Increasing the penetration depth for ultrafast laser tissue ablation using glycerol based optical clearing

Background: Deep tissue ablation is the next challenge in ultrafast laser microsurgery. By focusing ultrafast pulses below the tissue surface one can create an ablation void confined to the focal volume. However, as the ablation depth increases in a scattering tissue, increase in the required power can trigger undesired nonlinear phenomena out of focus that restricts our ability to ablate beyond a maximum ablation depth of few scattering lengths. Optical clearing (OC) might reduce the intensity and increase the maximal ablation depth by lowering the refractive index mismatch, and therefore reducing scattering. Some efforts to ablate deeper showed out of focus damage, while others used brutal mechanical methods for clearing. Our clinical goal is to create voids in the scarred vocal folds and inject a biomaterial to bring back the tissue elasticity and restore phonation. Materials and methods: Fresh porcine vocal folds were excised and applied a biocompatible OC agent (75% glycerol). Collimated transmittance was monitored. The tissue was optically cleared and put under the microscope for ablation threshold measurements at different depths. Results: The time after which the tissue was optically cleared was roughly two hours. Fitting the threshold measurements to an exponential decay graph indicated that the scattering length of the tissue increased to 83±16 μm, which is more than doubling the known scattering length for normal tissue. Conclusion: Optical clearing with Glycerol increases the tissue scattering length and therefore reduces the energy for ablation and increases the maximal ablation depth. This technique can potentially improve clinical microsurgery

Characterization of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) from Phlebotomus papatasi (Diptera: Psychodidae) expressed sequence tags (ESTs)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Phlebotomus papatasi </it>is a natural vector of <it>Leishmania major</it>, which causes cutaneous leishmaniasis in many countries. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs), or microsatellites, are common in eukaryotic genomes and are short, repeated nucleotide sequence elements arrayed in tandem and flanked by non-repetitive regions. The enrichment methods used previously for finding new microsatellite loci in sand flies remain laborious and time consuming; <it>in silico </it>mining, which includes retrieval and screening of microsatellites from large amounts of sequence data from sequence data bases using microsatellite search tools can yield many new candidate markers.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were characterized in <it>P. papatasi </it>expressed sequence tags (ESTs) derived from a public database, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). A total of 42,784 sequences were mined, and 1,499 SSRs were identified with a frequency of 3.5% and an average density of 15.55 kb per SSR. Dinucleotide motifs were the most common SSRs, accounting for 67% followed by tri-, tetra-, and penta-nucleotide repeats, accounting for 31.1%, 1.5%, and 0.1%, respectively. The length of microsatellites varied from 5 to 16 repeats. Dinucleotide types; AG and CT have the highest frequency. Dinucleotide SSR-ESTs are relatively biased toward an excess of (AX)n repeats and a low GC base content. Forty primer pairs were designed based on motif lengths for further experimental validation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The first large-scale survey of SSRs derived from <it>P. papatasi </it>is presented; dinucleotide SSRs identified are more frequent than other types. EST data mining is an effective strategy to identify functional microsatellites in <it>P. papatasi</it>.</p

Constraints on Energy Intake in Fish: The Link between Diet Composition, Energy Metabolism, and Energy Intake in Rainbow Trout

The hypothesis was tested that fish fed to satiation with iso-energetic diets differing in macronutrient composition will have different digestible energy intakes (DEI) but similar total heat production. Four iso-energetic diets (2×2 factorial design) were formulated having a contrast in i) the ratio of protein to energy (P/E): high (HP/E) vs. low (LP/E) and ii) the type of non-protein energy (NPE) source: fat vs. carbohydrate which were iso-energetically exchanged. Triplicate groups (35 fish/tank) of rainbow trout were hand-fed each diet twice daily to satiation for 6 weeks under non-limiting water oxygen conditions. Feed intake (FI), DEI (kJ kg−0.8 d−1) and growth (g kg−0.8 d−1) of trout were affected by the interaction between P/E ratio and NPE source of the diet (P<0.05). Regardless of dietary P/E ratio, the inclusion of carbohydrate compared to fat as main NPE source reduced DEI and growth of trout by ∼20%. The diet-induced differences in FI and DEI show that trout did not compensate for the dietary differences in digestible energy or digestible protein contents. Further, changes in body fat store and plasma glucose did not seem to exert a homeostatic feedback control on DEI. Independent of the diet composition, heat production of trout did not differ (P>0.05). Our data suggest that the control of DEI in trout might be a function of heat production, which in turn might reflect a physiological limit related with oxidative metabolism

Assessment of trace metal contamination in a historical freshwater canal (Buckingham Canal), Chennai, India

The present study was done to assess the sources and the major processes controlling the trace metal distribution in sediments of Buckingham Canal. Based on the observed geochemical variations, the sediments are grouped as South Buckingham Canal and North Buckingham Canal sediments (SBC and NBC, respectively). SBC sediments show enrichment in Fe, Ti, Mn, Cr, V, Mo, and As concentrations, while NBC sediments show enrichment in Sn, Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni, and Hg. The calculated Chemical Index of Alteration and Chemical Index of Weathering values for all the sediments are relatively higher than the North American Shale Composite and Upper Continental Crust but similar to Post-Archaean Average Shale, and suggest a source area with moderate weathering. Overall, SBC sediments are highly enriched in Mo, Zn, Cu, and Hg (geoaccumulation index (Igeo) class 4– 6), whereas NBC sediments are enriched in Sn, Cu,Zn, and Hg (Igeo class 4–6). Cu, Ni, and Cr show higher than Effects-Range Median values and hence the biological adverse effect of these metals is 20%; Zn, which accounts for 50%, in the NBC sediments, has a more biological adverse effect than other metalsfound in these sediments. The calculated Igeo, Enrichment Factor, and Contamination Factor values indicate that Mo, Hg, Sn, Cu, and Zn are highly enriched in the Buckingham Canal sediments, suggesting the rapid urban and industrial development of Chennai MetropolitanCity have negatively influenced on the surrounding aquatic ecosystem

Increasing the penetration depth for ultrafast laser tissue ablation using glycerol based optical clearing

Background: Deep tissue ablation is the next challenge in ultrafast laser microsurgery. By focusing ultrafast pulses below the tissue surface one can create an ablation void confined to the focal volume. However, as the ablation depth increases in a scattering tissue, increase in the required power can trigger undesired nonlinear phenomena out of focus that restricts our ability to ablate beyond a maximum ablation depth of few scattering lengths. Optical clearing (OC) might reduce the intensity and increase the maximal ablation depth by lowering the refractive index mismatch, and therefore reducing scattering. Some efforts to ablate deeper showed out of focus damage, while others used brutal mechanical methods for clearing. Our clinical goal is to create voids in the scarred vocal folds and inject a biomaterial to bring back the tissue elasticity and restore phonation. Materials and methods: Fresh porcine vocal folds were excised and applied a biocompatible OC agent (75% glycerol). Collimated transmittance was monitored. The tissue was optically cleared and put under the microscope for ablation threshold measurements at different depths. Results: The time after which the tissue was optically cleared was roughly two hours. Fitting the threshold measurements to an exponential decay graph indicated that the scattering length of the tissue increased to 83±16 μm, which is more than doubling the known scattering length for normal tissue. Conclusion: Optical clearing with Glycerol increases the tissue scattering length and therefore reduces the energy for ablation and increases the maximal ablation depth. This technique can potentially improve clinical microsurgery

SVE: Distributed Video Processing at Facebook Scale

Videos are an increasingly utilized part of the experience of the billions of people that use Facebook. These videos must be uploaded and processed before they can be shared and downloaded. Uploading and processing videos at our scale, and across our many applications, brings three key requirements: low latency to support interactive applications; a flexible programming model for application developers that is simple to program, enables efficient processing, and improves reliability; and robustness to faults and overload. This paper describes the evolution from our initial monolithic encoding script (MES) system to our current Streaming Video Engine (SVE) that overcomes each of the challenges. SVE has been in production since the fall of 2015, provides lower latency than MES, supports many diverse video applications, and has proven to be reliable despite faults and overload

Organochlorine Insecticides Lindane and Dieldrin and Their Binary Mixture Disturb Calcium Homeostasis in Dopaminergic PC12 Cells

Current hypotheses link long-term environmental exposure of humans to persistent organochlorine (OC) insecticides lindane (HCH) and dieldrin (HEOD) to the development of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. Primary adverse neurological effects of these insecticides are directed at inhibition of GABA(A) and glycine receptors, although GABA-independent effects have also been reported. In this paper we describe the effect of dieldrin and a binary mixture of dieldrin and lindane on a critical parameter of neuronal function and survival, i.e., intracellular calcium homeostasis. The intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca(2+)](i)) has been monitored using real-time single-cell fluorescence microscopy in dopaminergic PC12 cells loaded with the calcium-sensitive dye Fura-2. The results demonstrate that nanomolar concentrations of dieldrin time- and concentration-dependently inhibit depolarization-evoked influx of Ca(2+). Co-exposure of PC12 cells to a mixture of dieldrin and lindane revealed an additive inhibition of the depolarization-evoked increase in [Ca(2+)](i), whereas the lindane-induced increase in basal [Ca(2+)](i) is inhibited by dieldrin. The combined findings indicate that dieldrin and binary mixtures of organochlorines affect [Ca(2+)](i) already at concentrations below commonly accepted effect concentrations and close to human internal dose levels. Consequently, current findings illustrate the need to take mixtures of OC insecticides into account in human risk assessment