Structural and functional abnormities of amygdala and prefrontal cortex in major depressive disorder with suicide attempts

Finding neural features of suicide attempts (SA) in major depressive disorder (MDD) may be helpful in preventing suicidal behavior. The ventral and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as the amygdala form a circuit implicated in emotion regulation and the pathogenesis of MDD. The aim of this study was to identify whether patients with MDD who had a history of SA show structural and functional connectivity abnormalities in the amygdala and PFC relative to MDD patients without a history of SA. We measured gray matter volume in the amygdala and PFC and amygdala-PFC functional connectivity using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 158 participants [38 MDD patients with a history of SA, 60 MDD patients without a history of SA, and 60 healthy control (HC)]. MDD patients with a history of SA had decreased gray matter volume in the right and left amygdala (F = 30.270, P = 0.000), ventral/medial/dorsal PFC (F = 15.349, P = 0.000), and diminished functional connectivity between the bilateral amygdala and ventral and medial PFC regions (F = 22.467, P = 0.000), compared with individuals who had MDD without a history of SA, and the HC group. These findings provide evidence that the amygdala and PFC may be closely related to the pathogenesis of suicidal behavior in MDD and implicate the amygdala-ventral/medial PFC circuit as a potential target for suicide intervention

Structural and functional abnormities of amygdala and prefrontal cortex in major depressive disorder with suicide attempts

Finding neural features of suicide attempts (SA) in major depressive disorder (MDD) may be helpful in preventing suicidal behavior. The ventral and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as the amygdala form a circuit implicated in emotion regulation and the pathogenesis of MDD. The aim of this study was to identify whether patients with MDD who had a history of SA show structural and functional connectivity abnormalities in the amygdala and PFC relative to MDD patients without a history of SA. We measured gray matter volume in the amygdala and PFC and amygdala-PFC functional connectivity using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 158 participants [38 MDD patients with a history of SA, 60 MDD patients without a history of SA, and 60 healthy control (HC)]. MDD patients with a history of SA had decreased gray matter volume in the right and left amygdala (F = 30.270, P = 0.000), ventral/medial/dorsal PFC (F = 15.349, P = 0.000), and diminished functional connectivity between the bilateral amygdala and ventral and medial PFC regions (F = 22.467, P = 0.000), compared with individuals who had MDD without a history of SA, and the HC group. These findings provide evidence that the amygdala and PFC may be closely related to the pathogenesis of suicidal behavior in MDD and implicate the amygdala-ventral/medial PFC circuit as a potential target for suicide intervention

Surface Chemical Modification of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes by a Wet-Mechanochemical Reaction

A wet-mechanochemical reaction for surface modification of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has been developed. In the treatment, CNTs reacted with potassium hydroxide in alcohol solvent at room temperature under mechanical milling. The results from Fourier transmission infrared spectroscopy demonstrate that the nonreactive surfaces of CNTs have been modified successfully by multiple hydroxyl groups. Functionalized carbon nanotubes exhibit higher zeta potential values indicating their high dispersibility in polar solvents. XRD studies corroborate that the surface functionalization does not affect the basic crystal domain size of CNTs. TEM observations reveal that CNTs have been cut into shorter ones by the milling. Shortened CNTs with functionalized surfaces show good dispersion properties

Accountable Authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption with White-Box Traceability and Public Auditing in the Cloud

As a sophisticated mechanism for secure fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a highly promising solution for commercial applications such as cloud computing. However, there still exists one major issue awaiting to be solved, that is, the prevention of key abuse. Most of the existing CP-ABE systems missed this critical functionality, hindering the wide utilization and commercial application of CP-ABE systems to date. In this paper, we address two practical problems about the key abuse of CP-ABE: (1) The key escrow problem of the semi-trusted authority; and, (2) The malicious key delegation problem of the users. For the semi-trusted authority, its misbehavior (i.e., illegal key (re-)distribution) should be caught and prosecuted. And for a user, his/her malicious behavior (i.e., illegal key sharing) need be traced. We affirmatively solve these two key abuse problems by proposing the first accountable authority CP-ABE with white-box traceability that supports policies expressed in any monotone access structures. Moreover, we provide an auditor to judge publicly whether a suspected user is guilty or is framed by the authority

ICNMM2009-82033 THE SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NARROW-DISPERSED COPPER NANOPARTICLES

ABSTRACT A controlled synthesis method for preparing narrowdispersed copper nanoparticles, using water and ethylene glycol as the reaction mediums respectively, has been reported. In order to obtain pure-phase copper nanoparticles using water, the reaction time of 8h is essential. Owing to the reduction property of ethylene glycol, the reaction rate using ethylene glycol is higher. In addition, the amount of reduction agent can reduce largely. Polyvinyl pyrrolidone plays great role on the size of copper particles, and the increasing of polyvinyl pyrrolidone concentration attributes to the smaller dimension particles. The mean diameter is about 4 nm when the concentration of polyvinyl pyrrolidone is 0.5 mmol/L. Polyvinyl pyrrolidone acts as the polymeric capping agents in the reaction, preventing the agglomeration of the copper nanoparticles. When water is the reaction medium, Cu 2

Thermal Conductivity of Composite Materials Containing Copper Nanowires

The development of thermal conductive polymer composite is necessary for the application in thermal management. In this paper, the experimental and theoretical investigations have been conducted to determine the effect of copper nanowires (CuNWs) and copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) on the thermal conductivity of dimethicone nanocomposites. The CuNWs and CuNPs were prepared by using a liquid phase reduction method, and they were characterized through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The experimental data show that the thermal conductivity of composites increases with the increase of filler. With the addition of 10 vol.% CuNWs, the thermal conductivity of the composite is 0.41 W/m/K. The normalized thermal conductivity enhancement factor is 2.73, much higher than that of the analogue containing CuNPs (1.67). These experimental data are in agreement with Nan’s model prediction. Due to the high aspect ratio of 1D CuNWs, they can construct thermal networks more effectively than CuNPs in the composite, resulting in higher thermal conductivity

Water quality grade identification for lakes in middle reaches of Yangtze River using landsat-8 data with deep neural networks (DNN) model

Water quality grade is an intuitive element for people to understand the condition of water quality. However, in situ water quality grade measurements are often labor intensive, which makes measurement over large areas very costly and laborious. In recent years, numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of remote sensing techniques in monitoring water quality. In order to automatically extract the water quality information, machine learning technologies have been widely applied in remote sensing data interoperation. In this study, Landsat-8 data and deep neural networks (DNN) were employed to identify the water quality grades of lakes in two cities, Wuhan and Huangshi, in the middle reach of the Yangtze River, central China. Additionally, linear support vector machine (L-SVM), random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) were selected as comparative methods. The experimental results showed that DNN achieved the most promising performance compared to the other approaches. For the lakes in Wuhan, DNN gave water quality results with overall accuracy (OA) of 93.37% and Kappa of 0.9028. For the lakes in Huangshi, OA and kappa given by DNN were 96.39% and 0.951, respectively. The results show that the use of remote sensing images for water quality grade monitoring is effective. In the future, our method can be used for water quality monitoring of lakes in large areas at a low cost

MEDAPs: secure multi-entities delegated authentication protocols for mobile cloud computing

Since the technology of mobile cloud computing has brought a lot of benefits to information world, many applications in mobile devices based on cloud have emerged and boomed in the last years. According to the storage limitation, data owners would like to upload and further share the data through the cloud. Due to the safety requirements, mobile data owners are requested to provide credentials such as authentication tags along with the data. However, it is impossible to require mobile data owners to provide every authenticated computational results. The solution that signers’ privilege is outsourced to the cloud would be a promising way. To solve this problem, we propose three secure multi-entities delegated authentication protocols (MEDAPs) in mobile cloud computing, which enables the multiple mobile data owners to authorize a group designated cloud servers with the signing rights. The security of MEDAPs is constructed on three cryptographic primitive identity-based multi-proxy signature (IBMPS), identity-based proxy multi-signature (IBPMS), and identity-based multi-proxy multi-signature (IBMPMS), relied on the cubic residues, equaling to the integer factorization assumption. We also give the formal security proof under adaptively chosen message attacks and chosen identity/warrant attacks. Furthermore,compared with the pairing based protocol, MEDAPs are quite efficient and the communication overhead is nearly not a linear growth with the number of cloud servers. Copyright⃝c 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd