Neuronal processing depends on the input-output (I/O) relation between the frequency of synaptic stimulation and the resultant axonal firing rate. The all-or-none properties of spike generation and active membrane mechanisms can make the neuronal I/O relation very steep. The ensuing nearly bimodal behavior may severely limit information coding, as minimal input fluctuations within the expected ...

Global neuronal workspace theory predicts that damage to long-distance white matter (WM) tracts should impair access to consciousness during the perception of brief stimuli. To address this issue, we studied visual backward masking in 18 patients at the very first clinical stage of multiple sclerosis (MS), a neurological disease characterized by extensive WM damage, and in 18 matched healthy su...

Lipid peroxidation is a common feature of many chemical and biological processes, and is governed by a complex kinetic scheme. A fundamental stage in kinetic investigations of lipid peroxidation is the accurate determination of the rate of peroxidation, which in many instances is heavily reliant on the method of finite differences. Such numerical approximations of the first derivative are commo...

There is great need to express the impacts of chemicals found in the environment in terms of effects from alternative chemicals of interest. Methods currently employed in fields such as life-cycle assessment, risk assessment, mixtures toxicology, and pharmacology rely mostly on heuristic arguments to justify the use of linear relationships in the construction of "equivalency factors," which aim...

We introduce the “inverse square root linear unit” (ISRLU) to speed up learning in deep neural networks. ISRLU has better performance than ELU but has many of the same benefits. ISRLU and ELU have similar curves and characteristics. Both have negative values, allowing them to push mean unit activation closer to zero, and bring the normal gradient closer to the unit natural gradient, ensuring a ...

In this paper, we analyze a large published data set of cross sections of frontal sinuses of 3 to 11-year-olds (105 males and 87 females) from Central Europe to investigate several issues relating to frontal sinus ontogeny. Despite a large variation in every one year age cohort, we detect no asymmetry of the left average versus the right average frontal sinus lobe cross-sectional areas in the p...

Case Report We report a rare case of urothelial carcinoma invading the sigmoid mesocolon in a 60-year-old female admitted to our department. The patient presented with a 25-cm intra-abdominal mass and 6-cm ulcerated lesion at the top of the umbilicus. Laparotomy was performed which demonstrated a huge polycystic and solid tumour of the sigmoid mesentery infi ltrating the sigmoid colon and appen...

Sigmoid surface controller has been proved to be effective in motion control of autonomous underwater vehicles, but it is hard to adjust its control parameters. Improved particle swarm optimization of sigmoid surface controller was proposed in this paper, which solves the problems that particle swarm optimization may be trapped in local optimum and fails to converge to global optimum. Moreover,...

INTRODUCTION The low incidence of colon injury due to blunt abdominal trauma and the lack of a definitive diagnostic method for the same can lead to delays in diagnosis and treatment, subsequently resulting in high morbidity and mortality. CASE PRESENTATION A 66-year-old woman with sigmoid colon injury was admitted to our emergency department after sustaining blunt abdominal trauma. Her physi...

OBJECTIVES To report an unusual presentation of a giant sigmoid diverticulum in the colon. CLINICAL PRESENTATION AND INTERVENTION The patient presented with an abdominal mass, altered bowel habits, and increasing weight. The provisional diagnosis was made by barium enema and CT scan. The patient underwent laparotomy, revealing a perforated giant sigmoid diverticulum that was excised using Har...