Mycovirus-Containing Alters Transcription Factors in Normal and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Cells.

Transcription factors control genes to maintain normal hemopoiesis, and dysregulation of some factors can lead to acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Mycoviruses are known to alter the genetics of their fungal host. The present study evaluates the effects of the products of a mycovirus-containing (MCAF), isolated from the home of a patient with ALL, on certain transcription factors of normal and ALL cell lines.

The Year in Graduate Medical Education: Selected Highlights from 2023.

This special article is the third in an annual series of the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia that highlights significant literature from the world of graduate medical education published over the past year. Major themes addressed in this review include the potential uses and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in graduate medical education, trainee well-being and the rise of unionized house staff, the effect of gender and race/ethnicity on residency application and attrition rates, and the adoption of novel technologies in medical simulation and education. The authors thank the editorial board for again allowing us to draw attention to some of the more interesting work published in the field of graduate medical education during 2023.

Playing three-dimensional video games boosts stereo vision.

Playing two-dimensional video games has been shown to result in improvements in a range of visual and cognitive tasks, and these improvements appear to generalize widely. Here we report that young adults with healthy vision, surprisingly, showed a dramatic improvement in stereo vision after playing three-dimensional, but not two-dimensional, video games for a relatively short period of time. Intriguingly, neither group showed any significant improvement in binocular contrast sensitivity.

Update in lung transplantation: anesthetic considerations.

The field of lung transplantation (LTx) has expanded rapidly since its inception in the early 1960s with the work of James Hardy and colleagues at the University of Mississippi from the work of local single specialty physicians into an international multidisciplinary specialty. Advancements throughout the next several decades have led to the completion of over 70,000 lung transplants worldwide. The unique challenges presented by patients with end-stage lung disease have both evolved and remained consistent since then, yet these challenges are being answered with major improvements and advancements in perioperative care in the 21st century.

Energy Guided Diffusion for Generating Neurally Exciting Images.

In recent years, most exciting inputs (MEIs) synthesized from encoding models of neuronal activity have become an established method to study tuning properties of biological and artificial visual systems. However, as we move up the visual hierarchy, the complexity of neuronal computations increases. Consequently, it becomes more challenging to model neuronal activity, requiring more complex models.

Fibrous Dysplasia of Temporal Bone Presented as a Solitary Osteochondroma: A Case Report.

Introduction: Fibrous dysplasia is a benign disorder of unknown etiology. It represents a disturbance of normal bone development - a defect in osteoblastic differentiation and maturation that originates in the mesenchymal precursor of the bone. It is characterized by slow progressive replacement of bone by abnormal isomorphic fibrous tissue.

Foundation model of neural activity predicts response to new stimulus types and anatomy.

The complexity of neural circuits makes it challenging to decipher the brain's algorithms of intelligence. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have produced models that accurately simulate brain activity, enhancing our understanding of the brain's computational objectives and neural coding. However, these models struggle to generalize beyond their training distribution, limiting their utility.

Pattern completion and disruption characterize contextual modulation in the visual cortex.

Vision is fundamentally context-dependent, with neuronal responses influenced not just by local features but also by surrounding contextual information. In the visual cortex, studies using simple grating stimuli indicate that congruent stimuli - where the center and surround share the same orientation - are more inhibitory than when orientations are orthogonal, potentially serving redundancy reduction and predictive coding. Understanding these center-surround interactions in relation to natural image statistics is challenging due to the high dimensionality of the stimulus space, yet crucial for deciphering the neuronal code of real-world sensory processing.

NEURD offers automated proofreading and feature extraction for connectomics.

We are now in the era of millimeter-scale electron microscopy (EM) volumes collected at nanometer resolution. Dense reconstruction of cellular compartments in these EM volumes has been enabled by recent advances in Machine Learning (ML). Automated segmentation methods produce exceptionally accurate reconstructions of cells, but post-hoc proofreading is still required to generate large connectomes free of merge and split errors.

Bipartite invariance in mouse primary visual cortex.

A defining characteristic of intelligent systems, whether natural or artificial, is the ability to generalize and infer behaviorally relevant latent causes from high-dimensional sensory input, despite significant variations in the environment. To understand how brains achieve generalization, it is crucial to identify the features to which neurons respond selectively and invariantly. However, the high-dimensional nature of visual inputs, the non-linearity of information processing in the brain, and limited experimental time make it challenging to systematically characterize neuronal tuning and invariances, especially for natural stimuli.

Cellular composition and circuit organization of the locus coeruleus of adult mice.

The locus coeruleus (LC) houses the vast majority of noradrenergic neurons in the brain and regulates many fundamental functions, including fight and flight response, attention control, and sleep/wake cycles. While efferent projections of the LC have been extensively investigated, little is known about its local circuit organization. Here, we performed large-scale multipatch recordings of noradrenergic neurons in adult mouse LC to profile their morpho-electric properties while simultaneously examining their interactions.

Spatial Interactions in Interocular and Monocular "Blur Suppression".

Significance: The suppression of blurred images in one eye by clear images in the other eye is thought to contribute to the success of monovision correction. We show that interocular suppression occurs also for low-contrast targets that are not blurred and, to a lesser extent, when clear and low-contrast targets are presented to the same eye.

Purpose: A blurred target presented to one eye may be suppressed when a clear target is presented to the other eye.

The Year in Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia: Selected Highlights from 2022.

This special article is the 15th in an annual series for the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia. The authors thank the editor-in-chief Dr. Kaplan and the editorial board for the opportunity to continue this series, namely the research highlights of the past year in the specialties of cardiothoracic and vascular anesthesiology.

State-dependent pupil dilation rapidly shifts visual feature selectivity.

To increase computational flexibility, the processing of sensory inputs changes with behavioural context. In the visual system, active behavioural states characterized by motor activity and pupil dilation enhance sensory responses, but typically leave the preferred stimuli of neurons unchanged. Here we find that behavioural state also modulates stimulus selectivity in the mouse visual cortex in the context of coloured natural scenes.

Sustained deep-tissue voltage recording using a fast indicator evolved for two-photon microscopy.

Genetically encoded voltage indicators are emerging tools for monitoring voltage dynamics with cell-type specificity. However, current indicators enable a narrow range of applications due to poor performance under two-photon microscopy, a method of choice for deep-tissue recording. To improve indicators, we developed a multiparameter high-throughput platform to optimize voltage indicators for two-photon microscopy.

The Year in Graduate Medical Education: Selected Highlights From 2021.

This special article is the first in a planned annual series for the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia that will highlight significant literature from the world of graduate medical education (GME) that was published over the past year. The major themes selected for this inaugural review are the educational value of simulation and training workshops, the expanding role of social media and other information technologies in GME and recruitment, the state of residency and fellowship training before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inevitable effects COVID-19 has had on graduate medical education. The authors would like to thank the editorial board for allowing us to shine a light on a small subset of the writing and research produced in this field, so that educators may understand how best to educate and train the next generation of anesthesiologists.

Spatial and temporal proximity of objects for maximal crowding.

Crowding refers to the deleterious visual interaction among nearby objects. Does maximal crowding occur when objects are closest to one another in space and time? We examined how crowding depends on the spatial and temporal proximity, retinally and perceptually, between a target and flankers. Our target was a briefly flashed T-stimulus presented at 10° right of fixation (3-o'clock position).

The Year in Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia: Selected Highlights from 2021.

This special article is the fourteenth in an annual series for the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia. The authors thank the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Kaplan, and the editorial board for the opportunity to continue this series; namely, the research highlights of the past year in the specialty of cardiothoracic and vascular anesthesiology.