Exploring human rhythmic gait movement in the role of cerebral cortex signal

The rhythmic movement is a spontaneous behavior due to the central pattern generator(CPG).At present,the CPG model only shows the spontaneous behavior,butdoes not refer to the instruction regulation role of the cerebral cortex.In this paper,a modified model based on the Matsuoka neural oscillator theory is presented to better show the regulation role of the cerebral cortex signal to the CPG neuronal network.The complex interaction between the in put signal and other parameters in the CPG networkis establish...     

高光谱的刺五加黑斑病的早期检测研究

对感染黑斑病的刺五加叶片进行光谱特性研究,能为药用植物病害的早期筛选与精准治疗提供重要研究资料。实验目的,运用高光谱成像技术实现植物病害的自动监督分类与识别。实验过程,首先使用高光谱成像系统在可见光波段（380～960 nm）内采集刺五加黑斑病的叶片样本,光谱数据经过去除亮暗噪声和平滑预处理后,再经过主成分分析实现数据降维,继而运用基于不同核函数的支持向量机法建立分类模型,最后利用总体分类精度、Kappa系数等因子评价不同核函数对分类器性能的影响。根据叶片表面的特征将其分为四类样本：健康亮部、健康暗部、轻度病害和重度病害等。对比各类样本的光谱可知,刺五加的健康样本在540 nm波长存在一个明显峰值,在620～680 nm光谱曲线急剧上升;而病害样本的光谱反射率呈现缓慢且平稳的上升趋势,上述特征能够将图像空间上反射强度接近的健康亮部和严重病害完全区分开。经对比发现前四个主成分（PC1,PC2,PC3,PC4）在分类表达上存在差异,主要表现为PC1含有的信息多,能够较好地区分各类样本;PC2则出现健康亮部和严重病害的交叉混淆;PC3是对于PC2的补充,能基本完整地表达轻微病害;PC4的贡献率仅有0.19%,依然能够准确地识别严重病害。不同主成分分量在表达各类样本特征中存在的差异能够作为复杂样本分类的参考依据。对比四种核函数对支持向量机分类器性能的影响,结果显示线性核函数的识别过程受光强反射的影响较大,Sigmoid核函数的训练精度易受数据集大小的影响,在识别健康亮或暗,以及轻微病害上均存在一定的误差,多项式核函数与径向基核函数的效果较好,其中,多项式核函数的精度更高,为92.77%。研究表明,利用高光谱成像技术能够准确地识别刺五加的健康叶片和患病叶片,为实现自动诊断药用植物叶片病害提供新方法。     

Comparison of haemodynamics in cerebral aneurysms of different sizes located in the ophthalmic artery

Haemodynamics plays an important role in the progression and rupture of cerebral aneurysms. The temporal and spatial variations of the wall shear stress in the aneurysmal sac are hypothesized to be correlated with its growth and rupture. In addition, the assessment of the velocity field in the aneurysm dome and neck is important for the correct placement of endovascular coils. This work describes the flow dynamics in patient‐specific models of saccular aneurysms of different sizes located in the ophthalmic artery. The models were obtained from three‐dimensional rotational angiography image data and blood flow dynamics was studied under physiologically representative waveform of inflow. The three‐dimensional continuity and momentum equations for unsteady laminar flow were solved with commercial software using nonstructured fine grid sizes. The intra‐aneurysmal flows show complex vortex structures that change during one pulsatile cycle. A relation between the aneurysm aspect ratio and the mean wall shear stress on the aneurysmal sac is showed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

包头市青山区8～10岁儿童碘缺乏病甲状腺肿大率及尿碘监测分析

调查了内蒙古青山区８～１０岁儿童碘缺乏病甲状腺肿大率，结果表明，甲状腺肿大率为１９．６％，且以城乡结合部居住儿童为高，监测了其尿碘，尿碘水平１００μｇ／Ｌ以下者为１１．２％，其中５０μｇ／Ｌ者了有发现，据此情况，今后仍要强化防治工作。     

Cutaneous leishmaniasis in Peru using a vector‐host model: Backward bifurcation and sensitivity analysis

The final goal of control policies in neglected vector‐borne diseases in developing countries is to protect humans. These vector‐borne diseases include leishmaniasis, dengue, chagas, and malaria. The traditional control measures for vector‐borne diseases, as with any other illnesses, suggest to reduce the basic reproduction number below the value 1. This strategy is not necessarily sufficient when a backward bifurcation occurs. Because of its worldwide relevance, we are interested in modeling cutaneous leishmaniasis with Peru as a specific example. We use a vector‐host model with an extrinsic incubation period, which gives evidence that a backward bifurcation can occur under certain conditions. We estimate some parameters for the cutaneous leishmaniasis model in Peru. The uncertainty of the parameters suggests that we cannot guarantee the avoidance of a backward bifurcation range. It is important to be attentive to the appearance of phenomena that could make eradication more difficult. Local and global sensitivity analyses agree that is most sensitive to the number of bites by a female sandfly and its natural mortality rate. The former dependency suggests very practical control policies.     

A segmentation procedure of the pervious area of the aorta artery from CT images without contrast medium

In this paper, we develop an algorithm for the segmentation of the pervious lumen of the aorta artery in computed tomography (CT) images without contrast medium, a challenging task due to the closeness gray levels of the different zones to segment. The novel approach of the proposed procedure mainly resides in enhancing the resolution of the image by the application of the algorithm deduced from the mathematical theory of sampling Kantorovich operators. After the application of suitable digital image processing techniques, the pervious zone of the artery can be distinguished from the occluded one. Numerical tests have been performed using 233 CT images, and suitable numerical errors have been computed and introduced ex novo to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The above procedure is completely automatic in all its parts after the initial region of interest (ROI) selection. The main advantages of this approach relies in the potential possibility of performing diagnosis concerning vascular pathologies even for patients with severe kidney diseases or allergic problems, for which CT images with contrast medium cannot be achieved.     

森林病虫害模型的数值模拟

讨论森林病虫害的离散模型.根据森林病虫害传播的特征,针对各分块区域之间已感病树不互相转移的情况,建立差分方程模型;讨论系统的平衡点,并对无病平衡点和地方病平衡点进行稳定性分析,得到地方病平衡点稳定的充分条件;用Matlab进行多种情况的数值模拟,验证了理论结果.     

Significance of plaque morphology in modifying flow characteristics in a diseased coronary artery: Numerical simulation using plaque measurements from intravascular ultrasound imaging

The paper deals with numerical investigation of the effect of plaque morphology on the flow characteristics in a diseased coronary artery using realistic plaque morphology. The morphological information of the lumen and the plaque is obtained from intravascular ultrasound imaging measurements of 42 patients performed at Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio. For this data, study of Bhaganagar et al. (2010) [1] has revealed the stenosis for 42 patients can be categorized into four types – type I (peak-valley), type II (ascending), type III (descending), and type IV (diffuse). The aim of the present study is to isolate the effect of shape of the stenosis on the flow characteristics for a given degree of the stenosis. In this study, we conduct fluid dynamic simulations for the four stenosis types (type I–IV) and analyze the differences in the flow characteristics between these types. Finely refined tetrahedral mesh for the 3-D solid model of the artery with plaques has been generated. The 3-D steady flow simulations were performed using the turbulence (k–ε) model in a finite volume based computational fluid dynamics solver. The axial velocity, the radial velocity, turbulence kinetic energy and wall shear stress profiles of the plaque have been analyzed. From the axial and radial velocity profiles results the differences in the velocity patterns are significantly visible at proximal as well as distal to the throat, region of maximum stenosis. Turbulent kinetic energy and wall shear stress profiles have revealed significant differences in the vicinity of the plaque. Additional unsteady flow simulations have been performed to validate the hypothesis of the significance of plaque morphology in flow alterations in diseased coronary artery. The results revealed the importance of accounting for plaque morphology in addition to plaque height to accurately characterize the turbulent flow in a diseased coronary artery.     

A new sequence based encoding for prediction of host–pathogen protein interactions

Pathogen–host interactions are very important to figure out the infection process at the molecular level, where pathogen proteins physically bind to human proteins to manipulate critical biological processes in the host cell. Data scarcity and data unavailability are two major problems for computational approaches in the prediction of pathogen–host interactions. Developing a computational method to predict pathogen–host interactions with high accuracy, based on protein sequences alone, is of great importance because it can eliminate these problems. In this study, we propose a novel and robust sequence based feature extraction method, named Location Based Encoding, to predict pathogen–host interactions with machine learning based algorithms. In this context, we use Bacillus Anthracis and Yersinia Pestis data sets as the pathogen organisms and human proteins as the host model to compare our method with sequence based protein encoding methods, which are widely used in the literature, namely amino acid composition, amino acid pair, and conjoint triad. We use these encoding methods with decision trees (Random Forest, j48), statistical (Bayesian Networks, Naive Bayes), and instance based (kNN) classifiers to predict pathogen–host interactions. We conduct different experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. We obtain the best results among all the experiments with RF classifier in terms of F1, accuracy, MCC, and AUC.     

Scaffolds for Sustained Release of Ambroxol Hydrochloride,a Pharmacological Chaperone That Increases the Activity of Misfolded β‐Glucocerebrosidase

Ambroxol is a pharmacological chaperone (PC) for Gaucher disease that increases lysosomal activity of misfolded β‐glucocerebrosidase (GCase) while displaying a safe toxicological profile. In this work, different poly(ε‐caprolactone) (PCL)‐based systems are developed to regulate the sustained release of small polar drugs in physiological environments. For this purpose, ambroxol is selected as test case since the encapsulation and release of PCs using polymeric scaffolds have not been explored yet. More specifically, ambroxol is successfully loaded in electrospun PCL microfibers, which are subsequently coated with additional PCL layers using dip‐coating or spin‐coating. The time needed to achieve 80% release of loaded ambroxol increases from ≈15 min for uncoated fibrous scaffolds to 3 days and 1 week for dip‐coated and spin‐coated systems, respectively. Furthermore, it is proven that the released drug maintains its bioactivity, protecting GCase against induced thermal denaturation.