Activity

Therefore, the retroperitoneum was further dissected to search for the needle. Once the needle was identified, its flexibility enabled it to be easily removed by grasping it directly with a needle holder. The length of the aberrant needle was 40mm. The postoperative course was uneventful, and the patient was discharged from hospital on postoperative day 2.

When a foreign body remains in the gluteus and its tip touches intrapelvic organs, such as the rectum, it is critical to determine the best approach for its safe removal. Given the anatomical location of the foreign body and the patient background, laparoscopic removal was considered the best approach in the present case.

When a foreign body remains in the gluteus and its tip touches intrapelvic organs, such as the rectum, it is critical to determine the best approach for its safe removal. Given the anatomical location of the foreign body and the patient background, laparoscopic removal was considered the best approach in the present case.Pain is a complex, multidimensional experience that involves dynamic interactions between sensory-discriminative and affective-emotional processes. Pain experiences have a high degree of variability depending on their context and prior anticipation. Viewing pain perception as a perceptual inference problem, we propose a predictive coding paradigm to characterize evoked and non-evoked pain. We record the local field potentials (LFPs) from the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of freely behaving rats-two regions known to encode the sensory-discriminative and affective-emotional aspects of pain, respectively. We further use predictive coding to investigate the temporal coordination of oscillatory activity between the S1 and ACC. Specifically, we develop a phenomenological predictive coding model to describe the macroscopic dynamics of bottom-up and top-down activity. Supported by recent experimental data, we also develop a biophysical neural mass model to describe the mesoscopic neural dynamics in the S1 and ACC populations, in both naive and chronic pain-treated animals. Our proposed predictive coding models not only replicate important experimental findings, but also provide new prediction about the impact of the model parameters on the physiological or behavioral read-out-thereby yielding mechanistic insight into the uncertainty of expectation, placebo or nocebo effect, and chronic pain.Feed-forward deep neural networks have better performance in object categorization tasks than other models of computer vision. To understand the relationship between feed-forward deep networks and the primate brain, we investigated representations of upright and inverted faces in a convolutional deep neural network model and compared them with representations by neurons in the monkey anterior inferior-temporal cortex, area TE. We applied principal component analysis to feature vectors in each model layer to visualize the relationship between the vectors of the upright and inverted faces. The vectors of the upright and inverted monkey faces were more separated through the convolution layers. In the fully-connected layers, the separation among human individuals for upright faces was larger than for inverted faces. The Spearman correlation between each model layer and TE neurons reached a maximum at the fully-connected layers. These results indicate that the processing of faces in the fully-connected layers might resemble the asymmetric representation of upright and inverted faces by the TE neurons. The separation of upright and inverted faces might take place by feed-forward processing in the visual cortex, and separations among human individuals for upright faces, which were larger than those for inverted faces, might occur in area TE.The classical approach for calibrating non-ratiometric fluorescent Ca2+ dyes entails the measurement of the fluorescence maximum (Fmax) and minimum (Fmin), as well as the dissociation constant (Kd) of the Ca2+-Dye reaction (model 1). An alternative equation does not need the Fmin but requires the rate constants kon and koff (model 2). However, both approaches are experimentally time consuming and the rate constants for several dyes are unknown. Here, we propose a set of equations (model 3) that simplify the calibration of fluorescent Ca2+ transients obtained with non-ratiometric dyes. This equation allows the calibration of signals without using the Fmin [Ca2+] = Kd(F – Frest/Fmax – F) + [Ca2+]IR(Fmax – Frest/Fmax – F), where [Ca2+]IR is the resting [Ca2+]. If the classical calibration approach is followed, the Fmin can be estimated from Fmin = Frest – ([Ca2+]IR(Fmax – Frest)/Kd). We tested the models’ performance using signals obtained from enzymatically dissociated flexor digitorum brevis fibers of C57BL/6 mice loaded with Fluo-4, AM. Model 3 performed the same as model 2, and both gave peak [Ca2+] values 15 ± 0.3% (n = 3) lower than model 1, when we used our experimental Fmin (1.24 ± 0.11 A.U., n = 4). However, when we used the mathematically estimated Fmin (6.78 ± 0.2 A.U) for model 1, the peak [Ca2+] were similar for all three models. This suggests that the dye leakage makes a correct determination of the Fmin unlikely and induces errors in the estimation of [Ca2+]. In conclusion, we propose simpler and time-saving equations that help to reliably calibrate cytosolic Ca2+ transients obtained with non-ratiometric fluorescent dyes. The use of the estimated Fmin avoids the uncertainties associated with its experimental measurement.A transduced mechanical signal arriving at its destination in muscle alters sarcomeric structure and function. A major question addressed is how muscle mass and tension generation are optimized to match actual performance demands so that little energy is wasted. Three cases for improved energy efficiency are examined the troponin complex for tuning force production, control of the myosin heads in a resting state, and the Z-disc proteins for sarcomere assembly. On arrival, the regulation of protein complexes is often controlled by post-translational modification (PTM), of which the most common are phosphorylation by kinases, deacetylation by histone deacetylases and ubiquitination by E3 ligases. Another branch of signals acts not through peptide covalent bonding but via ligand interactions (e.g. Ca2+ and phosphoinositide binding). selleck chemical The myosin head and the regulation of its binding to actin by the troponin complex is the best and earliest example of signal destinations that modify myofibrillar contractility. PTMs in the troponin complex regulate both the efficiency of the contractile function to match physiologic demand for work, and muscle mass via protein degradation.