Cognitive load is the amount of mental resources required to execute a task. Psychophysiological researches show variations in the electrodermal activity of the skin with variations in cognitive ...load. State of the art studies mostly use exosomatic approach like Galvanic Skin Resistance (GSR) for measuring electrodermal activity. However, recent advances made in implementation of wearable endosomatic devices motivated us to use endosomatic bio-potentials measured using a wearable device for assessing cognitive load. In the present study, we have studied the effect of cognitive load on the endosomatic human bio-potentials. We have used a 4-channel high-resolution wearable device for measuring the bio-potentials during the execution of low and high cognitive load versions of mental addition tasks. Results suggest that there is significant variation in endosomatic electrodermal activity for various levels of cognitive load which can be used to classify low and high mental workload successfully. We have observed and analyzed bio-potentials recorded from both hands and feet. Combining potentials measured from all 4 locations, the classification accuracy obtained using a random forest classifier is approximately 83.4% and the corresponding f-score is 0.83. An optimum set of features selected increases the accuracy further to 86.5%. Moreover, a feature level fusion of GSR and endosomatic signal features gives an accuracy of 89.4%. Thus, the proposed approach provides immense scope for assessing mental workload based on bio-potentials recorded using a wearable device.
Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDSs) represent a spectrum of disorders that are generally thought to arise from a defective hematopoietic stem cell leading to clonal, dysregulated hematopoiesis. Although ...it is generally agreed that the marrow microenvironment plays a role in the biology of MDS, it is unclear whether this represents an intrinsically abnormal stromal compartment derived from the MDS clone. Hematopoiesis requires cooperation between progenitors and a variety of functionally and phenotypically different cell types that form the bone marrow stroma. Stromal abnormalities suspected to contribute to the pathology of bone marrow disorder with impaired hematopoiesis. Several studies on human MDS bone marrow microenvironment revealed functional alteration and increased cellular apoptosis thus contribute to the pathology of the disease progression. In this present study, we have investigated alterations in the hematopoietic microenvironment and underlying mechanisms involved in the disease progression of MDS animal model. We presented the results of bone marrow single cell culture study, Long-term bone marrow adherent culture study (LTBMC) and their functional efficacy, flowcytometric characterization of stem (Scal+c-kit+) and stromal (Scal+CD44+) progenitor cell population and expression level of extracellular apoptosis marker (Annexin v) in the bone marrow cells of MDS animal model. Bone marrow single cell culture study of MDS animal showed impairment in the normal cellular generation, proliferation and presence of apoptic cells. Long-term liquid Bone marrow stromal cell colony formation assay from MDS bone marrow cells showed significant difference in the colony formation and their maintenance than the control groups of animals. Immune functional capacity of the bone marrow stromal cells through cell mediated immune (CMI) parameter study denoted defects in the stromal microenvironment. Decreased expression of bone marrow long-term primitive hematopoietic population and stromal progenitor population depicted bone marrow abnormality in case of MDS animal model, which bears significant correlation with high expression level of apoptosis marker in the bone marrow cells. From the above experimental study we tried to highlight the abnormal bone marrow microenvironment and alteration in the bone marrow cell surface marker expression, which could be the probable mechanism of evolution and disease progression in case of MDS animal model.
Strength of an association rule is expressed in terms of interest between antecedent and consequent which is measured by using objective interestingness measures. The rules that contain at least user ...defined minimum interestingness are treated as Strong Association Rules (SAR). All of the SARs, extracted from the same database have no equal importance in knowledge discovery. As the user has limited resource to fix up the minimum interestingness, so there is a chance of generation of some SARs with high dissociation. Conceptually dissociation is opposite of association. As a matter of fact this type of SARs has pessimistic significance in knowledge discovery. It seems that some of the SARs are not really strong rules. This paper tries to find out such type of pseudo SARs termed as Pessimistic Association Rules (PAR). Dealing with PARs may not satisfy the user's expectation in decision making. Thus rejection of PARs may lead to a cost effective way to get a concrete decision. Experimental analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed concept.
Stem Cell Antigen-1 or Sca-1 is a cell surface receptor protein commonly used to detect adult murine haematopoietic stem cell population. Outside the haematopoietic system Sca-1 is similarly ...expressed in stem and progenitor cells in a wide variety of tissues and organs such as skeletal muscle, mammary gland, prostate, heart, liver and dermis. Thus Sca-1 has become a candidate marker in the search of tissue specific stem cells. The maintenance of a healthy corneal epithelium is achieved by a unique population of stem cell located in the limbal epithelial region. This limbal epithelium mainly contains limbal epithelial stem cells and its immediate progenitor early transient amplifying cells (e-TAC) which have self renewal capacity. As stem cells in other organs have been identified by their expression of Sca-1, in our study we wanted to determine whether this antigen could be present in the limbal epithelial region which contains stem cell population by using immunofluorescence through flow cytometric analysis of Sca-1 and its association with the cell cycle.
