Frontiers in Hospitalist Neurology (FHN) is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal formed to respond to the growing momentum of the neurohospitalist movement. Cultivating a subspecialty peer-reviewed medical literature will be vital if neuro-hospitalist medicine is to flourish among more established medical subspecialties. Peer-review has a storied past. In the English speaking world, the pro...

We explore the understanding of conscious states in terms of spatio-temporal dynamics through modelling a mobile agent. Conscious states are associated with an agent’s spontaneous and deterministic fluctuation between attachment to and detachment from the surroundings. It is because of this fluctuating nature, we argue, that an agent can perceive structure in the world. Perception requires a co...

In 1998 the World Health Organisation (WHO) Europe proposed a new type of community based nurse called the family health nurse (FHN). Although it was initially envisaged that 18 European countries would take part in the development of the FHN role through parallel processes of education and implementation, Scotland has been significantly ahead of other countries in enacting this plan. A pilot p...

A heightened hedonic response to sweet tastes has been associated with increased alcohol preference and alcohol consumption in both humans and animals. The principal goal of this study was to examine blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activation to high- and low-concentration sweet solutions in subjects who are either positive (FHP) or negative (FHN) for a family history of alcoholism. Se...

Many phenomena such as neuron firing in the brain, the travelling waves which produce the heartbeat, arrythmia and fibrillation in the heart, catalytic reactions or cellular organization activities, among others, can be described by a unifying paradigm based on a class of nonlinear reaction-diffusion mechanisms. The FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model is a simplified version of such class which is know...

PURPOSE To evaluate the efficiency and reproducibility of the extended FitzHugh & Nagumo (FHN) reaction-diffusion model proposed in this study for white matter hyperintensities (WMH) segmentation. MATERIALS AND METHODS Five types of magnetic resonance T2-weighted fluid-attenuated inversion-recovery (T2FLAIR) images of 127 patients with different scanning parameters from five clinical scanner ...

In bistable systems, the stability of front structures often influences the dynamics of extended patterns. We show how the combined effect of an instability to curvature modulations and proximity to a pitchfork front bifurcation leads to spontaneous nucleation of spiral waves along the front. This effect is demonstrated by direct simulations of a FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model and by simulations o...

We consider the fixed and exponential time-stepping Euler algorithms, with boundary tests, to calculate the mean first exit times (MFET) of two one-dimensional neural diffusion models, represented by the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) process and a stochastic space-clamped FitzHugh–Nagumo (FHN) system. The numerical methods are described and the convergence rates for the MFET analysed. A boundary test...

In bistable systems, the stability of front structures often influences the dynamics of extended patterns. We show how the combined effect of an instability to curvature modulations and proximity to a pitchfork front bifurcation leads to spontaneous nucleation of spiral waves along the front. This effect is demonstrated by direct simulations of a FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model and by simulations o...