Short-term effects of focal muscle vibration on motor recovery after acute stroke: a pilot randomized sham-controlled study

Repetitive focal muscle vibration (rMV) is known to promote neural plasticity and long-lasting motor recovery in chronic stroke patients. Those structural and functional changes within the motor network underlying motor recovery occur in the very first hours after stroke. Nonetheless, to our knowledge, no rMV-based studies have been carried out in acute stroke patients so far, and the clinical benefit of rMV in this phase of stroke is yet to be determined. The aim of this randomized double-blind sham-controlled study is to investigate the short-term effect of rMV on motor recovery in acute stroke patients. Out of 22 acute stroke patients, 10 were treated with the rMV (vibration group–VG), while 12 underwent the sham treatment (control group–CG). Both treatments were carried out for 3 consecutive days, starting within 72 h of stroke onset; each daily session consisted of three 10-min treatments (for each treated limb), interspersed with a 1-min interval. rMV was delivered using a specific device (Cro®System, NEMOCO srl, Italy). The transducer was applied perpendicular to the target muscle's belly, near its distal tendon insertion, generating a 0.2–0.5 mm peak-to-peak sinusoidal displacement at a frequency of 100 Hz. All participants also underwent a daily standard rehabilitation program. The study protocol underwent local ethics committee approval (ClinicalTrial.gov NCT03697525) and written informed consent was obtained from all of the participants. With regard to the different pre-treatment clinical statuses, VG patients showed significant clinical improvement with respect to CG-treated patients among the NIHSS (p < 0.001), Fugl-Meyer (p = 0.001), and Motricity Index (p < 0.001) scores. In addition, when the upper and lower limb scales scores were compared between the two groups, VG patients were found to have a better clinical improvement at all the clinical end points. This study provides the first evidence that rMV is able to improve the motor outcome in a cohort of acute stroke patients, regardless of the pretreatment clinical status. Being a safe and well-tolerated intervention, which is easy to perform at the bedside, rMV may represent a valid complementary non-pharmacological therapy to promote motor recovery in acute stroke patients

Strongly enhanced light-matter coupling of a monolayer WS2 from a bound state in the continuum

Optical bound states in the continuum (BIC) allow to totally prevent a photonic mode from radiating into free space along a given spatial direction. Polariton excitations derived from the strong radiation-matter interaction of a BIC with an excitonic resonance inherit an ultralong radiative lifetime and significant nonlinearities due to their hybrid nature. However, maximizing the light-matter interaction in these structures remains challenging, especially with 2D semiconductors, thus preventing the observation of room temperature nonlinearities of BIC polaritons. Here we show a strong light-matter interaction enhancement at room temperature by coupling monolayer WS2 excitons to a BIC, while optimizing for the electric field strength at the monolayer position through Bloch surface wave confinement. By acting on the grating geometry, the coupling with the active material is maximized in an open and flexible architecture, allowing to achieve a 100 meV photonic bandgap with the BIC in a local energy minimum and a record 70 meV Rabi splitting. Our novel architecture provides large room temperature optical nonlinearities, thus paving the way to tunable BIC-based polariton devices with topologically-protected robustness to fabrication imperfections.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figur

Crossmodal interactions during affective picture processing

"Natural" crossmodal correspondences, such as the spontaneous tendency to associate high pitches with high spatial locations, are often hypothesized to occur preattentively and independently of task instructions (top-down attention). Here, we investigate bottom-up attentional engagement by using emotional scenes that are known to naturally and reflexively engage attentional resources. We presented emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) or neutral pictures either below or above a fixation cross, while participants were required to discriminate between a high or a low pitch tone (experiment 1). Results showed that despite a robust crossmodal attentional capture of task-irrelevant emotional pictures, the general advantage in classifying the tones for congruent over incongruent visual-auditory stimuli was similar for emotional and neutral pictures. On the other hand, when picture position was task-relevant (experiment 2), task-irrelevant tones did not interact with pictures with regard to their combination of pitch and visual vertical spatial position, but instead they were effective in minimizing the interference effect of emotional picture processing on the ongoing task. These results provide constraints on our current understanding of natural crossmodal correspondences. \ua9 2014 Ferrari et al

The interplay between attention and long-term memory in affective habituation

Previous studies have consistently shown that repeated exposure to emotional stimuli leads to a reduction in cortical and autonomic responses (affective habituation). These findings emerge from studies conducted within a single experimental session, preventing the possibility of disentangling short-term from long-term habituation effects. The present study investigated whether affective habituation reflects a short-living learning process, or a more stable change involving long-term memory. Participants went through a first habituation phase consisting of 80 repetitions of the same set of emotional and neutral pictures, when event-related potentials and oscillatory activity were measured (Session 1). Crucially, after a 1-day interval, the same participants were exposed to a second habituation phase with the same stimuli that had been seen before. Results showed that the attenuation of the late positive potential (LPP) affective modulation prompted throughout repetitions of Session 1 remained unchanged after a 1-day interval, and this between-session habituation effect, which was specific to repeated exemplars, was consistent across different emotional contents. Alpha desynchronization was clearly enhanced for pictures of erotica and mutilation and this modulatory pattern remained fairly stable over repetitions. Altogether, these findings suggest that LPP affective habituation is not a short-living learning process, but, rather, reflects a strengthened long-term memory representation of specific repeated stimuli

New Selective Gas Sensor Based on Piezoelectric Quartz Crystal Modified By Electropolymerization of a Molecular Receptor Functionalized with 2,2'-Bithiophene

A new gas sensor suiting the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) technology has been realized and studied. The sensor is obtained by electropolymerization, onto the surface of a gold-coated piezoelectric quartz crystal (PQC), of a molecular receptor properly functionalised with 2,2-bithiophene. The obtained polymeric coating has shown to be able to selectively form hydrogen bonds with organic molecules containing electronegative atoms like chloroform, acetone, ethyl acetate, ethanol even in presence of hexane or toluene which do not interact with the receptor. The easy electrosynthetic preparation and the specificity of the response are the fundamental advantages of such a polymeric films. The effectiveness of the immobilized receptor has been tested in comparison with the responses obtained with PQCs coated with unfunctionalised poly(2,2-bithiophene). The sensor also showed good reproducibility and fairly long lifetime

Potentialities of a modified QCM sensor for the detection of analytes interacting via H-bonding and application to the determination of ethanol in bread

The capabilities of a previously developed sensor based on quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) were evaluated by using the QCM as detection unit for gas chromatography. Detection and quantitation limits towards eight compounds chosen on the basis of the coordination properties of the receptor were calculated obtaining the lowest value of limit of quantitation in the case of ethanol (LOD = 1.73×10−2 g; LOQ= 3.69×10−2 g). A novel and simple method for the determination of ethanol in bread was then developed and applied. The device proposed was proved promising as “on-line sensor” for quality control during bakery production for ethanol concentrations ranging from 0.26% to 1.70% (w/w) in whole-meal bread and from with ethanol concentration ranging from 0.68% to 2.06% (w/w) in durum-wheat bread