Lippia alba (Mill.) N.E. Brown (Verbenaceae) is widely used in different regions of Central and South America as a tranquilizer. The plant's anxiolytic properties, however, merit investigation. The ...present study evaluated the effects of repeated daily (14 days) intraperitoneal (ip) treatment with an essential oil (EO) from a chemotype of L. alba (LA, chemotype II, 12.5 and 25 mg/kg; N = 6-8) and (R)-(-)-carvone (25 mg/kg; N = 8-12), the main constituent of this chemotype, on male Wistar rats (weighing 250 g at the beginning of the experiments) submitted to the elevated T-maze (ETM). The ETM allows the measurement of two defensive responses: inhibitory avoidance and one-way escape. In terms of psychopathology, these responses have been related to generalized anxiety and panic disorder, respectively. Treatment with the EO impaired ETM avoidance latencies, without altering escape, in a way similar to the reference drug diazepam (P < 0.05) (avoidance 2: control = 84.6 ± 35.2; EO 12.5 mg/kg = 11.8 ± 3.8; EO 25 mg/kg = 14.6 ± 2.7; diazepam = 7 ± 2.1). (R)-(-)-carvone also significantly altered this same response (P < 0.05; avoidance 1: control = 91.9 ± 31.5; carvone = 11.6 ± 1.8; diazepam = 8.1 ± 3.3). These results were not due to motor changes since no significant effects were detected in an open field. These observations suggest that LA exerts anxiolytic-like effects on a specific subset of defensive behaviors that have been implicated in generalized anxiety disorder, and suggest that carvone is one of the constituents of LA responsible for its action as a tranquilizer.
Background
Our aim was to evaluate the reproducibility of epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) volume, measured on scans performed using an open-bore magnetic resonance scanner.
Methods
Consecutive ...patients referred for bariatric surgery, aged between 18 and 65 years who agreed to undergo cardiac imaging (MRI), were prospectively enrolled. All those with cardiac pathology or contraindications to MRI were excluded. MRI was performed on a 1.0-T open-bore scanner, and EAT was segmented on all scans at both systolic and diastolic phase by two independent readers (R1 with four years of experience and R2 with one year). Data were reported as median and interquartile range; agreement and differences were appraised with Bland-Altman analyses and Wilcoxon tests, respectively.
Results
Fourteen patients, 11 females (79%) aged 44 (41–50) years, underwent cardiac MRI. For the first and second readings, respectively, EAT volume was 86 (78–95) cm
3
and 85 (79–91) cm
3
at systole and 82 (74–95) cm
3
and 81 (75–94) cm
3
at diastole for R1, and 89 (79–99) cm
3
and 93 (84–98) cm
3
at systole and 92 (85–103) cm
3
and 93 (82–94) cm
3
at diastole for R2. R1 had the best reproducibility at diastole (bias 0.3 cm
3
, standard deviation of the differences (SD) 3.3 cm
3
). R2 had the worst reproducibility at diastole (bias 3.9 cm
3
, SD 12.1 cm
3
). The only significant difference between systole and diastole was at the first reading by R1 (
p
= 0.016). The greatest bias was that of inter-reader reproducibility at diastole (-9.4 cm
3
).
Conclusions
Reproducibility was within clinically acceptable limits in most instances.
The increasing economic competition of all industrial markets and growing complexity of engineering problems lead to a progressive specialisation and distribution of expertise, tools and work sites. ...Most industrial sectors manage this fragmentation using the concurrent engineering approach, which is based on tools integration and shared databases and requires significant investments in design and work organisation. Besides, the multidisciplinary design optimisation (MDO) is more and more used as a method for optimal solutions search with regard to multiple coupled disciplines. The paper describes a quite innovative multidisciplinary optimisation method based on robust design techniques: MORDACE (multidisciplinary optimisation and robust design approaches applied to concurrent engineering). Managing uncertainty due to design teams collaboration, our automatic optimisation strategy allows concurrently designing different aspects or parts of a complex product. The method assures effective design work distribution and high optimisation results, containing the CPU time. In addition, our strategy is suited to the early stages of the design cycle, where evolutions of design goals and constraints are possible and exhaustive information about the design space is necessary. A roll stabiliser fin optimisation is presented as an example of this method applied to an industrial design problem.
The CMS silicon strip tracker, providing a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and comprising 10 million readout channels, has recently been completed at the tracker integration facility at CERN. ...The strip tracker community is currently working to develop and integrate the online and offline software frameworks, known as XDAQ and CMSSW respectively, for the purposes of data acquisition and detector commissioning and monitoring. Recent developments have seen the integration of many new services and tools within the online data acquisition system, such as event building, online distributed analysis, an online monitoring framework, and data storage management. We review the various software components that comprise the strip tracker data acquisition system, the software architectures used for stand-alone and global data-taking modes. Our experiences in commissioning and operating one of the largest ever silicon micro-strip tracking systems are also reviewed.
The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker at the LHC comprises a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and 10 million readout channels. Its data acquisition system is based around a custom analogue front-end ...chip. Both the control and the readout of the front-end electronics are performed by off-detector VME boards in the counting room, which digitise the raw event data and perform zero-suppression and formatting. The data acquisition system uses the CMS online software framework to configure, control and monitor the hardware components and steer the data acquisition. The first data analysis is performed online within the official CMS reconstruction framework, which provides many services, such as distributed analysis, access to geometry and conditions data, and a Data Quality Monitoring tool based on the online physics reconstruction. The data acquisition monitoring of the Strip Tracker uses both the data acquisition and the reconstruction software frameworks in order to provide real-time feedback to shifters on the operational state of the detector, archiving for later analysis and possibly trigger automatic recovery actions in case of errors. Here we review the proposed architecture of the monitoring system and we describe its software components, which are already in place, the various monitoring streams available, and our experiences of operating and monitoring a large-scale system.
This paper investigates the performance of silicon microstrip detectors after heavy irradiation. Full-size prototype sensors (53 /spl times/ 64 mm/sup 2/) designed for the CMS Tracker have been ...irradiated with protons and extensively studied in the laboratory and using a beam of minimum ionising particles operated at low temperature as foreseen for the Large Hadron Collider. We present results of large statistics measurements of collected charge, noise, position resolution, and hit finding efficiency for these irradiated detectors.
The paper reports the results of a joint R&D project between INFN Pisa and STMicroelectronics aiming at the development of silicon micro-strip detectors with very high breakdown voltage. Several ...series of prototypes have been manufactured on 6-in-diameter n-type silicon wafers. The production technology was tuned for the standard high volume production lines and was optimized to reach a high processing yield while maintaining very good detector performance. We present a complete characterization of the devices in terms of leakage current, depletion voltage, quality and uniformity of coupling capacitors and polysilicon resistors. We discuss the main design rules and the most important technological steps which led to breakdown voltage systematically exceeding 1000 V even for very large area detectors.
The measurement of the finesse and the longitudinal locking of a 100 μm long plane mirrors Fabry-Perot cavity is described. a finesse of up to 5400 has been found. If attached to the Virgo antenna ...suspension (SA), a similar device is sensitive enough to detect the thermal displacement noise of the SA test mass, which is expected to limit the Virgo antenna sensitivity between 10 and 600 Hz. Reducing the Virgo noise floor is a challenge for future antenna development, as this region is the most promising one for coalescing binary stars and pulsar signals.
A set of microstrip gas chamber (MSGC) prototypes, developed for the barrel Tracking Detector of the CMS experiment at LHC, has been tested in a beam. The chambers were 10cm long, with Pestov or ...diamond coated glass substrate. The results on the performance of the chambers are reported. The spatial uniformity of the chambers is also illustrated.
Test of a CMS MSGC tracker prototype in a high-intensity hadron beam Abbaneo, D.; Albert, E.; Angelini, F. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
05/1998, Letnik:
409, Številka:
1-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A set of CMS MicroStrip Gas Chambers (MSGC) was exposed to a high-intensity 3GeV/c pion beam at a CERN PS facility for a period of two weeks. The performance of the detectors is reported in terms of ...stability of efficiency and response to minimum ionising particles as well as to more heavily ionising fragments generated by nuclear interactions.
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