Somatosensory processing in neurodevelopmental disorders

The purpose of this article is to review the role of somatosensory perception in typical development, its aberration in a range of neurodevelopmental disorders, and the potential relations between tactile processing abnormalities and central features of each disorder such as motor, communication, and social development. Neurodevelopmental disorders that represent a range of symptoms and etiologies, and for which multiple peer-reviewed articles on somatosensory differences have been published, were chosen to include in the review. Relevant studies in animal models, as well as conditions of early sensory deprivation, are also included. Somatosensory processing plays an important, yet often overlooked, role in typical development and is aberrant in various neurodevelopmental disorders. This is demonstrated in studies of behavior, sensory thresholds, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology in samples of children with Fragile X syndrome, autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and cerebral palsy (CP). Impaired somatosensory processing is found in a range of neurodevelopmental disorders and is associated with deficits in communication, motor ability, and social skills in these disorders. Given the central role of touch in early development, both experimental and clinical approaches should take into consideration the role of somatosensory processing in the etiology and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders

Enhanced Growth and Osteogenic Differentiation of Human Osteoblast-Like Cells on Boron-Doped Nanocrystalline Diamond Thin Films

Intrinsic nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) films have been proven to be promising substrates for the adhesion, growth and osteogenic differentiation of bone-derived cells. To understand the role of various degrees of doping (semiconducting to metallic-like), the NCD films were deposited on silicon substrates by a microwave plasma-enhanced CVD process and their boron doping was achieved by adding trimethylboron to the CH4:H2 gas mixture, the B∶C ratio was 133, 1000 and 6700 ppm. The room temperature electrical resistivity of the films decreased from >10 MΩ (undoped films) to 55 kΩ, 0.6 kΩ, and 0.3 kΩ (doped films with 133, 1000 and 6700 ppm of B, respectively). The increase in the number of human osteoblast-like MG 63 cells in 7-day-old cultures on NCD films was most apparent on the NCD films doped with 133 and 1000 ppm of B (153,000±14,000 and 152,000±10,000 cells/cm2, respectively, compared to 113,000±10,000 cells/cm2 on undoped NCD films). As measured by ELISA per mg of total protein, the cells on NCD with 133 and 1000 ppm of B also contained the highest concentrations of collagen I and alkaline phosphatase, respectively. On the NCD films with 6700 ppm of B, the cells contained the highest concentration of focal adhesion protein vinculin, and the highest amount of collagen I was adsorbed. The concentration of osteocalcin also increased with increasing level of B doping. The cell viability on all tested NCD films was almost 100%. Measurements of the concentration of ICAM-1, i.e. an immunoglobuline adhesion molecule binding inflammatory cells, suggested that the cells on the NCD films did not undergo significant immune activation. Thus, the potential of NCD films for bone tissue regeneration can be further enhanced and tailored by B doping and that B doping up to metallic-like levels is not detrimental for cells

An overview of tissue engineering approaches for management of spinal cord injuries

Severe spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to devastating neurological deficits and disabilities, which necessitates spending a great deal of health budget for psychological and healthcare problems of these patients and their relatives. This justifies the cost of research into the new modalities for treatment of spinal cord injuries, even in developing countries. Apart from surgical management and nerve grafting, several other approaches have been adopted for management of this condition including pharmacologic and gene therapy, cell therapy, and use of different cell-free or cell-seeded bioscaffolds. In current paper, the recent developments for therapeutic delivery of stem and non-stem cells to the site of injury, and application of cell-free and cell-seeded natural and synthetic scaffolds have been reviewed

FASTBUS Segment Driver microcode description

The FASTBUS Segment Driver, hereafter referred to as the FSD, is a list-driven, microcoded interface between the UNIBUS of a PDP-11 system and the FASTBUS. The list structure used by the FSD allows the programmer on the PDP-11 to program a sequence of data transfers to take place without the aid or intervention of the PDP-11. This allows the FASTBUS to be driven at FSD rates, independent of the PDP-11 processor. Due to the difference in speed between the FASTBUS and UNIBUS, the major goal of the FSD was to provide an interface which could transfer data on FASTBUS without significantly reducing the bandwidth in a multi-master system. This was accomplished by bursting data on the FASTBUS through a 256 word fast buffer internal to the FSD. Data can be transferred at near FASTBUS rates through this memory and only moved on the UNIBUS when the FSD is not master of FASTBUS. This allows other masters in the same system to transfer their data while the FSD is moving data on the slower UNIBUS

FASTBUS Diagnostic Language users manual. Version 3(74)

FASTBUS Diagnostic Language (FDL) is an interactive interpretive language designed to aid the engineer or physicist/user in the testing and debugging of FASTBUS modules and systems. Since FASTBUS systems involve a variety of devices and data paths, it is frequently more efficient to utilize a high-level language system such as FDL for diagnostics, rather than to develop device-specific programs. FDL can also be used to a limited extent for both device control and data acquisition

Multicore in production: advantages and limits of the multiprocess approach in the ATLAS experiment

International audienceThe shared memory architecture of multicore CPUs provides HEP developers with the opportunity to reduce the memory footprint of their applications by sharing memory pages between the cores in a processor. ATLAS pioneered the multi-process approach to parallelize HEP applications. Using Linux fork() and the Copy On Write mechanism we implemented a simple event task farm, which allowed us to achieve sharing of almost 80% of memory pages among event worker processes for certain types of reconstruction jobs with negligible CPU overhead. By leaving the task of managing shared memory pages to the operating system, we have been able to parallelize large reconstruction and simulation applications originally written to be run in a single thread of execution with little to no change to the application code. The process of validating AthenaMP for production took ten months of concentrated effort and is expected to continue for several more months. Besides validating the software itself, an important and time-consuming aspect of running multicore applications in production was to configure the ATLAS distributed production system to handle multicore jobs. This entailed defining multicore batch queues, where the unit resource is not a core, but a whole computing node; monitoring the output of many event workers; and adapting the job definition layer to handle computing resources with different event throughputs. We will present scalability and memory usage studies, based on data gathered both on dedicated hardware and at the CERN Computer Center