Acute Kidney Injury After Cardiac Surgery by Complete KDIGO Criteria Predicts Increased Mortality.

Objectives: Acute kidney injury (AKI) occurs frequently after cardiac surgery and is associated with increased mortality. The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria for diagnosing AKI include creatinine and urine output values. However, the value of the latter is debated.

Determination of saturation, heart rate, and respiratory rate at forearm using a Nellcor™ forehead SpO-saturation sensor.

Alterations in arterial blood oxygen saturation, heart rate (HR), and respiratory rate (RR) are strongly associated with intra-hospital cardiac arrests and resuscitations. A wireless, easy-to-use, and comfortable method for monitoring these important clinical signs would be highly useful. We investigated whether the Nellcor™ OxiMask MAX-FAST forehead sensor could provide data for vital sign measurements when located at the distal forearm instead of its intended location at the forehead to provide improved comfortability and easy placement.

Indirect measurement of the vascular endothelial glycocalyx layer thickness in human submucosal capillaries with a plug-in for ImageJ.

Background: The thickness of vascular endothelial glycocalyx layer can be measured indirectly during a spontaneous leukocyte passage from oral submucosal capillaries in humans. The subsequent differences in red blood cell (RBC) column widths, before a spontaneous white blood cell passage (pre-WBC) and after a spontaneous WBC passage (post-WBC) can be used in off-line analysis to measure glycocalyx thickness: [pre-WBC width-post-WBC width]/2. We created and validated a semi-automatic plug-in for ImageJ to measure the endothelial glycocalyx layer thickness.

Enhanced extrastriate activation during observation of distorted finger postures.

Hand and finger postures of other people are important body language cues that strongly contribute to the observer's decision about the person's intentions, thoughts, and attentional state. We compared neuromagnetic cortical activation elicited by color images of natural and distorted finger postures. The distorted postures contained computer-deformed joint angles and thereby easily caught the observer's attention.

Impaired mirror-image imitation in Asperger and high-functioning autistic subjects.

Imitation is crucial for proper development of social and communicative skills. Here, we argue that, based on an error analysis of a behavioral imitation task, adult Asperger and high-functioning autistic subjects suffer from an intriguing deficit of imitation: they lack the natural preference for imitation in a mirror-image fashion. The imitation task consisted of a simple movement sequence of putting a pen with the left or right hand into a green or a blue cup using one of two possible grips.