Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

BIOE 402. Medical Technology Assessment. 2 or 3 hours. Bioentrepreneur course. Assessment of medical technology in the context of commercialization. Objectives, competition, market share, funding, pricing, manufacturing, growth, and intellectual property; many issues unique to biomedical products. Course Information: 2 undergraduate hours. 3 graduate hours. Prerequisite(s): Junior standing or above and consent of the instructor.

“Bioinformatics” 특집을 내면서

Department of Materials Science, University of Patras, 26504 Rio Patras, Greece, Theoretical and Physical Chemistry Institute, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48 Vass. Constantinou Avenue, 116 35 Athens, Greece, Institut de Biologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire, UPR9021 CNRS, Immunologie et Chimie Therapeutiques, 67084 Strasbourg, France, and Dipartimento di Scienze Farmaceutiche, Universita di Trieste, Piazzale Europa 1, 34127 Trieste, Italy

Chemistry of Carbon Nanotubes

Engineered nanoparticles have the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases; for example, by allowing the targeted delivery of a drug to particular subsets of cells. However, so far, such nanoparticles have not proved capable of surmounting all of the biological barriers required to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, advances in nanoparticle engineering, as well as advances in understanding the importance of nanoparticle characteristics such as size, shape and surface properties for biological interactions, are creating new opportunities for the development of nanoparticles for therapeutic applications. This Review focuses on recent progress important for the rational design of such nanoparticles and discusses the challenges to realizing the potential of nanoparticles.

Strategies in the design of nanoparticles for therapeutic applications

Neuronal reconstruction, which involves generating the quantitative datasets that can measure neuronal morphologies, is a key step towards identifying cell types, building neuronal connectivity pattern, mapping neuronal circuits, modeling neurons, and realizing other such activities. Neuronal reconstruction can also provide valuable datasets for some studies focused on artificial intelligence. Recent advances in light microscopic techniques have enabled the whole-brain imaging of a mouse at cellular resolution and allowed us to observe nearly the complete morphology of a population of neurons including dendrites, soma, and axons. These imaging techniques have promoted the study of neuronal networks to an unprecedented scale and have been initiated to obtain the organization of the entire brain at a single-cell level. However, the neuronal datasets collected with these imaging techniques are complicated and pose many challenges to the current neuronal reconstruction methods. In this circumstance, we elaborated upon the research status of neuronal reconstruction, reviewed typical methods, and predicted the research trends. The research status indicates that many current methods focus on single neuron reconstruction, which involves analyzing the images in which a single neuron is included. These single neuron reconstruction methods are classified into groups including skeleton methods, region growing methods, graph-based methods, snake models, and local structure-based methods. We summarized the advantages and disadvantages of each of these methods, and regarded that the reconstruction performance depends on the match between the data set characteristics and the reconstruction methods. A reconstruction method may be suitable for most datasets but fail for some specific cases. In comparison to single neuron reconstruction, neuronal population reconstruction should be paid more attention to: Unlike single neuron reconstruction, neuronal population reconstruction focuses on images including a population of neurons and requires assigning the traced neurites into their own neurons. Neuronal population reconstruction can provide the information necessary for researching the correlation, coupling, and connectivity between neurons, and has several advantages over single neuron reconstruction. We presented compelling evidence to suggest that it is inevitable for the trend of development to move from single-neuron to neuronal population reconstruction. The evidences can be summarized as follows: The existing imaging techniques produce a large amount of neuronal population datasets. However, at present, single neuron reconstruction methods cannot cope with these datasets; population reconstruction method is in its infant stage and is thus urgently required. In addition, many existing methods for single neuron reconstruction have become fully mature and can vastly inspire population reconstruction methods. Furthermore, we highlighted the bottleneck problem of population reconstruction at the brain-wide scale. The current automatic methods fail to cope with this case while semi-automatic reconstruction is too slow. Using the conventional methods, such as a combination of big data organization techniques and the Amira tracing module, thousands of hours are required for the reconstructions of several tens of brain-wide neurons. We proposed a strategy for this bottleneck problem as designing automatic algorithms for the laborious steps in this reconstruction. Finally, we expressed our views on the future development of the neuronal population reconstruction. This sort of reconstruction has a complicated pipeline that involves many steps. Aiming at some key steps, machine learning methods will be designed. The above contents will help researchers evaluate the latest developments in the field at a glance and develop new reconstruction methods that match with the characteristics of the current datasets.

Review of advances and prospects in neuron reconstruction

Blood perfusion depends on blood flow and vessel in local tissue, which plays important role during hyperthermia. Laser speckle imaging technique was developed to obtain the regional blood flow distribution with high spatio-temporal resolution. Through LSI method, the velocity and diameter change of microvessels can be acquired simultaneously. In this paper, the spatiotemporal characteristics of local mesentery blood flow in anesthetized rats during thermal therapy (43°C, 45°C, 47°C, 49°C, 60min) were monitored in vivo and real time by laser speckle imaging method. The blood flow distribution image of microvessels diameters in 10-50μm was obtained and analyzed to get the information of the response of the diameter of blood vessel, the velocity of blood flood and the perfusion to hyperthermia. The results showed that the diameter of microvessels increased firstly, then decrease appeared if heated continuously while heated at 43°C, 45°C. The same trend could be found for changes in blood velocity and blood perfusion. While heated at a higher temperature, for example, at 47°C, 49°C, the diameter and blood velocity of microvessels decreased soon. This indicated that the microvessels underwent thermal damage. The thermal damage exhibitions were obvious when heated at higher temperature, and the blood flow blanking even may appear. In general, the blood flow of branch stops early more than the blood flow on the backbone. The analysis of the damage rate showed that the higher the heating temperature, the quicker the damage rate.

Monitoring thermally induced blood flow change of rat mesentery by laser speckle imaging

In this paper, we have developed a Monte Carlo algorithm that simulates the wavelength dependent, elastic scattering spectroscopy of the polarization light in preinvasive cancer tissue. Using stokes vector formalism and scattering amplitudes calculated with Mie theory. The simulation results show the backscattering spectroscopy is sensitive to cellular and nuclear size.© (2004) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Monte Carlo simulation of polarization backscattering spectroscopy

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) can provide important macroscopic structural information for mouse brain but is limited by the available imaging resolution and inferentia tractography. To validate DTI tractography, it is paramount to merge DTI images and microscopic images with true representation of fibers. Recently, we have developed a micro-optical sectioning tomography (MOST) system which enables neurite level resolution. By using Advanced Normalization Tools, we have aligned our MOST dataset to the template dataset of DTI from Duke University. To optimize the computing efficacy, lower resolution of two different modal images has been used to get a displacement field of diffeomorphism. Then the displacement field is extended to the deformation of full resolution images. This has been a flexible strategy for 3D nonlinear mouse brain registration across different modalities and different resolutions. Under this kind of co-registration, we can show very fine neural fiber architectures as foreground (MOST) on the background (DTI) of the fibre density map. By comparing the derived maps between DTI and MOST, we have realized that DTI technique encounters pitfall for resolving complex neural fibres. Image fusion of mouse DTI and MOST dataset should promote both neural circuits study and DTI applications.

Co-registration of diffusion tensor imaging and micro-optical imaging based on ants

In hyperthermia, the accurate measurement of blood flow is regarded as a key footstep to describe physiological status of subjects since blood flow serves both to deliver oxygen and the metabolic substrates, and to carry away heat and the waste products of metabolism. To facilitate these issues we put forward a simple optical method to measure dynamical change of blood volume combining laser speckle measurement and CCD microscopic imaging technique. In this study, at first we selected six different temperatures (31°C, 33°C, 35°C, 37°C, 38°C, 39°C), followed variations of blood velocity and diameter in microvessels (15~50μm) on rat’s mesentery after 30 minutes at each temperature. Furthermore, during heated at seven higher different temperatures (41°C, 43°C, 45°C, 46°C, 49°C, 51°C, 54°C) for 30 minutes respectively, diameter and velocity were measured in vivo and real time. The results showed that changes of blood volume ranged from 68~110% when temperature altered, and the relationship between the constant value and the temperature approximated linear (k=0.05±0.005). While heated at 41°C~46°C for 30 min, velocity increased slightly but diameter and blood volume increased markedly and finally got to constants. The value of velocity increased to maximum when microvessels were heated with 49°C for 12 min. At this temperature, diameter and blood volume increased during the first 14 min, but began to decrease when heated longer. When temperature is higher than 49°C, 51°C, 54°C, velocity ,diameter and blood volume all increased at first and then decreased during 30 min and at the end of heating they were all far lower than control value. We draw our conclusion that the critical temperature is 49°C for intestine microcirculation with heating for 30 min. And the rates of thermal damage are proportion to temperature for the same heating time.

Qingming Luo

Papers

Review of advances and prospects in neuron reconstruction

Monitoring thermally induced blood flow change of rat mesentery by laser speckle imaging

Monte Carlo simulation of polarization backscattering spectroscopy

Co-registration of diffusion tensor imaging and micro-optical imaging based on ants

Dynamic measurement of blood flow with optical methods