R ecovery after acute neurological damage, e.g. stroke 1 (Table 1), is believed to involve reorganisa-tion of neural circuitry, which enables non-damaged parts of the brain to appropriate new functions. A pragmatist might reasonably argue that understanding the mechanisms underpinning plasticity is not necessary; the goal for physicians is simply to maximise plasticity and, thereby, speed recov...

We show that continuum models for ideal plasticity can be obtained as a rigorous mathematical limit starting from a discrete microscopic model describing a viscoelastic crystal lattice with quenched disorder. The constitutive structure changes as a result of two concurrent limiting procedures: the vanishing-viscosity limit and the discrete-to-continuum limit. In the course of these limits a non...

Neurons in the central nervous system are organized in functional units interconnected to form complex networks. Acute and chronic brain damage disrupts brain connectivity producing neurological signs and/or symptoms. In several neurological diseases, particularly in Multiple Sclerosis (MS), structural imaging studies cannot always demonstrate a clear association between lesion site and clinica...

1Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Viale Regina Elena 299, 00161 Rome, Italy 2Instituto de Neurociencias, CSIC-UMH, Avenida Ramón y Cajal s/n, 03550 Sant Joan d’Alacant, Spain 3Institute of Applied Physiology, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany 4Institute of Anatomy and Medical Cell Biology, Heidelberg University, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany 5Klinikum Rech...

Studies in nonhuman primates have provided evidence of rapid neural reorganization in somatosensory cortex after brain damage [1] and amputation [2]. Furthermore, there is also evidence of experience-dependent plasticity in both human [3-5] and nonhuman primates [6] that is induced by repetitive tactile stimulation. Given the evidence of plasticity subsequent to both neural damage and tactile e...

The aim of this article is to investigate how the stress triaxiality affects plastic deformation behavior high-density polyethylene using an approach combining experiments and micromechanics-based modeling. stress-strain along with cavitation damage accumulation are experimentally quantified under well-controlled transversal response hourglass-shaped tensile specimens different curvature radii ...

A novel micromechanics based damage model is proposed to address failure mechanism of defected solids with randomly distributed penny-shaped cohesive micro-cracks (Barenblatt–Dugdale type). Energy release contribution to the material damage process is estimated in a representative volume element (RVE) under macro hydrostatic stress state. Macro-constitutive relations of RVE are derived via self...

A reduced micromorphic model is formulated in the scope of crystal plasticity and crystalline cleavage damage. The finite strain formulation utilizes a single additional microvariable that used to regularize localized inelastic deformation mechanisms. Damage as strain-like variable fit generalized microslip and/or microdamage based formulation. Strategies treating slip damage simultaneously sep...