Brain–Machine Interfaces: The Role of the Neurosurgeon

The neurotechnology field is set to expand rapidly in the coming years as technological innovations in hardware and software are translated to the clinical setting. Given our unique access to patients with neurological disorders, expertise with which to guide appropriate treatments and technical skills to implant brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), neurosurgeons have a key role to play in the progress of this field. We outline the current state and key challenges in this rapidly advancing field including implant technology, implant recipients, implantation methodology, implant function, ethical, regulatory and economic considerations. Our key message is to encourage the neurosurgical community to proactively engage in collaborating with other healthcare professionals, engineers, scientists, ethicists and regulators in tackling these issues. By doing so, we will equip ourselves with the skills and expertise to drive the field forward and avoid being mere technicians in an industry driven by those around us

Knowledge of Brazilian dentists and students in treating dentine hypersensitivity

Objective: To evaluate knowledge of undergraduates and qualified dentists from a Brazilian Dental School in treating Dentine Hypersensitivity (DH). Methodology: Data obtained from a 22-item questionnaire were analysed and arranged in distribution figures. Results: Of 100 respondents, 66.3% indicated that up to 25% of their patients had DH; 41.7%, that the duration of discomfort was up to eight weeks; 78.4%, that they examined a patient with DH within the last two-four weeks; and 70.4%, that this was done after the patient initiated the conversation on DH. Most of participants responded DH affects patients’ quality of life, and its aetiology was attrition, exposed dentine, occlusal interference, gingival recession or abrasion. The most common ways to diagnose DH were sensitivity history analysis, clinical examination, clinical testing and probing; and conflicting conditions were fractured restoration, bleaching sensitivity, marginal leakage, chipped tooth and periodontal disease. Furthermore, 82.5% and 78.7% of respondents indicated they were confident in diagnosing DH and providing advice to patients, but only 38.8% identified hydrodynamic theory as its underlying mechanism. To evaluate pain from DH they considered self-assessment, dental examination, dietary analysis and thermal assessment; and as recommendations, the use of desensitizing dentifrices, education on toothbrushing, in-office application of desensitizing products, and restorations. Conclusion: There is still confusion concerning the aetiology, the diagnosis and the subsequent management of DH, and both students and qualified dentists need better education

Awareness of Dentine Hypersensitivity among General Dental Practitioners in Mumbai, India.

Aim: The aim of this study was to describe the perception of dentists in general dental practice on the diagnosis and management of dentine hypersensitivity (DH) as perceived by a randomly selected sample of private dental practitioners in Mumbai. Methods: 500 dentists (Mean age 38-35 years [S.D = 11.3], 114 M: 92 F were randomly selected using the Indian Dental Association membership list and invited to participate in a questionnaire-based survey. Results: 206 private practitioners (GDPs) were included in the final analysis of the data. Most of these respondents [90.2%]) indicated that half of their patients reported problems with DH;78.2% respondents reported that the patients to usually initiated the conversation on DH; and 83.4% indicated that up to 25% of their patients considered DH as a serious problem. A greater part of the respondents (62.2%) reported that the pain due to DH lasted ≤4 weeks. There was an overall awareness regarding the current mechanisms underlying DH, with the majority of dentists (≥66%) reporting inadequate brushing of the teeth as an initiating cause and approximately 50% suggesting periodontal causes amongst the other recorded reasons. The most common management strategy employed by dentists was to prescribe desensitizing agents for home use. Conclusion: The conclusions from the present study were in agreement with the results from previous studies and generally consistent with the current scientific consensus on the management of DH by GDPs

Comparative Evaluation of Desensitizing Dentifrices containing BioMin®, Novamin® and Fluoride on Dentinal Tubule Occlusion before and after a Citric Acid Challenge– A Scanning Electron Microscope in-vitro Study.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the in vitro effectiveness of two different bioglass-containing commercial desensitizing toothpastes together with a fluoride containing dentifrice as a control on dentinal tubule occlusion before and after a citric acid challenge and immersion in artificial saliva. Methodology: Forty-five dentine specimens with patent tubules were randomly divided into 3 groups (n=15), Group A: brushing with Biomin (Elsenz®); Group B: brushing with Novamin (Sensodyne Repair®); and a control Group C: brushing with fluoride (Colgate Total®). In each group, treated specimens were further subdivided into Subgroup A: directly undergoing SEM, Subgroup B and C soaked in 0.3% citric acid and artificial saliva (Wet mouth®) for 5 minutes respectively. The percentage of tubule occlusion (%OCT) of the representative images from each group was analyzed using an environmental scanning electron microscopy and were scored by a blind review. Conclusion: The %OCT with BioMin® containing dentifrice was significantly higher than NovaMin® and a control i.e., fluoride containing dentifrice. Biomin ® and Novamin® containing dentifrices showed significant citric acid resistant compared to the fluoride containing dentifrice although the BioMin® containing dentifrice significantly showed better resistant to a citric acid challenge than the NovaMin® containing de

Decoding machine learning benchmarks

Despite the availability of benchmark machine learning (ML) repositories (e.g., UCI, OpenML), there is no standard evaluation strategy yet capable of pointing out which is the best set of datasets to serve as gold standard to test different ML algorithms. In recent studies, Item Response Theory (IRT) has emerged as a new approach to elucidate what should be a good ML benchmark. This work applied IRT to explore the well-known OpenML-CC18 benchmark to identify how suitable it is on the evaluation of classifiers. Several classifiers ranging from classical to ensembles ones were evaluated using IRT models, which could simultaneously estimate dataset difficulty and classifiers' ability. The Glicko-2 rating system was applied on the top of IRT to summarize the innate ability and aptitude of classifiers. It was observed that not all datasets from OpenML-CC18 are really useful to evaluate classifiers. Most datasets evaluated in this work (84%) contain easy instances in general (e.g., around 10% of difficult instances only). Also, 80% of the instances in half of this benchmark are very discriminating ones, which can be of great use for pairwise algorithm comparison, but not useful to push classifiers abilities. This paper presents this new evaluation methodology based on IRT as well as the tool decodIRT, developed to guide IRT estimation over ML benchmarks.Comment: Paper published at the BRACIS 2020 conference, 15 pages, 4 figure

Hypertensive patients' perceptions of their physicians' knowledge about them: a cross-sectional study in Japan

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In order to evaluate the difference in quality of primary care provided by physicians between the types of medical institutions in Japan, we examined whether the physicians' comprehensive knowledge of their patients is perceived differently by the patients seen at clinics and hospitals.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Patients with prescriptions for hypertensive drugs were approached sequentially at 13 pharmacies, and were administered a questionnaire on their perception of their physician's knowledge about them. Data were obtained for 687 patients (362 from clinics and 325 from hospitals). A physician's knowledge of his or her patients was assessed according to six aspects: their medical history, their current medications, history of allergy, what worries patients most about their health, patients' values and beliefs on their health, and patients' roles and responsibilities at work, home, or school. Responses were scored from 1 through 6 (1: knows very well; 6: doesn't know at all).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Patients treated in clinics were seen more frequently, for a longer period, and had fewer complications than the patients who were treated in hospitals. Among the six aspects of physicians' knowledge assessed, 79.3% of the patients reported that their physicians knew their complete list of medications "very well or well," while 28.3% reported the same about their roles and responsibilities at work, home, or school. Physicians in clinics were considered to know their patients' worries about their health (p = 0.004) and the roles and responsibilities of the patients at work, home, or school (p = 0.028) well. Multiple regression analysis showed that the type of medical institutions remained as a significant variable only for the aspect of patients' worries about their health. The factor that consistently affected the patients' perception of physicians' knowledge about them was the patients' age.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Hypertensive patients' perceptions of their physicians' knowledge about them did not differ significantly between clinics and hospitals in Japan for most of the aspects. In order to differentiate the roles of physicians in hospitals and clinics better and ensure the quality of primary care, the establishment of a standardized educational system to train primary care physicians better is recommended.</p

Challenges in monitoring and managing engineered slopes in a changing climate

Geotechnical asset owners need to know which parts of their asset network are vulnerable to climate change induced failure in order to optimise future investment. Protecting these vulnerable slopes requires monitoring systems capable of identifying and alerting to asset operators changes in the internal conditions that precede failure. Current monitoring systems are heavily reliant on point sensors which can be difficult to interpret across slope scale. This paper presents challenges to producing such a system and research being carried out to address some of these using electrical resistance tomography (ERT). Experimental results show that whilst it is possible to measure soil water content indirectly via resistivity the relationship between resistivity and water content will change over time for a given slope. If geotechnical parameters such as pore water pressure are to be estimated using this method then ERT systems will require integrating with more conventional geotechnical instrumentation to ensure correct representative information is provided. The paper also presents examples of how such data can be processed and communicated to asset owners for the purposes of asset management

Pydna: a simulation and documentation tool for DNA assembly strategies using python

Background: Recent advances in synthetic biology have provided tools to efficiently construct complex DNA molecules which are an important part of many molecular biology and biotechnology projects. The planning of such constructs has traditionally been done manually using a DNA sequence editor which becomes error-prone as scale and complexity of the construction increase. A human-readable formal description of cloning and assembly strategies, which also allows for automatic computer simulation and verification, would therefore be a valuable tool.Results: We have developed pydna, an extensible, free and open source Python library for simulating basic molecular biology DNA unit operations such as restriction digestion, ligation, PCR, primer design, Gibson assembly and homologous recombination. A cloning strategy expressed as a pydna script provides a description that is complete, unambiguous and stable. Execution of the script automatically yields the sequence of the final molecule(s) and that of any intermediate constructs. Pydna has been designed to be understandable for biologists with limited programming skills by providing interfaces that are semantically similar to the description of molecular biology unit operations found in literature.Conclusions: Pydna simplifies both the planning and sharing of cloning strategies and is especially useful for complex or combinatorial DNA molecule construction. An important difference compared to existing tools with similar goals is the use of Python instead of a specifically constructed language, providing a simulation environment that is more flexible and extensible by the user.Thanks to Dr. Aric Hagberg Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S.A and Sergio Simoes, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brasil for help with NetworkX and graph theory in general. Thanks to Henrik Bengtsson, Dept of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, U.S.A. for critical reading of the manuscript. Thanks to the 2013 Bioinformatics 6605 N4 students A. Coelho, A. Faria, A. Neves D. Yelshyna and E. Costa for testing. This work was supported by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) [PTDC/AAC-AMB/120940/2010, EXPL/BBB-BIO/1772/2013]; and the FEDER POFC-COMPETE [PEst-C/BIA/UI4050/2011]. FA and GR were supported by FCT fellowships [SFRH/BD/80934/2011 and SFRH/BD/42565/2007, respectively].info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Gestational age influences the early microarchitectural changes in response to mechanical ventilation in the preterm lamb lung

Background: Preterm birth is associated with abnormal lung architecture, and a reduction in pulmonary function related to the degree of prematurity. A thorough understanding of the impact of gestational age on lung microarchitecture requires reproducible quantitative analysis of lung structure abnormalities. The objectives of this study were (1) to use quantitative histological software (ImageJ) to map morphological patterns of injury resulting from delivery of an identical ventilation strategy to the lung at varying gestational ages and (2) to identify associations between gestational age-specific morphological alterations and key functional outcomes. Method: Lung morphology was compared after 60 min of a standardized ventilation protocol (40 cm H2O sustained inflation and then volume-targeted positive pressure ventilation with positive end-expiratory pressure 8 cm H2O) in lambs at different gestations (119, 124, 128, 133, 140d) representing the spectrum of premature developmental lung states and the term lung. Age-matched controls were compared at 124 and 128d gestation. Automated and manual functions of Image J were used to measure key histological features. Correlation analysis compared morphological and functional outcomes in lambs aged ≤128 and >128d. Results: In initial studies, unventilated lung was indistinguishable at 124 and 128d. Ventilated lung from lambs aged 124d gestation exhibited increased numbers of detached epithelial cells and lung tissue compared with 128d lambs. Comparing results from saccular to alveolar development (120-140d), lambs aged ≤124d exhibited increased lung tissue, average alveolar area, and increased numbers of detached epithelial cells. Alveolar septal width was increased in lambs aged ≤128d. These findings were mirrored in the measures of gas exchange, lung mechanics, and molecular markers of lung injury. Correlation analysis confirmed the gestation-specific relationships between the histological assessments and functional measures in ventilated lambs at gestation ≤128 vs. >128d.Conclusion: Image J allowed rapid, quantitative assessment of alveolar morphology, and lung injury in the preterm lamb model. Gestational age-specific patterns of injury in response to delivery of an identical ventilation strategy were identified, with 128d being a transition point for associations between morphological alterations and functional outcomes. These results further support the need to develop individualized respiratory support approaches tailored to both the gestational age of the infant and their underlying injury response

Karyotype and genome size of Iberochondrostoma almacai (Teleostei, Cyprinidae) and comparison with the sister-species I.lusitanicum

This study aimed to define the karyotype of the recently described Iberian endemic Iberochondrostoma almacai, to revisit the previously documented chromosome polymorphisms of its sister species I.lusitanicum using C-, Ag-/CMA3 and RE-banding, and to compare the two species genome sizes. A 2n = 50 karyotype (with the exception of a triploid I.lusitanicum specimen) and a corresponding haploid chromosome formula of 7M:15SM:3A (FN = 94) were found. Multiple NORs were observed in both species (in two submetacentric chromosome pairs, one of them clearly homologous) and a higher intra and interpopulational variability was evidenced in I.lusitanicum. Flow cytometry measurements of nuclear DNA content showed some significant differences in genome size both between and within species: the genome of I. almacai was smaller than that of I.lusitanicum (mean values 2.61 and 2.93 pg, respectively), which presented a clear interpopulational variability (mean values ranging from 2.72 to 3.00 pg). These data allowed the distinction of both taxa and confirmed the existence of two well differentiated groups within I. lusitanicum: one that includes the populations from the right bank of the Tejo and Samarra drainages, and another that reunites the southern populations. The peculiar differences between the two species, presently listed as “Critically Endangered”, reinforced the importance of this study for future conservation plans