Plos One
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The assumption that a name uniquely identifies an entity introduces two types of errors: splitting treats one entity as two or more (because of name variants); lumping treats multiple entities as if they were one (because of shared names). Here we investigate the extent to which splitting and lumping affect commonly-used measures of large-scale named-entity networks within two disambiguated bibliographic datasets: one for co-author names in biomedicine (PubMed, 2003-2007); the other for co-inventor names in U. S. patents (USPTO, 2003-2007). ⋯ This effect of lumping is much less dramatic but persists with measures that give less weight to high-degree vertices, such as the mean local clustering coefficient and log-based degree assortativity. Furthermore, the log-log distribution of collaborator counts follows a much straighter line (power law) with splitting and lumping errors than without, particularly at the low and the high counts. This suggests that part of the power law often observed for collaborator counts in science and technology reflects an artifact: name ambiguity.
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Acute kidney injury (AKI) and acute lung injury (ALI) are serious complications of sepsis. AKI is often viewed as a late complication of sepsis. Notably, the onset of AKI relative to ALI is unclear as routine measures of kidney function (BUN and creatinine) are insensitive and increase late. In this study, we hypothesized that AKI and ALI would occur simultaneously due to a shared pathophysiology (i.e., TNF-α mediated systemic inflammatory response syndrome [SIRS]), but that sensitive markers of kidney function would be required to identify AKI. ⋯ ALI and AKI occur together early in the course of sepsis and TNF-α plays a role in the early pathogenesis of both.
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Real-time brain-machine interfaces (BMI) have focused on either estimating the continuous movement trajectory or target intent. However, natural movement often incorporates both. Additionally, BMIs can be modeled as a feedback control system in which the subject modulates the neural activity to move the prosthetic device towards a desired target while receiving real-time sensory feedback of the state of the movement. ⋯ The optimal feedback control design also results in trajectories that are smoother and have lower estimation error. The two-stage decoder also performs better than linear regression approaches in offline cross-validation analyses. Our results demonstrate the advantage of a BMI design that jointly estimates the target and trajectory of movement and more closely mimics the sensorimotor control system.
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Postoperative respiratory complications are a major cause of mortality following liver transplantation (LT). Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) appears to be effective for respiratory complications in patients undergoing solid organ transplantation; however, mortality has been high in patients who experienced reintubation in spite of NIV therapy. The predictors of reintubation following NIV therapy after LT are not exactly known. ⋯ Because controlled preoperative infection, ABO-incompatibility or pneumonia prior to the start of NIV were independent risk factors for reintubation following NIV, caution should be used in applying NIV in patients with these conditions considering the high rate of mortality in patients requiring reintubation following NIV.
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Following fear conditioning (FC), ex vivo evidence suggests that early dynamics of cellular and molecular plasticity in amygdala and hippocampal circuits mediate responses to fear. Such altered dynamics in fear circuits are thought to be etiologically related to anxiety disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Consistent with this, neuroimaging studies of individuals with established PTSD in the months after trauma have revealed changes in brain regions responsible for processing fear. However, whether early changes in fear circuits can be captured in vivo is not known. ⋯ Our results indicate that DTI can detect rapid microstructural changes in brain regions known to mediate fear conditioning in vivo. DTI indices could be explored as a translational tool to capture potential early biological changes in individuals at risk for developing PTSD.