Improvement on the genetic engineering of an invasive agricultural pest insect, the cherry vinegar fly, Drosophila suzukii.

Background: The invasive fly Drosophila suzukii has become an established fruit pest in Europe, the USA, and South America with no effective and safe pest management. Genetic engineering enables the development of transgene-based novel genetic control strategies against insect pests and disease vectors. This, however, requires the establishment of reliable germline transformation techniques.

[The value of highest quality ultrasound as a reference for ultrasound diagnosis].

Aim: The aim of this study is to determine whether an additional ultrasound examination of DEGUM grade 3 (DEGUM 3) requested by examiners of DEGUM grade 1, 2 (DEGUM 1, 2) results in a diagnostic improvement.

Methods: From October 2000 till June 2003 our university internal medicine sonography unit examined 34 980 patients. In 211 cases DEGUM grade 1, 2 examiners requested a second opinion by DEGUM grade 3 examiners.

High resolution MRI relaxation measurements of water in the articular cartilage of the meniscectomized rat knee at 4.7 T.

Measurements by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the spin-spin (T2), spin-lattice (T1) and spin-density (M0) parameters of water protons, optimized by using the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) theory, were made to quantify the effect of surgically induced osteoarthritis on rat knee cartilage at 4.7 T. Partial meniscectomy was performed on the right medial condyle of four Sprague Dawley rats, leaving the left medial condyle as a control.

Effects of, and corrections for, cross-term interactions in Q-space MRI.

The present study assesses the effects of cross-term interactions between diffusion and imaging gradients in magnetic resonance imaging q-space analysis, and corrects for those effects for both spin echo and stimulated echo diffusion-weighted sequences. These corrections are demonstrated experimentally in unrestricted media for water and theoretically by simulating the case of restricted diffusion in a sphere. By correcting for the cross-term interactions, large imaging gradients can be used without compromising the results.

Optimization of diffusion measurements using Cramer-Rao lower bound theory and its application to articular cartilage.

A novel approach to optimized diffusion measurements by minimizing the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) with respect to the b-values used for diffusion measurement was investigated. The applicability of the CRLB to these measurements is shown by the close agreement between the CRLB prediction and the actual precision obtained from experimental results. Where studies using a propagation-of-errors approach have restricted the optimization of the diffusion measurement to two b-values and to specific diffusion coefficient values, the CRLB approach sets no bounds on the number of b-values and is applicable to any system.