Long Latency and High Variability in Accuracy-Speed of Prosaccades in Alzheimer's Disease at Mild to Moderate Stage

Background: Studying saccades is a useful tool to investigate brain function. There is still controversy regarding deficits in prosaccades in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and a study of saccades in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has not been published to date. Methods: We examined horizontal saccades in 10 healthy elderly, and 9 MCI and 9 AD patients. Two tasks were used: gap (fixation target extinguishes prior to target onset) and overlap (fixation stays on after target onset). Eye movements were recorded with the Skalar IRIS system. Results: (1) Latencies were shorter in the gap than in the overlap task (a gap effect) in all three groups of subjects: healthy elderly, MCI and AD; (2) for both tasks, latency of saccades was longer for AD patients than for healthy and MCI subjects, and (3) accuracy and mean velocity were normal in MCI and AD subjects, however, variability in accuracy-speed was higher for AD patients than for healthy and MCI subjects in the overlap task. Conclusions: Abnormalities in reaction time and accuracy-speed variability reflect deficits in cerebral areas involved in the triggering and execution of saccades; a saccade test can be useful to follow up the evolution of MCI subjects as some of them may develop AD disease

Attention-Guided Autoencoder for Automated Progression Prediction of Subjective Cognitive Decline with Structural MRI

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is a preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) which occurs even before mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Progressive SCD will convert to MCI with the potential of further evolving to AD. Therefore, early identification of progressive SCD with neuroimaging techniques (e.g., structural MRI) is of great clinical value for early intervention of AD. However, existing MRI-based machine/deep learning methods usually suffer the small-sample-size problem which poses a great challenge to related neuroimaging analysis. The central question we aim to tackle in this paper is how to leverage related domains (e.g., AD/NC) to assist the progression prediction of SCD. Meanwhile, we are concerned about which brain areas are more closely linked to the identification of progressive SCD. To this end, we propose an attention-guided autoencoder model for efficient cross-domain adaptation which facilitates the knowledge transfer from AD to SCD. The proposed model is composed of four key components: 1) a feature encoding module for learning shared subspace representations of different domains, 2) an attention module for automatically locating discriminative brain regions of interest defined in brain atlases, 3) a decoding module for reconstructing the original input, 4) a classification module for identification of brain diseases. Through joint training of these four modules, domain invariant features can be learned. Meanwhile, the brain disease related regions can be highlighted by the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on the publicly available ADNI dataset and a private CLAS dataset have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model is straightforward to train and test with only 5-10 seconds on CPUs and is suitable for medical tasks with small datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

Effects of Musical Tempo on Musicians’ and Non-musicians’ Emotional Experience When Listening to Music

Tempo is an important musical element that affects human’s emotional processes when listening to music. However, it remains unclear how tempo and training affect individuals’ emotional experience of music. To explore the neural underpinnings of the effects of tempo on music-evoked emotion, music with fast, medium, and slow tempi were collected to compare differences in emotional responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of neural activity between musicians and non-musicians. Behaviorally, musicians perceived higher valence in fast music than did non-musicians. The main effects of musicians and non-musicians and tempo were significant, and a near significant interaction between group and tempo was found. In the arousal dimension, the mean score of medium-tempo music was the highest among the three kinds; in the valence dimension, the mean scores decreased in order from fast music, medium music, to slow music. Functional analyses revealed that the neural activation of musicians was stronger than those of non-musicians in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL). A comparison of tempi showed a stronger activation from fast music than slow music in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), which provided corresponding neural evidence for the highest valence reported by participants for fast music. Medium music showed stronger activation than slow music in the right Heschl’s gyrus (HG), right middle temporal gyrus (MTG), right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), right precuneus, right IPL, and left STG. Importantly, this study confirmed and explained the connection between music tempo and emotional experiences, and their interaction with individuals’ musical training

Piercing Through Highly Obscured and Compton-thick AGNs in the Chandra Deep Fields: I. X-ray Spectral and Long-term Variability Analyses

We present a detailed X-ray spectral analysis of 1152 AGNs selected in the Chandra Deep Fields (CDFs), in order to identify highly obscured AGNs ($N_{\rm H} > 10^{23}\ \rm cm^{-2}$). By fitting spectra with physical models, 436 (38%) sources with $L_{\rm X} > 10^{42}\ \rm erg\ s^{-1}$ are confirmed to be highly obscured, including 102 Compton-thick (CT) candidates. We propose a new hardness-ratio measure of the obscuration level which can be used to select highly obscured AGN candidates. The completeness and accuracy of applying this method to our AGNs are 88% and 80%, respectively. The observed logN-logS relation favors cosmic X-ray background models that predict moderate (i.e., between optimistic and pessimistic) CT number counts. 19% (6/31) of our highly obscured AGNs that have optical classifications are labeled as broad-line AGNs, suggesting that, at least for part of the AGN population, the heavy X-ray obscuration is largely a line-of-sight effect, i.e., some high-column-density clouds on various scales (but not necessarily a dust-enshrouded torus) along our sightline may obscure the compact X-ray emitter. After correcting for several observational biases, we obtain the intrinsic NH distribution and its evolution. The CT-to-highly-obscured fraction is roughly 52% and is consistent with no evident redshift evolution. We also perform long-term (~17 years in the observed frame) variability analyses for 31 sources with the largest number of counts available. Among them, 17 sources show flux variabilities: 31% (5/17) are caused by the change of NH, 53% (9/17) are caused by the intrinsic luminosity variability, 6% (1/17) are driven by both effects, and 2 are not classified due to large spectral fitting errors.Comment: 32 pages, 21 figures, 9 tables, accepted for publication in Ap

Potent anti-tumor effects of a dual specific oncolytic adenovirus expressing apoptin in vitro and in vivo

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Oncolytic virotherapy is an attractive drug platform of cancer gene therapy, but efficacy and specificity are important prerequisites for success of such strategies. Previous studies determined that Apoptin is a p53 independent, bcl-2 insensitive apoptotic protein with the ability to specifically induce apoptosis in tumor cells. Here, we generated a conditional replication-competent adenovirus (CRCA), designated Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin, and investigated the effectiveness of the CRCA a gene therapy agent for further clinical trials.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The observation that infection with Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin significantly inhibited growth of the melanoma cells, protecting normal human epidermal melanocytes from growth inhibition confirmed cancer cell selective adenoviral replication, growth inhibition, and apoptosis induction of this therapeutic approach. The <it>in vivo </it>assays performed by using C57BL/6 mice containing established primary or metastatic tumors expanded the <it>in vitro </it>studies. When treated with Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin, the subcutaneous primary tumor volume reduction was not only observed in intratumoral injection group but in systemic delivery mice. In the lung metastasis model, Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin effectively suppressed pulmonary metastatic lesions. Furthermore, treatment of primary and metastatic models with Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin increased mice survival.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These data further reinforce the previously research showing that an adenovirus expressing Apoptin is more effective and advocate the potential applications of Ad-hTERT-E1a-Apoptin in the treatment of neoplastic diseases in future clinical trials.</p

Cuprous oxide/Titanium dioxide nanotube-array with coaxial heterogeneous structure synthesized by multiple-cycle chemical adsorption plus reduction method

We report the formation and characterization of Cuprous oxide/Titanium dioxide (Cu2O/TiO2) nanotube-array coaxial heterogeneous structure, which is supposed to have potential applications in photo-induced water decomposition and organic pollutant degradation. Such structure is formed by coating nano-particles of Cu2O onto titanium dioxide nanotube-array walls via multiple-cycle chemical adsorption plus reduction method (MC-CAR). The practical deposition technique employs a soaking step to separate the adsorption and reduction processes, thus enhancing the controllability of deposition rate and preventing the clogging of nanotube pores. The size of Cu2O nano-particles is adjusted by changing the glucose concentration in the reaction solutions. As a result, compact nano-particle film with sufficiently small crystal sizes is uniformly covered on the tube walls, resulting in the formation of coaxial heterogeneous structure. The detailed synthesis process and the surface morphology, structure, photoelectric properties, and hydrogen evolution ability of the Cu2O/TiO2 nanotube-array with coaxial heterogeneous structure are systematically investigated. The resulting film shows a stable hydrogen production rate of 3.1 mLcm-2h-1, which can be targeted for energy application in relation with solar energy driven production of hydrogen from water

Alcohol Consumption and Subclinical Findings on Cognitive Function, Biochemical Indexes, and Cortical Anatomy in Cognitively Normal Aging Han Chinese Population

Background: Binge drinking of alcohol is associated with brain damage, but less is known about relationship of light-to-moderate alcohol consumption with cognitive function, biochemical indexes, and cortical anatomy. Previous findings have debated on whether light-to-moderate drinking has any health benefits. We investigated cortical thickness and its association with alcohol consumption and cognitive functions in a non-dementia aging Han Chinese population.Methods: 940 non-dementia aging subjects were included in our study (alcohol n = 149; non-alcohol n = 791). Among them, 572 received blood biochemical tests including liver function and lipid metabolism (alcohol n = 100; non-alcohol n = 472) and 141 had brain magnetic resonance imaging (alcohol n = 27; non-alcohol n = 114). The Beijing version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and the Chinese version of the neuropsychological test battery were used to assess cognitive functions.Results: There was no significant difference in cognitive functions between alcohol and non-alcohol groups in the overall database. Similarly, there was no significant difference in liver function and lipid metabolism between two groups in the sub-database. The left superiortemporal gyrus was one of age sensitive regions and alcohol consumption was significantly associated with thinner cortex of the left superiotemporal cluster in the sub-database.Conclusion: Alcohol consumption was not significantly associated with better or worse cognitive function and biochemical indexes abnormality, however, significantly associated with thinner cortex of the left superiortemporal gyrus in cognitively normal aging Han Chinese population

Analysis of an Alanine/Arginine Mixture by Using TLC/FTIR Technique

We applied TLC/FTIR coupled with mapping technique to analyze an alanine/arginine mixture. Narrow band TLC plates prepared by using AgI as a stationary phase were used to separate alanine and arginine. The distribution of alanine and arginine spots was manifested by a 3D chromatogram. Alanine and arginine can be successfully separated by the narrow band TLC plate. In addition, the FTIR spectra of the separated alanine and arginine spots on the narrow band TLC plate are roughly the same as the corresponding reference IR spectra