The forests of the Amazon basin are threatened by climate and land use changes. Due to the transition towards a drier climate, moisture-dependent organisms such as canopy epiphytes are particularly affected. Even if the topography in the Amazon lowland is moderate, mesoscale nocturnal katabatic flows result from cold air production related to radiative cooling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn May 2021, the German parliament passed a long-debated law to protect children with variations of sex development/sex characteristics from medically unnecessary surgeries until they are old enough to decide for themselves. This law joins similar laws passed in other countries in recent years and recognizes the rights of people with variations of sex development to self-determination and bodily autonomy. In this article, we discuss the notion of bodily autonomy and examine details of the German legislation in the context of psychosocial care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Affect Disord
December 2021
Background: Individuals with depression often demonstrate an altered peripheral inflammatory profile, as well as emotion perception difficulties. However, correlations of inflammation with overall depression severity are inconsistent and inflammation may only contribute to specific symptoms. Moreover, measurement of the association between inflammation and emotion perception is sparse in adolescence, despite representing a formative window of emotional development and high-risk period for depression onset.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlutaric aciduria type 1 (GA1) is caused by deficiency of the mitochondrial matrix enzyme glutaryl-CoA dehydrogenase (GCDH), leading to accumulation of glutaric acid (GA) and 3-hydroxyglutaric acid (3OHGA) in tissues and body fluids. During catabolic crises, GA1 patients are prone to the development of striatal necrosis and a subsequent irreversible movement disorder during a time window of vulnerability in early infancy. Thus, GA1 had been considered a pure "cerebral organic aciduria" in the past.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUp until now montane cloud forest (MCF) in Taiwan has only been mapped for selected areas of vegetation plots. This paper presents the first comprehensive map of MCF distribution for the entire island. For its creation, a Random Forest model was trained with vegetation plots from the National Vegetation Database of Taiwan that were classified as "MCF" or "non-MCF".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Early detection of cancerous lesions is still crucial for a patient's prognosis. Although diagnostic access to the oral cavity and oropharynx is comparably easy, the incidence of resulting disease remains high. This is due to the fact that in many cases, malignity is recognized too late on a purely visual basis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a technology with high potential in the field of non-invasive detection of cancer. However, in complex imaging situations like HSI of the larynx with a rigid endoscope, various image interferences can disable a proper classification of cancerous tissue. We identified three main problems: i) misregistration of single images in a HS cube due to patient heartbeat ii) image noise and iii) specular reflections (SR).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHyperspectral Imaging has long been established in other scientific disciplines than medicine (e. g. earth science) as a means for objective classification of image data information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe metabolic disorder glutaric aciduria type 1 (GA1) is caused by deficiency of the mitochondrial glutaryl-CoA dehydrogenase (GCDH), leading to accumulation of the pathologic metabolites glutaric acid (GA) and 3-hydroxyglutaric acid (3OHGA) in blood, urine and tissues. Affected patients are prone to metabolic crises developing during catabolic conditions, with an irreversible destruction of striatal neurons and a subsequent dystonic-dyskinetic movement disorder. The pathogenetic mechanisms mediated by GA and 3OHGA have not been fully characterized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hyperspectral imaging has been proven to be useful in remote earth sensing, e.g., satellite-based classification of vegetation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the field of earth observation, hyperspectral detector systems allow precise target detections of surface components from remote sensing platforms. This enables specific land covers to be identified without the need to physically travel to the areas examined. In the medical field, efforts are underway to develop optical technologies that detect altering tissue surfaces without the necessity to perform an excisional biopsy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA consensus panel from the United States and Europe was convened recently to update and revise the 1997 consensus guidelines for the neuropathologic evaluation of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other diseases of brain that are common in the elderly. The new guidelines recognize the pre-clinical stage of AD, enhance the assessment of AD to include amyloid accumulation as well as neurofibrillary change and neuritic plaques, establish protocols for the neuropathologic assessment of Lewy body disease, vascular brain injury, hippocampal sclerosis, and TDP-43 inclusions, and recommend standard approaches for the workup of cases and their clinico-pathologic correlation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this study was to proof applicability of hyperspectral imaging for the analysis and classification of human mucosal surfaces in vivo. The larynx as a prototypical anatomically well-defined surgical test area was analyzed by microlaryngoscopy with a polychromatic lightsource and a synchronous triggered monochromatic CCD-camera. Image stacks (5 benign, 7 malignant tumors) were analyzed by established software (principal component analysis PCA, hyperspectral classification, spectral profiles).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association charged a workgroup with the task of revising the 1984 criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. The workgroup sought to ensure that the revised criteria would be flexible enough to be used by both general healthcare providers without access to neuropsychological testing, advanced imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid measures, and specialized investigators involved in research or in clinical trial studies who would have these tools available. We present criteria for all-cause dementia and for AD dementia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association charged a workgroup with the task of developing criteria for the symptomatic predementia phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD), referred to in this article as mild cognitive impairment due to AD. The workgroup developed the following two sets of criteria: (1) core clinical criteria that could be used by healthcare providers without access to advanced imaging techniques or cerebrospinal fluid analysis, and (2) research criteria that could be used in clinical research settings, including clinical trials. The second set of criteria incorporate the use of biomarkers based on imaging and cerebrospinal fluid measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe pathophysiological process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is thought to begin many years before the diagnosis of AD dementia. This long "preclinical" phase of AD would provide a critical opportunity for therapeutic intervention; however, we need to further elucidate the link between the pathological cascade of AD and the emergence of clinical symptoms. The National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association convened an international workgroup to review the biomarker, epidemiological, and neuropsychological evidence, and to develop recommendations to determine the factors which best predict the risk of progression from "normal" cognition to mild cognitive impairment and AD dementia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Criteria for the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) were established in 1984. A broad consensus now exists that these criteria should be revised to incorporate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge.
Methods: The National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer's Association sponsored a series of advisory round table meetings in 2009 whose purpose was to establish a process for revising diagnostic and research criteria for AD.
Contraction kinetics of isolated rat tracheal smooth muscle were studied by analysing the increase of force subsequent to force-inhibiting passive length changes lasting 1 s (100 Hz, sinus, 5% of muscle length). Compared with carbachol activation, phorboldibutyrate (PDBu)-induced stimulation of protein kinase C (PKC) demonstrated no significant difference in the extent of force development in the polarized preparation [mean peak force 9.16 +/- 0.
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