Methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MeCP2) is highly expressed in neurons in the vertebrate brain, and mutations of the gene encoding MeCP2 cause the neurodevelopmental disorder Rett syndrome. This study examines the role of MeCP2 in the development and function of thalamic GABAergic circuits. Whole cell recordings were carried out in excitatory neurons of the ventrobasal complex (VB) of the thalamus...

The final film thickness of a resin adhesive and a resin cement could be affected by previous polymerization of the adhesive systems on dentin surfaces. The aim of this work was to evaluate changes in the film thickness of dual resin based cements with their adhesives as a function of polymerization of the latter on dentin surfaces. The materials used were: RelyX ARC (R) + Single Bond (SB) and ...

Nonparametric Bayesian mixture models, in particular Dirichlet process (DP) mixture models, have shown great promise for density estimation and data clustering. Given the size of today’s datasets, computational efficiency becomes an essential ingredient in the applicability of these techniques to real world data. We study and experimentally compare a number of variational Bayesian (VB) approxim...

The variational Bayesian (VB) approximation is known to be a promising approach to Bayesian estimation, when the rigorous calculation of the Bayes posterior is intractable. The VB approximation has been successfully applied to matrix factorization (MF), offering automatic dimensionality selection for principal component analysis. Generally, finding the VB solution is a non-convex problem, and m...

In both cats and Japanese macaques, there are nociceptive specific (NS) and wide dynamic range (WDR) neurons in the shell region of the caudal ventrobasal (VB) complex of the thalamus. This comprises both the nucleus ventralis posteromedialis proper (VPM proper), and the nucleus ventralis posterolateralis (VPL). These two classes of nociceptive neurons are spatially segregated, WDR neurons bein...

A VB–algebroid is essentially defined as a Lie algebroid object in the category of vector bundles. There is a one-to-one correspondence between VB–algebroids and certain flat Lie algebroid superconnections, up to a natural notion of equivalence. In this setting, we are able to construct characteristic classes, which in special cases reproduce characteristic classes constructed by Crainic and Fe...

We describe a variational Bayes (VB) learning algorithm for generalized autoregressive (GAR) models. The noise is modeled as a mixture of Gaussians rather than the usual single Gaussian. This allows different data points to be associated with different noise levels and effectively provides robust estimation of AR coefficients. The VB framework is used to prevent overfitting and provides model-o...

The influence of both geometric and offset charge disorder of two-dimensional quantum dot arrays ~also known as network tunnel junctions! on their Coulomb blockade voltage Vb is studied using extensive Monte–Carlo simulations. A general increase of Vb with increasing disorder is confirmed, but an exception to the rule is found for intermediate degrees of offset charge disorder. Detailed studies...

In this paper we explore the use of Variational Bayesian (VB) learning in unsupervised speaker clustering. VB learning is a relatively new learning technique that has the capacity of doing at the same time parameter learning and model selection. We tested this approach on the NIST 1996 HUB-4 evaluation test for speaker clustering when the speaker number is a priori known and when it has to be e...

Pulmonary artery sling is frequently accompanied by tracheal anomalies other than local compression, including focal/segmental or extensive stenosis (ring-sling complex). Recent advances in computed tomography technology, such as multidetector computed tomography with 3-dimensional imaging (3-D) and virtual bronchoscopy (VB), offer important and accurate information of the entire tracheobronchi...