Enlargement of the brachial plexus on magnetic resonance imaging: a novel finding in adult-onset Krabbe disease

Adult-onset Krabbe disease is an autosomal recessive degenerative leukodystrophy that presents with bilateral corticospinal tract involvement on MRI. Although peripheral nerve involvement is a known manifestation of Krabbe disease, MRI findings of peripheral nerve abnormalities are limited to the cranial nerves and spinal nerve roots. In this case report, we discuss two cases of adult-onset Krabbe disease with brachial plexus enlargement on MRI. Adult-onset Krabbe disease should be included in the differential diagnoses when brachial plexus enlargement and white matter lesions involving corticospinal tracts present simultaneously

Kantis: A new Australopithecus site on the shoulders of the Rift Valley near Nairobi, Kenya

ケニア・ナイロビ郊外で初めて発見されたアウストラロピテクス. 京都大学プレスりリス. 2016-03-24.Most Plio-Pleistocene sites in the Gregory Rift Valley that have yielded abundant fossil hominins lie on the Rift Valley floor. Here we report a new Pliocene site, Kantis, on the shoulder of the Gregory Rift Valley, which extends the geographical range of Australopithecus afarensis to the highlands of Kenya. This species, known from sites in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and possibly Kenya, is believed to be adapted to a wide spectrum of habitats, from open grassland to woodland. The Kantis fauna is generally similar to that reported from other contemporaneous A. afarensis sites on the Rift Valley floor. However, its faunal composition and stable carbon isotopic data from dental enamel suggest a stronger C4 environment than that present at those sites. Although the Gregory Rift Valley has been the focus of paleontologists' attention for many years, surveys of the Rift shoulder may provide new perspective on African Pliocene mammal and hominin evolutio

園芸学部研究業績紹介(目次)

<p>Multivariable analysis to determine prognostic factors for surgical failure of 2^nd operated trabeculectomy using Cox proportional hazards regression models among the successful 1^st operated eyes.</p

第1084回千葉医学会例会・第21回千葉精神科集談会

<p>The comparison of the successful 2^nd operated eyes versus failed 2^nd operated eyes among successful 1^st operated eyes, Criterion C: n = 30.</p

Local Signal Time-Series during Rest Used for Areal Boundary Mapping in Individual Human Brains

It is widely thought that resting state functional connectivity likely reflects functional interaction among brain areas and that different functional areas interact with different sets of brain areas. A method for mapping areal boundaries has been formulated based on the large-scale spatial characteristics of regional interaction revealed by resting state functional connectivity. In the present study, we present a novel analysis for areal boundary mapping that requires only the signal timecourses within a region of interest, without reference to the information from outside the region. The areal boundaries were generated by the novel analysis and were compared with those generated by the previously-established standard analysis. The boundaries were robust and reproducible across the two analyses, in two regions of interest tested. These results suggest that the information for areal boundaries is readily available inside the region of interest

Diminished Medial Prefrontal Activity behind Autistic Social Judgments of Incongruent Information

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to make inadequate social judgments, particularly when the nonverbal and verbal emotional expressions of other people are incongruent. Although previous behavioral studies have suggested that ASD individuals have difficulty in using nonverbal cues when presented with incongruent verbal-nonverbal information, the neural mechanisms underlying this symptom of ASD remain unclear. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we compared brain activity in 15 non-medicated adult males with high-functioning ASD to that of 17 age-, parental-background-, socioeconomic-, and intelligence-quotient-matched typically-developed (TD) male participants. Brain activity was measured while each participant made friend or foe judgments of realistic movies in which professional actors spoke with conflicting nonverbal facial expressions and voice prosody. We found that the ASD group made significantly less judgments primarily based on the nonverbal information than the TD group, and they exhibited significantly less brain activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex/ventral medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/vmPFC), and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) than the TD group. Among these five regions, the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC were most involved in nonverbal-information-biased judgments in the TD group. Furthermore, the degree of decrease of the brain activity in these two brain regions predicted the severity of autistic communication deficits. The findings indicate that diminished activity in the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC underlies the impaired abilities of individuals with ASD to use nonverbal content when making judgments regarding other people based on incongruent social information

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

粗飼料成分に対する一般分析法と Van Soest 法の比較 : I 刈取時期を異にするエンバクおよびイタリアンライグラスにおける比較(農学部門)

粗飼料を分析する場合, 一般分析法では酸およびアルカリで処理し, これに不溶のものを粗繊維として定量している。この場合, ヘミセルロースおよびリグニンなどの本来繊維質として定量されるべきものが, アルカリに可溶であるため, その一部が繊維質として定量されない弊害が認められている。近年, Van Soestによって中性および酸性のDetergentを用いて処理することにより得られる繊維質をNDFおよびA DFとして表示する方法が提唱されている。そこで刈取期の異るイネ科粗飼料を用いて, 上記2つの分析法の間にどのような得失があるかを検討した。その結果, 粗飼料が反すう胃内の消化生理に及ぼす影響を知る上には一般分析法はかなり不備な方法であると考えられた。しかし粗繊維とNDFおよびADF相互間にはかなり高い相関が認められたので, この点をさらに試料数を増やして検討する必要があると思われた。An experiment was conducted to compare the ordinary method and the Van Soest method on analysis of roughage. Soiling oat and Italian ryegrass which have been cut at different stages of growth were used. The Van Soest method was superior to the ordinary method in estimating nutritional availability. However, correlation with the crude fiber and NDF of these roughages was r=0.931 and crude fiber and ADF was r=0.973

Nipple-centered Radiate M PR Images of M DCT for Evaluation of Breast Cancer Extent ― Correlation with M ammography and Pathologic Specimen ―

Background & Aims : Evaluation of the extent of breast cancer lesions is important for selecting the appropriate surgical procedure or to determine the surgical margin. We aimed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of nipple-centered radiate multiplanar reconstruction (NRMPR)images using multidetector row helical computed tomography (MDCT), comparing it with conventional mammography. M ethods : Our subjects were 26 breast cancer patients with a total of 29 lesions who sequentially received contrastenhanced MDCT imaging for preoperative evaluation. We measured the maximum diameter of the breast cancer in the direction toward the nipple on NRMPR images and mammography. All data were correlated with histopathological mapping of the specimens. Results : The tumor extent measured on NRMPR images and in pathological examinations ranged from 12.4 to 66.0mm (average, 28.0mm) and 10 to 70mm (average, 27.9 mm), respectively. The correlation coefficient of the two measurements was 0.898. On mammography, two lesions were not clearly identified. The correlation coefficient of mammography and pathological measurements was 0.554. Conclusions : The addition of NRMPR images to mammography provides more information to evaluate breast cancer extension toward the nipple. Potentially, it provides a clue for selecting the appropriate surgical procedure or surgical resection margin for breast cancer