Gender-differences of in vitro colonic motility after chemo- and radiotherapy in humans.

Background: The aim of the present in vitro study was to investigate, in different genders, motor responses in surgical colonic specimens from patients with rectal cancer undergoing and not undergoing chemotherapy with capecitabine and radiotherapy. Methods: This in vitro study was conducted from October 2015 to August 2017 at the Experimental Pharmacology Laboratory at the National Institute “S. de Bellis” after collecting samples at the Department of Surgery. Segments of sigmoid colon were obtained from 15 patients (Male (M)/Female (F) = 8/7; control group, CG) operated on for elective colorectal resection for rectal cancer without obstruction and 14 patients (M/F = 7/7; study group, SG) operated on for elective colorectal resection for rectal cancer who also received chemotherapy, based on capecitabine twice daily, and radiotherapy. Isometric tension was measured on colonic circular muscle strips exposed to increasing carbachol or histamine concentrations to obtain concentration-response curves. The motor responses to electrically evoked stimulation were also investigated. Results: In males, carbachol and histamine caused concentration-dependent contractions in the CG and SG. An increased sensitivity and a higher response to carbachol and histamine were observed in SG than CG (P < 0.01). On the contrary, in females, the response to carbachol was not significantly different in CG from the SG and the maximal responses to carbachol were greater in CG than in SG (P < 0.001). The same applied to histamine for half-maximal effective concentrations and maximal response in that they were not significantly different in CG from the SG. Electrically evoked contractions were significantly more pronounced in males, especially in the SG (P < 0.05). Conclusions: This preliminary in vitro study has shown gender differences in motor responses of colonic circular muscle strips in patients who had received chemotherapy with capecitabine and radiotherapy

The 'not-so-strange' body in the mirror: : A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Paul M. Jenkinson, and Catherine Preston, ‘The “not-so-strange” body in the mirror: A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation’, Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 48, pp. 262-272, first published online 4 January 2017, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.12.007 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.In this study we adopted a psychometric approach to examine how the body is subjectively experienced in a mirror. One hundred and twenty-four healthy participants viewed their body for five minutes directly or via a mirror, and then completed a 20-item questionnaire designed to capture subjective experiences of the body. PCA revealed a two-component structure for both direct and mirror conditions, comprising body evaluations (and alienation) and unusual feelings and perceptions. The relationship between these components and pre-existing tendencies for appearance anxiety, body dysmorphic-type beliefs, dissociative symptomatology, self-objectification and delusion ideation further supported the similarity between direct and mirror conditions; however, the occurrence of strange experiences like those reported to occur during prolonged face viewing was not confirmed. These results suggest that, despite obvious differences in visual feedback, observing the body via a mirror (as an outside observer) is subjectively equivalent to observing the body directly (from our own viewpoint).Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe

Observations of the high-redshift Universe with the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral hydrogen promise to open an entirely new window onto the early phases of cosmic structure formation. Here we review the physics of the 21 cm transition, focusing on processes relevant at high redshifts, and describe the insights to be gained from such observations. These include measuring the matter power spectrum at z~50, observing the formation of the cosmic web and the first luminous sources, and mapping the reionization of the intergalactic medium. The epoch of reionization is of particular interest, because large HII regions will seed substantial fluctuations in the 21 cm background. We also discuss the experimental challenges involved in detecting this signal, with an emphasis on the Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. These increase rapidly toward low frequencies and are especially severe for the highest redshift applications. Assuming that these difficulties can be overcome, the redshifted 21 cm line will offer unique insight into the high-redshift Universe, complementing other probes but providing the only direct, three-dimensional view of structure formation from z~200 to z~6.Comment: extended review accepted by Physics Reports, 207 pages, 44 figures (some low resolution); version with high resolution figures available at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~srf28/21cm/index.htm; minor changes to match published versio

Embodiment and Presence in Virtual Reality After Stroke. A Comparative Study With Healthy Subjects

[EN] The ability of virtual reality (VR) to recreate controlled, immersive, and interactive environments that provide intensive and customized exercises has motivated its therapeutic use after stroke. Interaction and bodily presence in VR-based interventions is usually mediated through virtual selves, which synchronously represent body movements or responses to events on external input devices. Embodied self-representations in the virtual world not only provide an anchor for visuomotor tasks, but their morphologies can have behavioral implications. While research has focused on the underlying subjective mechanisms of exposure to VR on healthy individuals, the transference of these findings to individuals with stroke is not evident and remains unexplored, which could affect the experience and, ultimately, the clinical effectiveness of neurorehabilitation interventions. This study determined and compared the sense of embodiment and presence elicited by a virtual environment under different perspectives and levels of immersion in healthy subjects and individuals with stroke. Forty-six healthy subjects and 32 individuals with stroke embodied a gender-matched neutral avatar in a virtual environment that was displayed in a first-person perspective with a head-mounted display and in a third-person perspective with a screen, and the participants were asked to interact in a virtual task for 10 min under each condition in counterbalanced order, and to complete two questionnaires about the sense of embodiment and presence experienced during the interaction. The sense of body-ownership, self-location, and presence were more vividly experienced in a first-person than in a third-person perspective by both healthy subjects (p < 0.001, eta(2)(p) = 0.212; p = 0.005, eta(2)(p) = 0.101; p = 0.001, eta(2)(p) = 0.401, respectively) and individuals with stroke (p = 0.019, eta(2)(p) = 0.070; p = 0.001, eta(2)(p) = 0.135; p = 0.014, eta(2)(p) = 0.077, respectively). In contrast, no agency perspective-related differences were found in any group. All measures were consistently higher for healthy controls than for individuals with stroke, but differences between groups only reached statistical significance in presence under the first-person condition (p < 0.010, eta(2)(p) = 0.084). In spite of these differences, the participants experienced a vivid sense of embodiment and presence in almost all conditions. These results provide first evidence that, although less intensively, embodiment and presence are similarly experienced by individuals who have suffered a stroke and by healthy individuals, which could support the vividness of their experience and, consequently, the effectiveness of VR-based interventions.This study was funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain (Project RTC-2017-6051-7 and Grant BES-2014-068218), Fundació la Marató de la TV3 (Grant 201701-10), and Universitat Politècnica de València (Grant PAID-10-18). We acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan Xp GPU used for this research.Borrego, A.; Latorre, J.; Alcañiz Raya, ML.; Llorens Rodríguez, R. (2019). Embodiment and Presence in Virtual Reality After Stroke. A Comparative Study With Healthy Subjects. Frontiers in Neurology. 10:1-8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2019.01061S1810Berlucchi, G., & Aglioti, S. (1997). The body in the brain: neural bases of corporeal awareness. Trends in Neurosciences, 20(12), 560-564. doi:10.1016/s0166-2236(97)01136-3Legrand, D. (2006). The Bodily Self: The Sensori-Motor Roots of Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(1), 89-118. doi:10.1007/s11097-005-9015-6Arzy, S., Overney, L. S., Landis, T., & Blanke, O. (2006). Neural Mechanisms of Embodiment. Archives of Neurology, 63(7), 1022. doi:10.1001/archneur.63.7.1022De Vignemont, F. (2011). Embodiment, ownership and disownership. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(1), 82-93. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.09.004Giummarra, M. J., Gibson, S. J., Georgiou-Karistianis, N., & Bradshaw, J. L. (2008). Mechanisms underlying embodiment, disembodiment and loss of embodiment. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 32(1), 143-160. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2007.07.001Ma, K., & Hommel, B. (2015). The role of agency for perceived ownership in the virtual hand illusion. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 277-288. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.07.008Kilteni, K., Maselli, A., Kording, K. P., & Slater, M. (2015). Over my fake body: body ownership illusions for studying the multisensory basis of own-body perception. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00141Clark, A., Kiverstein, J., & Vierkant, T. (Eds.). (2013). Decomposing the Will. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746996.001.0001Frith, C. D., Blakemore, S.-J., & Wolpert, D. M. (2000). Abnormalities in the awareness and control of action. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 355(1404), 1771-1788. doi:10.1098/rstb.2000.0734Bermúdez i Badia, S., Fluet, G. G., Llorens, R., & Deutsch, J. E. (2016). Virtual Reality for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation Post Stroke: Design Principles and Evidence. Neurorehabilitation Technology, 573-603. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28603-7_28Perez-Marcos, D., Sanchez-Vives, M. V., & Slater, M. (2011). Is my hand connected to my body? The impact of body continuity and arm alignment on the virtual hand illusion. Cognitive Neurodynamics, 6(4), 295-305. doi:10.1007/s11571-011-9178-5IJsselsteijn, W. A., de Kort, Y. A. W., & Haans, A. (2006). Is This My Hand I See Before Me? The Rubber Hand Illusion in Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(4), 455-464. doi:10.1162/pres.15.4.455Banakou, D., Groten, R., & Slater, M. (2013). Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(31), 12846-12851. doi:10.1073/pnas.1306779110Yee, N., & Bailenson, J. (2007). The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior. Human Communication Research, 33(3), 271-290. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.xSteed, A., Frlston, S., Lopez, M. M., Drummond, J., Pan, Y., & Swapp, D. (2016). An ‘In the Wild’ Experiment on Presence and Embodiment using Consumer Virtual Reality Equipment. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 22(4), 1406-1414. doi:10.1109/tvcg.2016.2518135Colomer, C., Llorens, R., Noé, E., & Alcañiz, M. (2016). Effect of a mixed reality-based intervention on arm, hand, and finger function on chronic stroke. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 13(1). doi:10.1186/s12984-016-0153-6Laver, K. E., Lange, B., George, S., Deutsch, J. E., Saposnik, G., & Crotty, M. (2017). Virtual reality for stroke rehabilitation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. doi:10.1002/14651858.cd008349.pub4Llorens, R., Borrego, A., Palomo, P., Cebolla, A., Noé, E., i Badia, S. B., & Baños, R. (2017). Body schema plasticity after stroke: Subjective and neurophysiological correlates of the rubber hand illusion. Neuropsychologia, 96, 61-69. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.01.007Zeller, D., Gross, C., Bartsch, A., Johansen-Berg, H., & Classen, J. (2011). Ventral Premotor Cortex May Be Required for Dynamic Changes in the Feeling of Limb Ownership: A Lesion Study. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(13), 4852-4857. doi:10.1523/jneurosci.5154-10.2011Folstein, M. F., Folstein, S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (1975). «Mini-mental state». Journal of Psychiatric Research, 12(3), 189-198. doi:10.1016/0022-3956(75)90026-6Romero, M., Sánchez, A., Marín, C., Navarro, M. D., Ferri, J., & Noé, E. (2012). Clinical usefulness of the Spanish version of the Mississippi Aphasia Screening Test (MASTsp): validation in stroke patients. Neurología (English Edition), 27(4), 216-224. doi:10.1016/j.nrleng.2011.06.001Latorre, J., Llorens, R., Colomer, C., & Alcañiz, M. (2018). Reliability and comparison of Kinect-based methods for estimating spatiotemporal gait parameters of healthy and post-stroke individuals. Journal of Biomechanics, 72, 268-273. doi:10.1016/j.jbiomech.2018.03.008Lloréns, R., Noé, E., Naranjo, V., Borrego, A., Latorre, J., & Alcañiz, M. (2015). Tracking Systems for Virtual Rehabilitation: Objective Performance vs. Subjective Experience. A Practical Scenario. Sensors, 15(3), 6586-6606. doi:10.3390/s150306586Slater, M., & Steed, A. (2000). A Virtual Presence Counter. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 9(5), 413-434. doi:10.1162/105474600566925Slater, M., Spanlang, B., Sanchez-Vives, M. V., & Blanke, O. (2010). First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality. PLoS ONE, 5(5), e10564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010564Petkova, V. I., Khoshnevis, M., & Ehrsson, H. H. (2011). The Perspective Matters! Multisensory Integration in Ego-Centric Reference Frames Determines Full-Body Ownership. Frontiers in Psychology, 2. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00035Maselli, A., & Slater, M. (2013). The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00083Debarba, H. G., Molla, E., Herbelin, B., & Boulic, R. (2015). Characterizing embodied interaction in First and Third Person Perspective viewpoints. 2015 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). doi:10.1109/3dui.2015.7131728Burin, D., Livelli, A., Garbarini, F., Fossataro, C., Folegatti, A., Gindri, P., & Pia, L. (2015). Are Movements Necessary for the Sense of Body Ownership? Evidence from the Rubber Hand Illusion in Pure Hemiplegic Patients. PLOS ONE, 10(3), e0117155. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117155Post-stroke cognitive disorders TeasellR SalterK FaltynekP CotoiA EskesG Evidence-Based Review of Stroke Rehabilitatio

Angular and Current-Target Correlations in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Correlations between charged particles in deep inelastic ep scattering have been studied in the Breit frame with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 6.4 pb-1. Short-range correlations are analysed in terms of the angular separation between current-region particles within a cone centred around the virtual photon axis. Long-range correlations between the current and target regions have also been measured. The data support predictions for the scaling behaviour of the angular correlations at high Q2 and for anti-correlations between the current and target regions over a large range in Q2 and in the Bjorken scaling variable x. Analytic QCD calculations and Monte Carlo models correctly describe the trends of the data at high Q2, but show quantitative discrepancies. The data show differences between the correlations in deep inelastic scattering and e+e- annihilation.Comment: 26 pages including 10 figures (submitted to Eur. J. Phys. C

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined. For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4, while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than 90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Dissociation of virtual photons in events with a leading proton at HERA

The ZEUS detector has been used to study dissociation of virtual photons in events with a leading proton, gamma^* p -> X p, in e^+p collisions at HERA. The data cover photon virtualities in two ranges, 0.03<Q^2<0.60 GeV^2 and 2<Q^2<100 GeV^2, with M_X>1.5 GeV, where M_X is the mass of the hadronic final state, X. Events were required to have a leading proton, detected in the ZEUS leading proton spectrometer, carrying at least 90% of the incoming proton energy. The cross section is presented as a function of t, the squared four-momentum transfer at the proton vertex, Phi, the azimuthal angle between the positron scattering plane and the proton scattering plane, and Q^2. The data are presented in terms of the diffractive structure function, F_2^D(3). A next-to-leading-order QCD fit to the higher-Q^2 data set and to previously published diffractive charm production data is presented

Azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles at high transverse momenta in PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV

The azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles in PbPb collisions at nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is measured with the CMS detector at the LHC over an extended transverse momentum (pt) range up to approximately 60 GeV. The data cover both the low-pt region associated with hydrodynamic flow phenomena and the high-pt region where the anisotropies may reflect the path-length dependence of parton energy loss in the created medium. The anisotropy parameter (v2) of the particles is extracted by correlating charged tracks with respect to the event-plane reconstructed by using the energy deposited in forward-angle calorimeters. For the six bins of collision centrality studied, spanning the range of 0-60% most-central events, the observed v2 values are found to first increase with pt, reaching a maximum around pt = 3 GeV, and then to gradually decrease to almost zero, with the decline persisting up to at least pt = 40 GeV over the full centrality range measured.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Compressed representation of a partially defined integer function over multiple arguments

In OLAP (OnLine Analitical Processing) data are analysed in an n-dimensional cube. The cube may be represented as a partially defined function over n arguments. Considering that often the function is not defined everywhere, we ask: is there a known way of representing the function or the points in which it is defined, in a more compact manner than the trivial one

Search for new physics with same-sign isolated dilepton events with jets and missing transverse energy

A search for new physics is performed in events with two same-sign isolated leptons, hadronic jets, and missing transverse energy in the final state. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns produced in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. This constitutes a factor of 140 increase in integrated luminosity over previously published results. The observed yields agree with the standard model predictions and thus no evidence for new physics is found. The observations are used to set upper limits on possible new physics contributions and to constrain supersymmetric models. To facilitate the interpretation of the data in a broader range of new physics scenarios, information on the event selection, detector response, and efficiencies is provided.Comment: Published in Physical Review Letter