A Novel Dimeric Eremophilane from Ligularia virgaurea spp. oligocephala

A novel dimeric eremophilane, ligulolide B, was isolated from the alcoholic extract of the whole plant of Ligularia virgaurea spp. oligocephala. The structure was elucidated by various spectroscopic methods including intensive 2D NMR techniques （^1H-^1H COSY, gHMQC, gHMBC and ^1H-^1H NOESY） and HR-ESI-MS.     

Subtle white matter volume differences in children treated for medulloblastoma with conventional or reduced dose craniospinal irradiation

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children, and approximately seventy percent of average-risk patients will achieve long-term survival. Craniospinal irradiation (CSI), combined with chemotherapy and surgery, is currently the mainstay of treatment but places children who survive at risk for serious neurocognitive sequelae. These sequelae are intensified with a younger age at treatment, greater elapsed time following treatment, and an increased radiation dose. Many newer treatment approaches have attempted to address this problem by reducing the dose of the CSI component of radiation therapy while maintaining the current survival rates. This study evaluates longitudinal MR imaging during therapy to assess the impact of the two CSI doses (conventional [36 Gy] and reduced [23.4 Gy]) on normal appearing white matter volumes (NAWMV) evaluated in a single index slice. Twenty-six children and young adults at least three years of age enrolled on an institutional protocol for newly diagnosed, previously untreated primary medulloblastoma had at least four MR examinations over a minimum nine month period following CSI. These serial volumes were evaluated as a function of time since CSI in three analyses: 1) all subjects, 2) subjects stratified by age at CSI, and 3) subjects stratified by CSI dose. The first analysis demonstrated that medulloblastoma patients treated with CSI have a significant loss of NAWMV in contradistiction to normally expected maturation. Stratifying the patients by age at CSI found no significant differences in the rate of NAWMV loss. The final analysis stratified the patients by CSI dose and revealed that the rate of NAWMV loss was 23% slower in children receiving reduced-dose. Serial quantitative MR measures of NAWMV may provide a neuroanatomical substrate for assessing functional impact of CSI on normal brain function following treatment for medulloblastoma.     

Establishing norms for age-related changes in proton T1 of human brain tissue in vivo

The goal of this study was to determine the expected normal range of variation in spin-lattice relaxation time (T₁) of brain tissue in vivo, as a function of age. A previously validated precise and accurate inversion recovery method was used to map T₁ transversely, at the level of the basal ganglia, in a study population of 115 healthy subjects (ages 4 to 72; 57 male and 58 female). Least-squares regression analysis shows that T₁ varied as a function of age in pulvinar nucleus (R² = 56%), anterior thalamus (R² = 51%), caudate (R² = 50%), frontal white matter (R² = 47%), optic radiation (R² = 39%), putamen (R² = 36%), genu (R² = 22%), occipital white matter (R² = 20%) (all p < 0.0001), and cortical gray matter (R² = 53%) (p < 0.001). There were no significant differences in T₁ between men and women. T₁ declines throughout adolescence and early adulthood, to achieve a minimum value in the fourth to sixth decade of life, then T₁ begins to increase. Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging provides evidence that brain tissue continues to change throughout the lifespan among healthy subjects with no neurologic deficits. Age-related changes follow a strikingly different schedule in different brain tissues; white matter tracts tend to reach a minimum T₁ value, and to increase again, sooner than do gray matter tracts. Such normative data may prove useful for the early detection of brain pathology in patients.     

一类齐次对称多项式上的切比雪夫不等式

本文借助于控制不等式及数学归纳法，将著名的切比雪夫不等式推广到m次一般齐次对称多项式上(如文中定理及引理7)，并将此结果用于对称平均等．旨在展示证明解析不等式的一些有效的方法和技巧，同时为数学研究特别是高维几何研究提供一些新的有趣而有用的解析不等式．     

Computer-aided detection of therapy-induced leukoencephalopathy in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients treated with intravenous high-dose methotrexate

The purpose of this study was to use objective quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods to develop a computer-aided detection (CAD) tool to differentiate white matter (WM) hyperintensities into either leukoencephalopathy (LE) induced by chemotherapy or normal maturational processes in children treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia without irradiation. A combined MRI set consisting of T1-weighted, T2-weighted, proton-density-weighted and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery images and WM, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid proportional volume maps from a spatially normalized atlas were analyzed with a neural network segmentation based on a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM). Segmented maps were manually classified to identify the most hyperintense WM region and the normal-appearing genu region. Signal intensity differences normalized to the genu within each examination were generated for four time points in 228 children. A second Kohonen SOM was trained on the first examination data and divided the WM into normal-appearing or LE groups. Reviewing labels from the CAD tool revealed a consistency measure of 89.8% (167 of 186) within patients. The overall agreement between the CAD tool and the consensus reading of two trained observers was 84.1% (535 of 636), with 84.2% (170 of 202) agreement in the training set and 84.1% (365 of 434) agreement in the testing set. These results suggest that subtle therapy-induced LE can be objectively and reproducibly detected in children treated for cancer using this CAD approach based on relative differences in quantitative signal intensity measures normalized within each examination.     

用ZEMAX软件辅助迈克耳孙干涉仪实验教学

利用ZEMAX软件设计了迈克耳孙干涉仪实验光路.软件绘制的不同显示方式的实验光路外形图,使学生对实验光路建立起了清晰的图像.通过编写ZPL程序实现了对实验现象的动态模拟,使学生对理想情况下的实验现象有一个准确的把握.通过在软件中改变光路主要参数分析了不同方面和不同程度的误差对干涉条纹的影响,其结论对学生在实验中进行有效而准确的调节起到了指导作用.     

Relative rates of Michael reactions of 2'-(phenethyl)thiol with vinyl sulfones,vinyl sulfonate esters,and vinyl sulfonamides relevant to vinyl sulfonyl cysteine protease inhibitors

[reaction: see text] The relative rates of Michael additions of 2'-(phenethyl)thiol to representative vinyl sulfonyl Michael acceptors were measured. The dependence of the reactivity of the Michael acceptor on the nature of the sulfonyl R substituent was determined in order to evaluate the effect of these substituents on the inactivation kinetics of comparably substituted vinyl sulfonyl cysteine protease inhibitors. The rates of these Michael additions vary over 3 orders of magnitude, with phenyl vinyl sulfonate esters (R = OPh) being ca. 3000-fold more reactive than N-benzyl vinyl sulfonamides (R = NHBn).     

Hybrid artificial neural network segmentation of precise and accurate inversion recovery (PAIR) images from normal human brain

This paper presents a novel semi-automated segmentation and classification method based on raw signal intensities from a quantitative T1 relaxation technique with two novel approaches for the removal of partial volume effects. The segmentation used a Kohonen Self Organizing Map that eliminated inter- and intra-operator variability. A Multi-layered Backpropagation Neural Network was able to classify the test data with a predicted accuracy of 87.2% when compared to manual classification. A linear interpolation of the quantitative T1 information by region and on a pixel-by-pixel basis was used to redistribute voxels containing a partial volume of gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) or a partial volume of GM and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) into the principal components of GM, WM, and CSF. The method presented was validated against manual segmentation of the base images by three experienced observers. Comparing segmented outputs directly to the manual segmentation revealed a difference of less than 2% in GM and less than 6% in WM for pure tissue estimations for both the regional and pixel-by-pixel redistribution techniques. This technique produced accurate estimates of the amounts of GM and WM while providing a reliable means of redistributing partial volume effects.     

Noncommutative Differential Calculus Approach to Discrete Symplectic Schemes on Regular Lattice

By means of a noncommutative differential calculus on function space of discrete Abelian groups and that of the regular lattice with equal spacing as well as the discrete symplectic geometry and a kind of classical mechanical systems with separable Hamiltonian of the type H(p, q) = T(p) + V(q) on regular lattice, we introduce the discrete symplectic algorithm, i.e., the phase-space discrete counterpart of the symplectic algorithm including original symplectic schemes and the jet-symplectic schemes in terms of the discrete time jet bundle formalism, on the regular lattice. We show some numerical calculation examples and compare the results of different schemes.