \ud Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: http://NCT01021631.The authors would like to thank Suelly Zeferino and Lígia Camara for their assistance with data extraction. There was no external funding source for this research.This work was supported by the Department of Anaesthesiology, InCor, University of Sao Paulo

ATLANTIC EPIPHYTES: a data set of vascular and non-vascular epiphyte plants and lichens from the Atlantic Forest

Epiphytes are hyper-diverse and one of the frequently undervalued life forms in plant surveys and biodiversity inventories. Epiphytes of the Atlantic Forest, one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, have high endemism and radiated recently in the Pliocene. We aimed to (1) compile an extensive Atlantic Forest data set on vascular, non-vascular plants (including hemiepiphytes), and lichen epiphyte species occurrence and abundance; (2) describe the epiphyte distribution in the Atlantic Forest, in order to indicate future sampling efforts. Our work presents the first epiphyte data set with information on abundance and occurrence of epiphyte phorophyte species. All data compiled here come from three main sources provided by the authors: published sources (comprising peer-reviewed articles, books, and theses), unpublished data, and herbarium data. We compiled a data set composed of 2,095 species, from 89,270 holo/hemiepiphyte records, in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, recorded from 1824 to early 2018. Most of the records were from qualitative data (occurrence only, 88%), well distributed throughout the Atlantic Forest. For quantitative records, the most common sampling method was individual trees (71%), followed by plot sampling (19%), and transect sampling (10%). Angiosperms (81%) were the most frequently registered group, and Bromeliaceae and Orchidaceae were the families with the greatest number of records (27,272 and 21,945, respectively). Ferns and Lycophytes presented fewer records than Angiosperms, and Polypodiaceae were the most recorded family, and more concentrated in the Southern and Southeastern regions. Data on non-vascular plants and lichens were scarce, with a few disjunct records concentrated in the Northeastern region of the Atlantic Forest. For all non-vascular plant records, Lejeuneaceae, a family of liverworts, was the most recorded family. We hope that our effort to organize scattered epiphyte data help advance the knowledge of epiphyte ecology, as well as our understanding of macroecological and biogeographical patterns in the Atlantic Forest. No copyright restrictions are associated with the data set. Please cite this Ecology Data Paper if the data are used in publication and teaching events. © 2019 The Authors. Ecology © 2019 The Ecological Society of Americ

Stroke atlas of the brain: Voxel-wise density-based clustering of infarct lesions topographic distribution

The supply territories of main cerebral arteries are predominantly identified based on distribution of infarct lesions in patients with large arterial occlusion; whereas, there is no consensus atlas regarding the supply territories of smaller end-arteries. In this study, we applied a data-driven approach to construct a stroke atlas of the brain using hierarchical density clustering in large number of infarct lesions, assuming that voxels/regions supplied by a common end-artery tend to infarct together. A total of 793 infarct lesions on MRI scans of 458 patients were segmented and coregistered to MNI-152 standard brain space. Applying a voxel-wise data-driven hierarchical density clustering algorithm, we identified those voxels that were most likely to be part of same infarct lesions in our dataset. A step-wise clustering scheme was applied, where the clustering threshold was gradually decreased to form the first 20 mother (>50 cm3) or main (1–50 cm3) clusters in addition to any possible number of tiny clusters (<1 cm3); and then, any resultant mother clusters were iteratively subdivided using the same scheme. Also, in a randomly selected 2/3 subset of our cohort, a bootstrapping cluster analysis with 100 permutations was performed to assess the statistical robustness of proposed clusters. Approximately 91% of the MNI-152 brain mask was covered by 793 infarct lesions across patients. The covered area of brain was parcellated into 4 mother, 16 main, and 123 tiny clusters at the first hierarchy level. Upon iterative clustering subdivision of mother clusters, the brain tissue was eventually parcellated into 1 mother cluster (62.6 cm3), 181 main clusters (total volume 1107.3 cm3), and 917 tiny clusters (total volume of 264.8 cm3). In bootstrap analysis, only 0.12% of voxels, were labelled as “unstable” – with a greater reachability distance in cluster scheme compared to their corresponding mean bootstrapped reachability distance. On visual assessment, the mother/main clusters were formed along supply territories of main cerebral arteries at initial hierarchical levels, and then tiny clusters emerged in deep white matter and gray matter nuclei prone to small vessel ischemic infarcts. Applying voxel-wise data-driven hierarchical density clustering on a large number of infarct lesions, we have parcellated the brain tissue into clusters of voxels that tend to be part of same infarct lesion, and presumably representing end-arterial supply territories. This hierarchical stroke atlas of the brain is shared publicly, and can potentially be applied for future infarct location-outcome analysis. •Using data-driven density clustering, a hierarchical brain atlas is constructed to identify voxels likely to infarct together.•Different clusters can potentially be extracted from dendrogram through thresholding at different reachability thresholds.•The hierarchical stroke atlas hypothetically represents the detailed anatomical distribution of distal arties in the brain.•The stroke atlas is made publicly available for potential future location-outcome correlation studies in stroke patients

Corrigendum to “Does phylogeny have a role in the liana-phorophyte interaction in tropical forests?” [Perspect. Plant Ecol. Evol. Syst. 21 (August 2016) 14–22]

We assessed the influence of species phylogenetic relatedness on the interaction between woody climbing plants (lianas) and their host trees (phorophytes). Considering that closely related species tend to have similar niches, we expected (1) closely related lianas to co-occur in similar phorophyte sets and (2) original lianas (phylogenetically distinct lianas with unique set of features) to occur on distinct phorophyte sets. We sampled three highly diverse forest sites in SE Brazil (a tropical rainforest, a savanna woodland and a tropical semideciduous forest), and sought for (1) a phylogenetic signal in liana climbing traits; (2) a phylogenetic signal in the liana-phorophyte interaction by testing the correlation between (a) phylogenetic distances and similarity of interacting species sets and (b) the species phylogenetic originality and the number of their interactions; and (3) a positive relationship between phylogenetic originality and the specificity of liana-phorophyte interactions. We found a phylogenetic signal in climbing systems of liana species. In the semideciduous forest, we observed that closely related lianas share similar phorophyte sets, and original lianas occur on a small number of phorophyte species. However, when we evaluated the interactions of species with high originality, we found an opposing pattern in forests and savanna. In forests, the phylogenetically original liana species co-occurred more frequently with very distinct phorophyte sets; whereas in the savanna woodland, the phylogenetically original liana species co-occurred conversely with common phorophyte sets. We argued that environmental differences in forests and savannas could have mediated different tree morphological traits, such as bark characteristics, which might structure different liana-phorophyte interactions211422CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPnão temnão te

Waterproof paper as a new substrate to construct a disposable sensor for the, electrochemical determination of paracetamol and melatonin

Disposable electrochemical sensors using sustainable and cheap materials are an exciting alternative to produce new kinds of sensing platforms. Waterproof paper (WP) is a biodegradable and biocompatible material that allows dropped of the sample on its surface without absorption by fibers. Also, WP can be used for miniaturized sensors construction. In this work, a conductive ink was produced with nail polish and graphite powder, using the WP as the sensor substrate for paracetamol (PAR) and melatonin (MEL) voltammetric determination. PAR is a pharmaceutical commonly used in high doses for the relief of pain and fever, and MEL is a hormone related to several diseases besides a direct relation to sleep quality. Using differential pulse voltammetry for PAR determination, the WP sensor showed a linear response in the concentration ranging from 0.50 mu mol L-1 to 100 mu mol L-1 with a limit of detection (LOD) of 53.6 nmol L-1. Square wave voltammetry was applied for MEL determination, and the proposed electrode presented linear response ranging from 0.80 mu mol L-1 to 100 mu mol L-1 and LOD of 32.5 nmol L-1. The sensor showed excellent repeatability and reproducibility for consecutive measurements. Then, the disposable WP sensor was successfully applied in the determination of PAR and MEL in pharmaceutical and biological samples, with recovery values, above 91.1%. The described architecture allowed the manufacture of a disposable, simple, and low-cost electroanalytical device that can be used for electrochemical sensing208CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DE PESSOAL DE NÍVEL SUPERIOR - CAPESFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPnão temnão tem2013/22127-2; 2019/00473-2; 2017/21097-3; 2017/21898-6; 2018/02162-