Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) produces an electrophysiological signature called evoked resonant neural activity (ERNA); a high-frequency oscillation that has been ...linked to treatment efficacy. However, the single-neuron and synaptic bases of ERNA are unsubstantiated. This study proposes that ERNA is a subcortical neuronal circuit signature of DBS-mediated engagement of the basal ganglia indirect pathway network. In people with Parkinson's disease, we: (i) showed that each peak of the ERNA waveform is associated with temporally-locked neuronal inhibition in the STN; (ii) characterized the temporal dynamics of ERNA; (iii) identified a putative mesocircuit architecture, embedded with empirically-derived synaptic dynamics, that is necessary for the emergence of ERNA in silico; (iv) localized ERNA to the dorsal STN in electrophysiological and normative anatomical space; (v) used patient-wise hotspot locations to assess spatial relevance of ERNA with respect to DBS outcome; and (vi) characterized the local fiber activation profile associated with the derived group-level ERNA hotspot.
The origin of secondary currents and subaqueous sediment patterns in natural rivers is analysed from first principles. For this purpose, simulations of sediment transport in canonical turbulent open ...channel flows are performed using a numerical technique that resolves all relevant flow scales and the dynamics of the individual sand grains. The high-fidelity datasets reveal the fundamental importance of individual coherent structures for the development of sediment patterns and secondary flows.
Neural communication across different spatial and temporal scales is a topic of great interest in clinical and basic science. Phase‐amplitude coupling (PAC) has attracted particular interest due to ...its functional role in a wide range of cognitive and motor functions. Here, we introduce a novel measure termed the direct modulation index (dMI). Based on the classical modulation index, dMI provides an estimate of PAC that is (1) bound to an absolute interval between 0 and +1, (2) resistant against noise, and (3) reliable even for small amounts of data. To highlight the properties of this newly‐proposed measure, we evaluated dMI by comparing it to the classical modulation index, mean vector length, and phase‐locking value using simulated data. We ascertained that dMI provides a more accurate estimate of PAC than the existing methods and that is resilient to varying noise levels and signal lengths. As such, dMI permits a reliable investigation of PAC, which may reveal insights crucial to our understanding of functional brain architecture in key contexts such as behaviour and cognition. A Python toolbox that implements dMI and other measures of PAC is freely available at https://github.com/neurophysiological-analysis/FiNN.
Neural coupling measures are sensitive to higher harmonics of the target oscillation. The direct modulation index is a novel measure that achieves frequency‐specificity by sine‐fitting the phase‐amplitude histogram. dMI allows for reliable estimation of phase‐amplitude coupling with increased robustness to noise and signal duration in comparison to other measures.
Deep brain stimulation procedures offer an invaluable opportunity to study disease through intracranial recordings from awake patients. Here, we address the relationship between single-neuron and ...aggregate-level (local field potential; LFP) activities in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (Vim) of patients with Parkinson's disease (
= 19) and essential tremor (
= 16), respectively. Both disorders have been characterized by pathologically elevated LFP oscillations, as well as an increased tendency for neuronal bursting. Our findings suggest that periodic single-neuron bursts encode both pathophysiological beta (13 to 33 Hz; STN) and tremor (4 to 10 Hz; Vim) LFP oscillations, evidenced by strong time-frequency and phase-coupling relationships between the bursting and LFP signals. Spiking activity occurring outside of bursts had no relationship to the LFP. In STN, bursting activity most commonly preceded the LFP oscillation, suggesting that neuronal bursting generated within STN may give rise to an aggregate-level LFP oscillation. In Vim, LFP oscillations most commonly preceded bursting activity, suggesting that neuronal firing may be entrained by periodic afferent inputs. In both STN and Vim, the phase-coupling relationship between LFP and high-frequency oscillation (HFO) signals closely resembled the relationships between the LFP and single-neuron bursting. This suggests that periodic single-neuron bursting is likely representative of a higher spatial and temporal resolution readout of periodic increases in the amplitude of HFOs, which themselves may be a higher resolution readout of aggregate-level LFP oscillations. Overall, our results may reconcile "rate" and "oscillation" models of Parkinson's disease and shed light on the single-neuron basis and origin of pathophysiological oscillations in movement disorders.
Recently, neuroscience has seen a shift from localist approaches to network-wide investigations of brain function. Neurophysiological signals across different spatial and temporal scales provide ...insight into neural communication. However, additional methodological considerations arise when investigating network-wide brain dynamics rather than local effects. Specifically, larger amounts of data, investigated across a higher dimensional space, are necessary. Here, we present FiNN (
nd
europhysiological
etworks), a novel toolbox for the analysis of neurophysiological data with a focus on functional and effective connectivity. FiNN provides a wide range of data processing methods and statistical and visualization tools to facilitate inspection of connectivity estimates and the resulting metrics of brain dynamics. The Python toolbox and its documentation are freely available as
. We evaluated FiNN against a number of established frameworks on both a conceptual and an implementation level. We found FiNN to require much less processing time and memory than other toolboxes. In addition, FiNN adheres to a design philosophy of easy access and modifiability, while providing efficient data processing implementations. Since the investigation of network-level neural dynamics is experiencing increasing interest, we place FiNN at the disposal of the neuroscientific community as open-source software.
In Spain the price of all ibuprofen 600 mg tablet generic products is the same due to reimbursement existing rules so for the patient there is not any economic incentive to choose a particular one. ...Bearing in mind that the quality of generic products should be similar, it could be questioned if differences in patient preferences evaluated as sales could be related to differences on their pharmaceutical properties. The aims of this work were to study the variability on the pharmaceutical characteristics of marketed bioequivalent tablet formulations and its impact on patient preferences.
Thirty-six batches corresponding to fourteen different generic products were chosen among the best-selling products of the Spanish market in the years 2011 and 2015 and were compared to the reference product. The effect on patient preferences of six variables was studied through a multivariate analysis. The first two variables were marketing characteristics: 1) years in the market and 2) the number of other generic products marketed by the same manufacturer, which could be related to the size and service provided by the manufacturer. The other four variables studied were pharmaceutical tablet properties: 3) mean weight, 4) hardness, 5) disintegration, and 6) dissolution. A multiple linear regression analysis was performed to identify the effect on sales of the six variables studied.
The disintegration time was the most significant (
=0.018) factor affecting the sales of Ibuprofen tablets which may be related to the onset of action.
The faster the tablet disintegration, the higher its sales. Two possible explanations are suggested: 1) the most specialized ibuprofen tablet manufacturer considers fast disintegration as a key parameter and/or 2) habitual consumers of ibuprofen can detect small differences on the onset of action among different marketed formulations. In this work, all marketed ibuprofen tablets comply with the pharmacopoeia specifications.
Starring into the void? Putze, Felix; Scherer, Maximilian; Schultz, Tanja
Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction,
10/2016
Conference Proceeding
For any HCI system, it would be a great advantage if it was aware of the attentional state of its user: Is he or she paying attention to external stimuli provided by the user's environment or is the ...user focusing his or her attention on internal mental tasks? In this paper, we propose a model for the discrimination of internal and external attention by using Electroencephalography. We describe the experiment we conducted to collect data of internal and external attention, describe our setup for classification and discuss the classifications results.
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