Unveiling vocal profiles in adolescent anorexia nervosa: a Software Based, Multiparametric Analysis.

Dysphonia, characterized by disturbances in voice quality and modulation, has been sporadically observed in individuals with Anorexia Nervosa (AN), potentially stemming from both organic and psychopathological factors. This study seeks to employ software-based voice analysis to compare the voices of girls with AN to those of female healthy controls (HC). Case-control study adopting "Praat" software to assess voices.

Individually Cultured Bovine Zygotes Successfully Develop to the Blastocyst Stage in an Extremely Confined Environment.

The possibility of detecting the developmental competence of individually cultured embryos through analysis of spent media is a major current trend in an ART setting. However, individual embryo culture is detrimental compared with high-density group culture due to the reduced concentration of putative embryotropins. The main aim of this study was to identify an individual culture system that is not detrimental over high-density group culture in the bovine model.

Evidence-informed and consensus-based statements about SAFEty of Physical Agent Modalities Practice in physiotherapy and rehabilitation medicine (SAFE PAMP): a national Delphi of healthcare scientific societies.

Objective: A shared consensus on the safety about physical agent modalities (PAMs) practice in physiotherapy and rehabilitation is lacking. We aimed to develop evidence-informed and consensus-based statements about the safety of PAMs.

Study Design And Setting: A RAND-modified Delphi Rounds' survey was used to reach a consensus.

Enhanced solute transport and steady mechanical stimulation in a novel dynamic perifusion bioreactor increase the efficiency of the culture of ovarian cortical tissue strips.

We report the development and preliminary evaluation of a novel dynamic bioreactor to culture ovarian cortical tissue strips that leverages tissue response to enhanced oxygen transport and adequate mechanical stimulation. multistep ovarian tissue static culture followed by mature oocyte generation, fertilization, and embryo transfer promises to use the reserve of dormant follicles. Unfortunately, static culture of ovarian tissue does not promote development of primordial to secondary follicles or sustain follicle viability and thereby limits the number of obtainable mature oocytes.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with upper motor neuron predominance: diagnostic accuracy of qualitative and quantitative susceptibility metrics in the precentral gyrus.

Objective: The study aims at comparing the diagnostic accuracy of qualitative and quantitative assessment of the susceptibility in the precentral gyrus in detecting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with predominance of upper motor neuron (UMN) impairment.

Methods: We retrospectively collected clinical and 3T MRI data of 47 ALS patients, of whom 12 with UMN predominance (UMN-ALS). We further enrolled 23 healthy controls (HC) and 15 ALS Mimics (ALS-Mim).

Impact of prepubertal bovine ovarian tissue pre-freeze holding duration on follicle quality.

Ovarian tissue cryopreservation prior to gonadotoxic treatment is the only recommended option for fertility preservation in prepubertal girls. Due to the technical complexity of this technique, limited number of centres across the world are equipped to offer the facility. Hence, the retrieved ovarian tissue needs to be maintained at hypothermic temperature (4 °C) for long time during shipment.

Methane Emission From Global Lakes: New Spatiotemporal Data and Observation-Driven Modeling of Methane Dynamics Indicates Lower Emissions.

Lakes have been highlighted as one of the largest natural sources of the greenhouse gas methane (CH) to the atmosphere. However, global estimates of lake CH fluxes over the last 20 years exhibit widely different results ranging from 6 to 185 Tg CH yr, which is to a large extent driven by differences in lake areas and thaw season lengths used. This has generated uncertainty regarding both lake fluxes and the global CH budget.

Protective effects of a SIRT1 inhibitor on primordial follicle activation and growth induced by cyclophosphamide: insights from a bovine in vitro folliculogenesis system.

Purpose: Although oncological advances have improved survival rates of female cancer patients, they often suffer a reduced fertility due to treatment side effects. In the present study, we evaluated the potential fertoprotective effects of the specific inhibitor of SIRT1, EX-527, on the gonadotoxic action exerted by cyclophosphamide (CPM) on loss of primordial follicles (PFs).

Methods: The effects of the CPM metabolite phosphoramide mustard (PM) on follicle activation, growth and viability and the protective action of EX-527 against PM effects were evaluated on bovine ovarian cortical strips in vitro cultured for 1 or 6 days.

Feasibility and safety of robotic-assisted total pancreatectomy: a pilot western series.

This study was designed to demonstrate non-inferiority of robot-assisted total pancreatectomy (RATP) to open total pancreatectomy (OPT) based on an intention-to-treat analysis, having occurrence of severe post-operative complications (SPC) as primary study endpoint. The two groups were matched (2:1) by propensity scores. Assuming a rate of SPC of 22.

Smoothing the transition of adolescents with CF from pediatric to adult care: Pre-transfer needs.

Introduction: In France, the cystic fibrosis (CF) care pathway is performed in 45 CF centers, the life expectancy of patients has steadily increased, but to date there are no national recommendations for the transition from pediatric to adult care. The transition to an adult CF center still raises questions about the relevance of its organizational arrangements. The "SAFETIM need" study aimed to identify the organizational needs both of patients and of parents before the transfer to an adult CF center.

Methane emission from high latitude lakes: methane-centric lake classification and satellite-driven annual cycle of emissions.

Methane (CH) is emitted from lakes by several processes: bubbles released from bottom sediments that reach the atmosphere (ebullition); spring release of CH trapped in bubbles in and under the ice during fall freeze (bubble release), and diffusion of CH from sediments to the surface. Each of these emission routes is highly variable over space and time, and episodic in the extreme, making reliable measurements difficult to carry out. However, lakes are receiving increasing interest for their important contribution to global CH emissions.

Evaluation of modelled net primary production using MODIS and landsat satellite data fusion.

Background: To improve estimates of net primary production for terrestrial ecosystems of the continental United States, we evaluated a new image fusion technique to incorporate high resolution Landsat land cover data into a modified version of the CASA ecosystem model. The proportion of each Landsat land cover type within each 0.004 degree resolution CASA pixel was used to influence the ecosystem model result by a pure-pixel interpolation method.

Up-Down Chair: A novel mechatronic device to assess otolith function in patients with vestibular disorders.

This paper describes a novel mechatronic platform, named "Up-Down Chair" (UDC), aimed at investigating otolith function in patients with vestibular disorders. The UDC was designed to provide a wide range of repeatable and controllable vertical oscillations of the head whose kinematic features match those encountered during daily activities. The following parameters were assessed to characterize the performance of the UDC: accordance between expected and measured kinematics in both loaded and unloaded conditions; Dynamic Visual Acuity (DVA) of a group of 15 healthy subjects who were asked to identify a set of Snellen optotypes while being repeatedly moved at different perturbation intensities.

Prior-to- and Post-Impact Fall Detection Using Inertial and Barometric Altimeter Measurements.

This paper investigates a fall detection system based on the integration of an inertial measurement unit with a barometric altimeter (BIMU). The vertical motion of the body part the BIMU was attached to was monitored on-line using a method that delivered drift-free estimates of the vertical velocity and estimates of the height change from the floor. The experimental study included activities of daily living of seven types and falls of five types, simulated by a cohort of 25 young healthy adults.

A real-time research platform to study vestibular implants with gyroscopic inputs in vestibular deficient subjects.

Researchers have succeeded in partly restoring damaged vestibular functionality in several animal models. Recently, acute interventions have also been demonstrated in human patients. Our previous work on a vestibular implant for humans used predefined stimulation patterns; here we present a research tool that facilitates motion-modulated stimulation.

A sensor fusion method for tracking vertical velocity and height based on inertial and barometric altimeter measurements.

A sensor fusion method was developed for vertical channel stabilization by fusing inertial measurements from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and pressure altitude measurements from a barometric altimeter integrated in the same device (baro-IMU). An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) estimated the quaternion from the sensor frame to the navigation frame; the sensed specific force was rotated into the navigation frame and compensated for gravity, yielding the vertical linear acceleration; finally, a complementary filter driven by the vertical linear acceleration and the measured pressure altitude produced estimates of height and vertical velocity. A method was also developed to condition the measured pressure altitude using a whitening filter, which helped to remove the short-term correlation due to environment-dependent pressure changes from raw pressure altitude.

Online decoding of hidden Markov models for gait event detection using foot-mounted gyroscopes.

In this paper, we present an approach to the online implementation of a gait event detector based on machine learning algorithms. Gait events were detected using a uniaxial gyro that measured the foot instep angular velocity in the sagittal plane to feed a four-state left-right hidden Markov model (HMM). The short-time Viterbi algorithm was used to overcome the limitation of the standard Viterbi algorithm, which does not allow the online decoding of hidden state sequences.

Alaska ecosystem carbon fluxes estimated from MODIS satellite data inputs from 2000 to 2010.

Background: Trends in Alaska ecosystem carbon fluxes were predicted from inputs of monthly MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) vegetation index time-series combined with the NASA-CASA (Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach) carbon cycle simulation model over the past decade. CASA simulates monthly net ecosystem production (NEP) as the difference in carbon fluxes between net primary production (NPP) and soil microbial respiration (Rh).

Results: Model results showed that NEP on a unit area basis was estimated to be highest (> +10 g C m-2 yr-1) on average over the period 2000 to 2010 within the Major Land Resource Areas (MRLAs) of the Interior Brooks Range Mountains, the Arctic Foothills, and the Western Brooks Range Mountains.

A stochastic approach to noise modeling for barometric altimeters.

The question whether barometric altimeters can be applied to accurately track human motions is still debated, since their measurement performance are rather poor due to either coarse resolution or drifting behavior problems. As a step toward accurate short-time tracking of changes in height (up to few minutes), we develop a stochastic model that attempts to capture some statistical properties of the barometric altimeter noise. The barometric altimeter noise is decomposed in three components with different physical origin and properties: a deterministic time-varying mean, mainly correlated with global environment changes, and a first-order Gauss-Markov (GM) random process, mainly accounting for short-term, local environment changes, the effects of which are prominent, respectively, for long-time and short-time motion tracking; an uncorrelated random process, mainly due to wideband electronic noise, including quantization noise.

Forest production predicted from satellite image analysis for the Southeast Asia region.

Background: The objective of this study was to demonstrate a new, cost-effective method to define the sustainable amounts of harvested wood products in Southeast Asian countries case studies, while avoiding degradation (net loss) of total wood carbon stocks. Satellite remote sensing from the MODIS sensor was used in the CASA (Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach) carbon cycle model to map forest production for the Southeast Asia region from 2000 to 2010. These CASA model results have been designed to be spatially detailed enough to support carbon cycle assessments in different wooded land cover classes, e.

The plasma levels of soluble HLA-G molecules correlate directly with CD34+ cell concentration and HLA-G 14bp insertion/insertion polymorphism in cord blood donors.

Background: Cord blood provides haematopoietic stem cells for allogeneic transplantation and, thanks to the naivety of its immune system, has several advantages over other sources of stem cells. In the transplantation setting, the presence of immunosuppressive human leucocyte antigen (HLA)-G molecules has been advocated to prevent both rejection and Graft-versus-Host disease. HLA-G is physiologically expressed throughout pregnancy and is contained in cord blood at birth.

Design and evaluation of a new mechatronic platform for assessment and prevention of fall risks.

Background: Studying the responses in human behaviour to external perturbations during daily motor tasks is of key importance for understanding mechanisms of balance control and for investigating the functional response of targeted subjects. Experimental platforms as far developed entail a low number of perturbations and, only in few cases, have been designed to measure variables used at run time to trigger events during a certain motor task.

Methods: This work introduces a new mechatronic device, named SENLY, that provides balance perturbations while subjects carry out daily motor tasks (e.