Real-time MR artifacts filtering during continuous EEG/fMRI acquisition

The purpose of this study was the development of a real-time filtering procedure of MRI artifacts in order to monitor the EEG activity during continuous EEG/fMRI acquisition. The development of a combined EEG and fMRI technique has increased in the past few years. Preliminary “spike-triggered” applications have been possible because in this method, EEG knowledge was only necessary to identify a trigger signal to start a delayed fMRI acquisition. In this way, the two methods were used together but in an interleaved manner. In real simultaneous applications, like event-related fMRI study, artifacts induced by MRI events on EEG traces represent a substantial obstacle for a right analysis. Up until now, the methods proposed to solve this problem are mainly based on procedures to remove post-processing artifacts without the possibility to control electrophysiological behavior of the patient during fMRI scan. Moreover, these methods are not characterized by a strong “prior knowledge” of the artifact, which is an imperative condition to avoid any loss of information on the physiological signals recovered after filtering. In this work, we present a new method to perform simultaneous EEG/fMRI study with real-time artifacts filtering characterized by a procedure based on a preliminary analytical study of EPI sequence parameters-related EEG-artifact shapes. Standard EEG equipment was modified in order to work properly during ultra-fast MRI acquisitions. Changes included: high-performance acquisition device; electrodes/cap/wires/cables materials and geometric design; shielding box for EEG signal receiver; optical fiber link; and software. The effects of the RF pulse and time-varying magnetic fields were minimized by using a correct head cap wires-locked environment montage and then removed during EEG/fMRI acquisition with a subtraction algorithm that takes in account the most significant EPI sequence parameters. The on-line method also allows a further post-processing utilization.     

Comprehensive study towards the desulfonylation/desulfinylation of cis-3-functionalized 3-phenylsulfonyl/sulfinyl-β-lactams to access novel cis-3-monosubstituted-β-lactams

An inclusive study towards the stereospecific synthesis of novel cis-3-monosubstituted-β-lactams from cis-3-functionalized 3-phenylsulfonyl/sulfinyl-β-lactams is described. 3-Sulfinyl-β-lactams 5/5? successfully furnished stereospecific cis-3-monosubstituted-β-lactams 6, however 3-sulfonyl-β-lactams 2 failed to give the desulfurized product 6?. The final stereochemical and structural conformations of novel β-lactams were established by single crystal X-ray crystallographic study (5c). The cis configuration of the β-lactams 5/5? and 6 was assigned in relevance to E and C4-H and C3-H and C4-H respectively.     

Efficient newton–raphson/singular value decomposition-based optimization scheme with dynamically updated critical condition number for rapid convergence of weighted histogram analysis method equations

Selection of the successful optimization strategy is an essential part of solving numerous practical problems yet often is a nontrivial task, especially when a function to be optimized is multidimensional and involves statistical data. Here we propose a robust optimization scheme, referred to as NR/SVD-Cdyn, which is based on a combination of the Newton–Raphson (NR) method along with singular value decomposition (SVD), and demonstrate its performance by numerically solving a system of the weighted histogram analysis method equations. Our results show significant improvement over the direct iteration and conventional NR optimization methods. The proposed scheme is universal and could be used for solving various optimization problems in the field of computational chemistry such as parameter fitting for the methods of molecular mechanics and semiempirical quantum-mechanical methods. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Practical Synthesis of Disaccharide H

Abstract

Oligosaccharide components of glycoconjugates play a fundamental role in recognition phenomena and intercellular interactions. Disaccharide H, 2-O-(α-L-fucopyranosyl)-D-galactopyranose, is one such biologically important, L-fucose containing oligosaccharide.¹ This disaccharide is found in natural antigenic determinants such as blood group determinants and tumor associated antigens.^1,2     

The use of fluorinated additives in fire retardance of polymers

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is shown to improve fire retardance characteristics of brominated compounds/antimony trioxide systems added to polymers burning with or without dripping, as for example high-impact polystyrene or acrylonitrilebutadiene-styrene terpolymer, respectively. The action of PTFE seems to be the reduction of intrinsic flammability of the material as shown by parallel improvement of Underwriters Laboratories (UL94) tests and oxygen index parameters. A mechanistic interpretation is tentatively proposed which takes into account the very high effectiveness of PTFE.