Search results for " processi"

Infrared microspectroscopic determination of collagen cross-links in articular cartilage

2017

Collagen forms an organized network in articular cartilage to give tensile stiffness to the tissue. Due to its long half-life, collagen is susceptible to cross-links caused by advanced glycation end-products. The current standard method for determination of cross-link concentrations in tissues is the destructive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The aim of this study was to analyze the cross-link concentrations nondestructively from standard unstained histological articular cartilage sections by using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy. Half of the bovine articular cartilage samples ( n = 27 ) were treated with threose to increase the collagen cross-linking whi…

2021

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is a major cause of morbidity and mortality following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Measuring CMV-specific cellular immunity may improve the risk stratification and management of patients. IFN-γ ELISpot assays, based on the stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells with CMV pp65 and IE-1 proteins or peptides, have been validated in clinical settings. However, it remains unclear to which extend the T-cell response to synthetic peptides reflect that mediated by full-length proteins processed by antigen-presenting cells. We compared the stimulating ability of pp65 and IE-1 proteins and corresponding overlapping peptides in 16 HSCT recip…

The Importance of Cerebellar Connectivity on Simulated Brain Dynamics

2020

The brain shows a complex multiscale organization that prevents a direct understanding of how structure, function and dynamics are correlated. To date, advances in neural modeling offer a unique opportunity for simulating global brain dynamics by embedding empirical data on different scales in a mathematical framework. The Virtual Brain (TVB) is an advanced data-driven model allowing to simulate brain dynamics starting from individual subjects' structural and functional connectivity obtained, for example, from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The use of TVB has been limited so far to cerebral connectivity but here, for the first time, we have introduced cerebellar nodes and interconnecting…

Analysis of RNA modifications by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry

2016

The analysis of RNA modifications is of high importance in order to address a wide range of biological questions. Therefore, a highly sensitive and accurate method such as liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has to be available. By using different LC-MS/MS procedures, it is not only possible to quantify very low amounts of RNA modifications, but also to detect probably unknown modified nucleosides. For these cases the dynamic multiple reaction monitoring and the neutral loss scan are the most common techniques. Here, we provide the whole workflow for analyzing RNA samples regarding their modification content. This includes an equipment list, the preparation of required…

Quantum clustering in non-spherical data distributions: Finding a suitable number of clusters

2017

Quantum Clustering (QC) provides an alternative approach to clustering algorithms, several of which are based on geometric relationships between data points. Instead, QC makes use of quantum mechanics concepts to find structures (clusters) in data sets by finding the minima of a quantum potential. The starting point of QC is a Parzen estimator with a fixed length scale, which significantly affects the final cluster allocation. This dependence on an adjustable parameter is common to other methods. We propose a framework to find suitable values of the length parameter σ by optimising twin measures of cluster separation and consistency for a given cluster number. This is an extension of the Se…

2018

The expertise of humans for recognizing faces is largely based on holistic processing mechanism, a sophisticated cognitive process that develops with visual experience. The various visual features of a face are thus glued together and treated by the brain as a unique stimulus, facilitating robust recognition. Holistic processing is known to facilitate fine discrimination of highly similar visual stimuli, and involves specialized brain areas in humans and other primates. Although holistic processing is most typically employed with face stimuli, subjects can also learn to apply similar image analysis mechanisms when gaining expertise in discriminating novel visual objects, like becoming exper…

Quantitatively characterizing drug-induced arrhythmic contractile motions of human stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.

2018

Quantification of abnormal contractile motions of cardiac tissue has been a noteworthy challenge and significant limitation in assessing and classifying the drug-induced arrhythmias (i.e. Torsades de pointes). To overcome these challenges, researchers have taken advantage of computational image processing tools to measure contractile motion from cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC-CMs). However, the amplitude and frequency analysis of contractile motion waveforms doesn't produce sufficient information to objectively classify the degree of variations between two or more sets of cardiac contractile motions. In this paper, we generated contractile motion dat…

Spectral entropy based neuronal network synchronization analysis based on microelectrode array measurements

2016

Synchrony and asynchrony are essential aspects of the functioning of interconnected neuronal cells and networks. New information on neuronal synchronization can be expected to aid in understanding these systems. Synchronization provides insight in the functional connectivity and the spatial distribution of the information processing in the networks. Synchronization is generally studied with time domain analysis of neuronal events, or using direct frequency spectrum analysis, e.g., in specific frequency bands. However, these methods have their pitfalls. Thus, we have previously proposed a method to analyze temporal changes in the complexity of the frequency of signals originating from differ…

Revealing community structures by ensemble clustering using group diffusion

2018

We propose an ensemble clustering approach using group diffusion to reveal community structures in data. We represent data points as a directed graph and assume each data point belong to single cluster membership instead of multiple memberships. The method is based on the concept of ensemble group diffusion with a parameter to represent diffusion depth in clustering. The ability to modulate the diffusion-depth parameter by varying it within a certain interval allows for more accurate construction of clusters. Depending on the value of the diffusion-depth parameter, the presented approach can determine very well both local clusters and global structure of data. At the same time, the ability …

Automatic detection of hemangiomas using unsupervised segmentation of regions of interest

2016

In this paper we compare the performances of three automatic methods of identifying hemangioma regions in images: 1) unsupervised segmentation using the Otsu method, 2) Fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) and 3) an improved region growing algorithm based on FCM (RG-FCM). For each image, the starting point of the algorithms is a rectangular region of interest (ROI) containing the hemangioma. For computing the performances of each method, the ROIs had been manually labeled in 2 classes: pixels of hemangioma and pixels of non-hemangioma. The computed scores are given separately for each image, as well as global performances across all ROIs for both classes. The best classification of non-hemangioma…