Mitochondrial quality control and neurological disease: an emerging connection

The human brain is a highly complex organ with remarkable energy demands. Although it represents only 2% of the total body weight, it accounts for 20% of all oxygen consumption, reflecting its high rate of metabolic activity. Mitochondria have a crucial role in the supply of energy to the brain. Consequently, their deterioration can have important detrimental consequences on the function and plasticity of neurons, and is thought to have a pivotal role in ageing and in the pathogenesis of several neurological disorders. Owing to their inherent physiological functions, mitochondria are subjected to particularly high levels of stress and have evolved specific molecular quality-control mechanisms to maintain the mitochondrial components. Here, we review some of the most recent advances in the understanding of mitochondrial stress-control pathways, with a particular focus on how defects in such pathways might contribute to neurodegenerative disease

Options for new real-time image-processing architectures in cardiovascular systems

Low-dose X-ray imaging, diagnosis by image analysis and multi-modal medical imaging are example aspects that lead to more advanced image processing algorithms and the corresponding platforms on which they have to be executed. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of commercially available off-the-shelf components for a new computing platform. In the analysis, we will comply to some specific use cases. In cardiovascular minimal invasive surgery, physicians require low-latency imaging applications, as their actions must be directly visible on the screen. Typical image-processing algorithms in this domain are based on multi-resolution decomposition, noise reduction, image analysis and enhancement techniques. We have compared various solutions for possible processing architectures. The most interesting technology areas for constituting a new architecture are presented and we discuss the mapping of the use cases onto the various architectural proposals. Results show that a heterogeneous architecture gives the highest potential for current and upcoming image-processing applications. However, hardware and software solutions to support low-latency, high-bandwidth image streaming and an efficient concurrent distribution of functionality still need further development. This validates a clear direction for the future, which is based on modeling streaming computing architectures and special interconnect infrastructures

Unbiased vessel-diameter quantification based on the FWHM criterion

The full-width at half-max (FWHM) criterion is often used for both manual and automatic quantification of the vessel diameter in medical images. The FWHM criterion is easy to understand and it can be implemented with low computational cost. However, it is well known that the FWHM criterion can give an over- and underestimation of the vessel diameter. In this paper, we propose a simple and original method to create an unbiased estimation of the vessel diameter based on the FWHM criterion and we compared the robustness to noise of several edge detectors. The quantitative results of our experiments show that the proposed method is accurate and precise in comparison to other (more complex) edge detectors, even for small vessels