Aging of the Vascular System and Neural Diseases.

Vertebrates have acquired complex high-order functions facilitated by the dispersion of vascular and neural networks to every corner of the body. Blood vessels deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells and provide essential transport systems for removing waste products. For these functions, tissue vascularization must be spatiotemporally appropriate. Recent studies revealed that blood vessels create a tissue-specific niche, thus attracting attention as biologically active sites for tissue development. Each capillary network is critical for maintaining proper brain function because age-related and disease-related impairment of cognitive function is associated with the loss or diminishment of brain capillaries. This review article highlights how structural and functional alterations in the brain vessels may change with age and neurogenerative diseases. Capillaries are also responsible for filtering toxic byproducts, providing an appropriate vascular environment for neuronal function. Accumulation of amyloid β is a key event in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis. Recent studies have focused on associations reported between Alzheimer’s disease and vascular aging. Furthermore, the glymphatic system and meningeal lymphatic systems contribute to a functional unit for clearance of amyloid β from the brain from the central nervous system into the cervical lymph nodes. This review article will also focus on recent advances in stem cell therapies that aim at repopulation or regeneration of a degenerating vascular system for neural diseases

Research Activities in the Department of Medical Engineering

The Department of Medical Engineering is dedicated to the research and educational activities to fulfill its mission as educating medical professionals in medical engineering under the diploma policy and curriculum policy, that is, "research and education aiming for fostering professionals competent in comprehensive resolving capacity based upon a wide field of knowledge and vision in clinical engineering, which can be attained by wearing the basic knowledge of medical science and engineering." For this reason, the Faculty of the Department of Medical Engineering is composed of the two areas; PhDs in engineering-based clinical medicine, and mainly MDs in medical sciences and clinical medicine. To summarize the research activities at the Department of Medical Engineering, the authors will describe the overview of research activities being performed in the Department of Medical Engineering Fields, by dividing into 1) Research in Biomedical Engineering Fields, and 2) Research in Medical Science and Clinical Engineering Fields

Research Promotion in Nursing, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy and Medical Engineering - Appeal and Recommendation to the Colleague -

[Summary] Despite of the severe situations of insufficient money, labor, time, and communication, we want to promote the research activity in our university to the level of major institutions. The first step we propose is to acquire the external research grants from public resources. The specific proposal is described in grant application to increase the probability of successful adoption of the grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of Japan

Application of Pair-Wise Discrimination Method to Japanese Consonant Recognition

We have proposed pair-wise discrimination method which discriminates multiple classes by combining the results of two-class discriminant analyses performed on the pairs of classes. In this paper, we discuss its application to recognition of all the Japanese consonants. 26 consonant classes for recognition are decided based on the phonetic category and statistical analysis by considering the influence of the following vowels. Effective pairs to discrimination are selected among all the possible 26C2 pairs. Experimental results show that, as the number of classes increases, the performance of pair-wise discrimination method is outstanding while the conventional one-stage discriminant analysis using common variables for all the classes lowers its recognition rate. It was also confirmed that minimax method is most effective in combining the results of two-class discrimination

Absolute second order nonlinear susceptibility of Pt nanowire arrays on MgO faceted substrates with various cross-sectional shapes

We have measured optical second harmonic generation (SHG) intensity from three types of Pt nanowires with 7 nm widths of elliptical and boomerang cross-sectional shapes, and with 2 nm width elliptical cross-sectional shapes on the MgO faceted templates. From the SHG intensities, we calculated the absolute value of the nonlinear susceptibility χ^(2) integrated in the direction of the wire-layer thickness. The tentatively obtained bulk χ^(2)B of the wire layer was very large, approaching the value of the well-known nonlinear optical material BaTiO_3