Prenatal exposure to valproic acid induces a dose dependent impairment in sensorimotor gating in a mouse model of autism

Poster Sessionspublished_or_final_versionThe 27th World Congress of the International College of Neuro-Psychopahrmacology (CINP), Hong Kong, 6–10 June 2010. In International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2010, v. 13, suppl. S1, p. 68, abstract no. P-02.03

Contrast Echo-A Simple Diagnostic Tool for a Coronary Artery Fistula

Coronary artery fistulas have been diagnosed with aortography, coronary angiography, and coronary computed tomography (CT). A large fistula can be occasionally found as a mass lesion on echocardiography but cannot be easily confirmed. Here, we report a new diagnostic approach to coronary artery fistulas using a contrast agent and transthoracic echocardiography. Transthoracic echocardiography of a 46-year-old female suffering from dyspnea revealed suspicious small turbulent flow in the main pulmonary artery. Following infusion of a contrast agent, we found whitish flow in the main pulmonary artery during the diastolic phase, and aortic CT revealed two huge right coronary artery fistulas in the main pulmonary artery. A simple diagnostic approach to a coronary artery fistula using contrast agent helped us confirm the diagnosis because of the typical diastolic whitish flow in the pulmonary artery

Anterior Hippocampus and Goal-Directed Spatial Decision Making

Contains fulltext : 115487.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Supervision-by-Registration: An Unsupervised Approach to Improve the Precision of Facial Landmark Detectors

© 2018 IEEE. In this paper, we present supervision-by-registration, an unsupervised approach to improve the precision of facial landmark detectors on both images and video. Our key observation is that the detections of the same landmark in adjacent frames should be coherent with registration, i.e., optical flow. Interestingly, coherency of optical flow is a source of supervision that does not require manual labeling, and can be leveraged during detector training. For example, we can enforce in the training loss function that a detected landmark at framet-1 followed by optical flow tracking from framet-1 to framet should coincide with the location of the detection at framet. Essentially, supervision-by-registration augments the training loss function with a registration loss, thus training the detector to have output that is not only close to the annotations in labeled images, but also consistent with registration on large amounts of unlabeled videos. End-to-end training with the registration loss is made possible by a differentiable Lucas-Kanade operation, which computes optical flow registration in the forward pass, and back-propagates gradients that encourage temporal coherency in the detector. The output of our method is a more precise image-based facial landmark detector, which can be applied to single images or video. With supervision-by-registration, we demonstrate (1) improvements in facial landmark detection on both images (300W, ALFW) and video (300VW, Youtube-Celebrities), and (2) significant reduction of jittering in video detections

Myeloid-Specific Deficiency of Pregnane X Receptor Decreases Atherosclerosis in LDL Receptor-Deficient Mice

Abstract The pregnane X receptor (PXR) is a nuclear receptor that can be activated by numerous drugs and xenobiotic chemicals. PXR thereby functions as a xenobiotic sensor to coordinately regulate host responses to xenobiotics by transcriptionally regulating many genes involved in xenobiotic metabolism. We have previously reported that PXR has pro-atherogenic effects in animal models, but how PXR contributes to atherosclerosis development in different tissues or cell types remains elusive. In this study, we generated an LDL receptor-deficient mouse model with myeloid-specific PXR deficiency (PXRΔMyeLDLR−/−) to elucidate the role of macrophage PXR signaling in atherogenesis. The myeloid PXR deficiency did not affect metabolic phenotypes and plasma lipid profiles, but PXRΔMyeLDLR−/− mice had significantly decreased atherosclerosis at both aortic root and brachiocephalic arteries compared with control littermates. Interestingly, the PXR deletion did not affect macrophage adhesion and migration properties, but reduced lipid accumulation and foam cell formation in the macrophages. PXR deficiency also led to decreased expression of the scavenger receptor CD36 and impaired lipid uptake in macrophages of the PXRΔMyeLDLR−/− mice. Further, RNA-Seq analysis indicated that treatment with a prototypical PXR ligand affects the expression of many atherosclerosis-related genes in macrophages in vitro. These findings reveal a pivotal role of myeloid PXR signaling in atherosclerosis development and suggest that PXR may be a potential therapeutic target in atherosclerosis management