Functional Connectivity Evaluation for Infant EEG Signals based on Artificial Neural Network

The employment of the brain signals electroencephalography (EEG) could supply a deep intuitive understanding for infants behaviour and their alertness level within the living environment. The study of human brain through a computer-based approach has increased significantly as it aiming at the understanding of infants’ mind and measure their attention towards the surrounding activities. The artificial neural network achieved a significant level of success in different fields such as pattern classification, decision making, prediction, and adaptive control by learning from a set of data and construct weight matrices to represent the learning patterns. This research study proposes an artificial neural network based approach to predict the rightward asymmetry or leftward asymmetry which reflects higher frontal functional connectivity in the frontal right and frontal left, respectively within infant’s brain. In the traditional methods, the value of asymmetry of the frontal (FA) functional connectivity is used to determine the rightward or the leftward asymmetry. While the proposed approach is trying to predict that without going through all the levels of the calculation complexity. The achieved work will supply a deep understanding into the deployment of the functional connectivity to provide information on the interactions between different brain regions

Women with endometriosis have higher comorbidities: Analysis of domestic data in Taiwan

AbstractEndometriosis, defined by the presence of viable extrauterine endometrial glands and stroma, can grow or bleed cyclically, and possesses characteristics including a destructive, invasive, and metastatic nature. Since endometriosis may result in pelvic inflammation, adhesion, chronic pain, and infertility, and can progress to biologically malignant tumors, it is a long-term major health issue in women of reproductive age. In this review, we analyze the Taiwan domestic research addressing associations between endometriosis and other diseases. Concerning malignant tumors, we identified four studies on the links between endometriosis and ovarian cancer, one on breast cancer, two on endometrial cancer, one on colorectal cancer, and one on other malignancies, as well as one on associations between endometriosis and irritable bowel syndrome, one on links with migraine headache, three on links with pelvic inflammatory diseases, four on links with infertility, four on links with obesity, four on links with chronic liver disease, four on links with rheumatoid arthritis, four on links with chronic renal disease, five on links with diabetes mellitus, and five on links with cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, etc.). The data available to date support that women with endometriosis might be at risk of some chronic illnesses and certain malignancies, although we consider the evidence for some comorbidities to be of low quality, for example, the association between colon cancer and adenomyosis/endometriosis. We still believe that the risk of comorbidity might be higher in women with endometriosis than that we supposed before. More research is needed to determine whether women with endometriosis are really at risk of these comorbidities

Continuum-based models and concepts for the transport of nanoparticles in saturated porous media: A state-of-the-science review

Environmental applications of nanoparticles (NP) increasingly result in widespread NP distribution within porous media where they are subject to various concurrent transport mechanisms including irreversible deposition, attachment/detachment (equilibrium or kinetic), agglomeration, physical straining, site-blocking, ripening, and size exclusion. Fundamental research in NP transport is typically conducted at small scale, and theoretical mechanistic modeling of particle transport in porous media faces challenges when considering the simultaneous effects of transport mechanisms. Continuum modeling approaches, in contrast, are scalable across various scales ranging from column experiments to aquifer. They have also been able to successfully describe the simultaneous occurrence of various transport mechanisms of NP in porous media such as blocking/straining or agglomeration/deposition/detachment. However, the diversity of model equations developed by different authors and the lack of effective approaches for their validation present obstacles to the successful robust application of these models for describing or predicting NP transport phenomena. This review aims to describe consistently all the important NP transport mechanisms along with their representative mathematical continuum models as found in the current scientific literature. Detailed characterizations of each transport phenomenon in regards to their manifestation in the column experiment outcomes, i.e., breakthrough curve (BTC) and residual concentration profile (RCP), are presented to facilitate future interpretations of BTCs and RCPs. The review highlights two NP transport mechanisms, agglomeration and size exclusion, which are potentially of great importance in controlling the fate and transport of NP in the subsurface media yet have been widely neglected in many existing modeling studies. A critical limitation of the continuum modeling approach is the number of parameters used upon application to larger scales and when a series of transport mechanisms are involved. We investigate the use of simplifying assumptions, such as the equilibrium assumption, in modeling the attachment/detachment mechanisms within a continuum modelling framework. While acknowledging criticisms about the use of this assumption for NP deposition on a mechanistic (process) basis, we found that its use as a description of dynamic deposition behavior in a continuum model yields broadly similar results to those arising from a kinetic model. Furthermore, we show that in two dimensional (2-D) continuum models the modeling efficiency based on the Akaike information criterion (AIC) is enhanced for equilibrium vs kinetic with no significant reduction in model performance. This is because fewer parameters are needed for the equilibrium model compared to the kinetic model. Two major transport regimes are identified in the transport of NP within porous media. The first regime is characterized by higher particle-surface attachment affinity than particle-particle attachment affinity, and operative transport mechanisms of physicochemical filtration, blocking, and physical retention. The second regime is characterized by the domination of particle-particle attachment tendency over particle-surface affinity. In this regime although physicochemical filtration as well as straining may still be operative, ripening is predominant together with agglomeration and further subsequent retention. In both regimes careful assessment of NP fate and transport is necessary since certain combinations of concurrent transport phenomena leading to large migration distances are possible in either case

Multisensory representations of space : multimodal brain imaging approaches

Humans and other primates evolved and live in a three- dimensional space. How and where spatial information is represented in the brain is an important issue in cognitive neuroscience. Evidence from monkey neurophysiological studies suggests that several cortical areas encode spatial information in various reference frames, such as eye-centered, head-centered, arm-centered, object-centered, and body- centered coordinates. Some areas may combine information across multiple sensory modalities to form a coherent representation of the world. Topographic mapping is a fundamental organizing principle of sensory systems. Several retinotopic (eye-centered) maps have been revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. It is not clear, however, whether other spatial reference frames are also represented as continuous topographic maps on the cortical surface. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate cortical representations of multiple reference frames across multiple sensory modalities using multiple brain imaging techniques. The first study uses fMRI to investigate higher-level retinotopic maps with wide-field phase-encoded video stimuli. Results showed that retinotopy extended anteriorly along the fusiform gyrus in the ventral surface, beyond MT+ into the superior temporal and lateral sulci, beyond LIP+ into postcentral sulcus, and medially into posterior cingulate cortex. The second study investigates cortical representations of skin surface using an MR-compatible somatosensory stimulation system and phase-encoded methods. Multiple somatotopic representations of the face, lips, and fingers were mapped in primary motor cortex (MI), ventral premotor cortex (PMv), polymodal zone (PZ), primary (SI) and secondary (SII) somatosensory cortex, parietal ventral area (PV) and 7b, as well as anterior and ventral intraparietal areas (AIP and VIP). The third study investigates a multisensory parietal face area revealed by both of the previous studies. This area is considered a human homologue to area VIP in the macaque, which contains aligned head-centered visual and tactile maps. A surface coil was constructed to obtain high-resolution mapping in this area. Cognitive functions and multisensory interactions in this area were investigated in several paradigms, including structured motion, phase-encoded looming objects, imagination of navigation, and multisensory random block design

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Multisensory maps in parietal corte