XROMM analysis of tooth occlusion and temporomandibular joint kinematics during feeding in juvenile miniature pigs

Like humans, domestic pigs are omnivorous and thus are a common model for human masticatory function. Prior attempts to characterize food–tooth interactions and jaw movements associated with mastication have been limited to aspects of the oral apparatus that are visible externally (with videography) and/or to 2D movements of oral structures (with monoplanar videofluoroscopy). We used XROMM, a 3D technique that combines CT-based morphology with biplanar videofluoroscopy, to quantify mandibular kinematics, tooth occlusion and mandibular condylar displacements within the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) during feeding. We observed that the pig TMJ moved detectably in only three of six possible degrees of freedom during mastication: two rotations, pitch and yaw; and one translation, protraction–retraction. Asymmetrical yaw around a dorsoventral axis produced the observed alternating left–right chewing cycles responsible for food reduction. Furthermore, the relative motions of the upper and lower premolars contained a substantial mesiodistal component in addition to the buccolingual component, resulting in an oblique (rather than a strictly transverse) power stroke. This research demonstrates the capacity of XROMM to explore the kinematic underpinnings of key masticatory movements, such as the occlusal power stroke, by integrating tooth, joint and rigid body jaw movements. XROMM also allowed us to test kinematic hypotheses based on skeletal anatomy with actual kinematics observed during naturalistic feeding behaviors. We observed that the soft tissue structures of the TMJ appear to play a significant role in limiting the range of motion of a joint, and thus analyses based solely on osseous morphology may over-estimate joint mobility

Pipeline Comparison for the Pre-Processing of Resting-State Data in Epilepsy

Noise removal is a critical step to recover the signal of interest from resting-state fMRI data. Several pre-processing pipelines have been developed mainly based on nuisance regression or independent component analysis. The aim of this work was to evaluate the ability in removing spurious non-BO LD signals of different cleaning pipelines when applied to a dataset of healthy controls and temporal lobe epilepsy patients. Increased tSNR and power spectral density in the resting-state frequency range (0.01-0.1 Hz) were found for all pre-processing pipelines with respect to the minimally pre-processed data, suggesting a positive gain in terms of temporal properties when optimal cleaning procedures are applied to the acquired fMRI data. All the pre-processing pipelines considered were able to recover the DMN through group ICA. By visually comparing this network across all the pipelines and groups, we found that AROMA, SPM12, FIX and FIXMC were able to better delineate the posterior cingulate cortex

Mitochondrial phylogeography and demographic history of the Vicuña: implications for conservation

The vicuña (Vicugna vicugna; Miller, 1924) is a conservation success story, having recovered from near extinction in the 1960s to current population levels estimated at 275 000. However, lack of information about its demographic history and genetic diversity has limited both our understanding of its recovery and the development of science-based conservation measures. To examine the evolution and recent demographic history of the vicuña across its current range and to assess its genetic variation and population structure, we sequenced mitochondrial DNA from the control region (CR) for 261 individuals from 29 populations across Peru, Chile and Argentina. Our results suggest that populations currently designated as Vicugna vicugna vicugna and Vicugna vicugna mensalis comprise separate mitochondrial lineages. The current population distribution appears to be the result of a recent demographic expansion associated with the last major glacial event of the Pleistocene in the northern (18 to 22°S) dry Andes 14–12 000 years ago and the establishment of an extremely arid belt known as the 'Dry Diagonal' to 29°S. Within the Dry Diagonal, small populations of V. v. vicugna appear to have survived showing the genetic signature of demographic isolation, whereas to the north V. v. mensalis populations underwent a rapid demographic expansion before recent anthropogenic impacts

Growth and reproductive performance of 14- to 15-month-old Hereford heifers

ABSTRACT Aiming at breeding heifers with 14-15 months of age, 100 Hereford calves were subjected to different feeding systems. Heifers grazed on a natural pasture in early winter, fed or not a supplement (14% crude protein; 72% total digestible nutrients), were transferred to a ryegrass pasture for 73 days, and then returned to a natural pasture for 15 days until the beginning of the breeding season. During the last 15 days on ryegrass pasture and the 15 days of the return to the natural pasture, half of the heifers of the two previous systems were offered the supplement, thereby establishing four feeding treatments. Heifers supplemented during the second period, independently of supplementation during the first grazing period, presented higher average daily gain and greater backfat values than the non-supplemented heifers. The breeding season extended for 75 days. At the start of the breeding season (November 18), heifers supplemented during both periods presented higher body condition score and body weight. The highest percentage of puberty was determined in heifers supplemented in the early winter. Heifers supplemented during both periods presented the highest pregnancy rate. Pregnant heifers presented higher average daily gain when fed the supplement during the second period, as well as higher relative pelvic area, body weight, and body condition score at the start and end of the breeding season. To an expressive pregnancy in 14- to 15- month-old heifers, higher weaning weights and pasture allowance are required to get a better answer to supplements offered

Comprehensive multiplexed immune profiling of the ductal carcinoma in situ immune microenvironment regarding subsequent ipsilateral invasive breast cancer risk

Background: Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is treated to prevent subsequent ipsilateral invasive breast cancer (iIBC). However, many DCIS lesions will never become invasive. To prevent overtreatment, we need to distinguish harmless from potentially hazardous DCIS. We investigated whether the immune microenvironment (IME) in DCIS correlates with transition to iIBC.Methods: Patients were derived from a Dutch population-based cohort of 10,090 women with pure DCIS with a median follow-up time of 12 years. Density, composition and proximity to the closest DCIS cell of CD20+ B-cells, CD3+CD8+ T-cells, CD3+CD8- T-cells, CD3+FOXP3+ regulatory T-cells, CD68+ cells, and CD8+Ki67+ T-cells was assessed with multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) with digital whole-slide analysis and compared between primary DCIS lesions of 77 women with subsequent iIBC (cases) and 64 without (controls).Results: Higher stromal density of analysed immune cell subsets was significantly associated with higher grade, ER negativity, HER-2 positivity, Ki67 ≥ 14%, periductal fibrosis and comedonecrosis (P Conclusion: IME features analysed by mIF in 141 patients from a well-annotated cohort of pure DCIS with long-term follow-up are no predictors of subsequent iIBC, but do correlate with other factors (grade, ER, HER2 status, Ki-67) known to be associated with invasive recurrences.</p

TME12/400: Application Oriented Wavelet-based Coding of Volumetric Medical Data

INTRODUCTION: While medical data are increasingly acquired in a multidimensional space, in clinical practice they are mainly still analyzed as images. We propose a wavelet-based coding technique exploiting the full dimensionality of the data distribution while allowing to recover a single image without any need to decode the whole volume. The proposed compression scheme is based on the Layered Zero Coding (LZC) method. Two modes are considered. In the progressive (PROG) mode, the volume is processed as a whole, while in the layer-per-layer (LPL) one each layer of each sub-band is encoded independently. The three-dimensional extension of the Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW) coder is used as reference for coding efficiency. All working modalities provide a fully embedded bit-stream allowing a progressive by quality recovering of the encoded information. METHODS: The 3D DWT is performed mapping integers to integers thus allowing lossless compression. Two different coding systems have been considered: EZW and LZC. LZC models the expected statistical dependencies among coefficients by defining some conditional terms (contexts) which summarize the significance state of the samples belonging to a generalized neighborhood of the coefficient being encoded. Such terms are then used by a context adaptive arithmetic coder. The LPL mode has been designed in order to be able to independently decode any image of the dataset, and it is derived from the PROG mode by over-constraining the system. The sub-bands are quantized and encoded according to a sequence of uniform quantizers with decreasing step-size. This ensures progressiveness capabilities when decoding both the whole volume and a single image. RESULTS: Performances have been evaluated on two datasets: DSR and ANGIO, an opthalmologic angiographic sequence. For each mode the best context has been retained. Results show that the proposed system is competitive with EZW, and PROG mode is the more performant. The main factors compromising compression efficiency in the LPL mode are the restriction on the choice of the contexts, and the overheading resulting from the independent coding of each layer in each sub-band. This mainly depends on the number of decomposition levels and the volume size. The isotropy of the data distribution for DSR volume results in better compression efficiency. DISCUSSION: The exploitation of the whole 3D correlation among data samples improves coding efficiency with respect to 2D systems, encoding each image independently. The number of layers to be decoded in the LPL mode in each sub-band to recover a given image is a function of the length of Wavelet filters, which makes short ones particularly suited. For the filter used the maximum this number is 4. This makes the system particularly efficient at decoding, ensuring a fast and effective access to data. Among the possible applications, it is worth citing low-rate transmission (telemedicine), archiving and remote access