Substantial evidence shows that activation of glial cells in the spinal cord may promote central sensitization and pain. Descending facilitation from the rostroventromedial medulla (RVM) is a critical component in the maintenance of chronic pain states, although the precise mechanisms through which facilitation maintains pain are unclear. Here, we investigated the possibility that glial activat...

Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) play essential roles in most cellular processes. Knowledge of PPIs is becoming increasingly more important, which has prompted the development of technologies that are capable of discovering large-scale PPIs. Although many high-throughput biological technologies have been proposed to detect PPIs, there are unavoidable shortcomings, including cost, time intens...

Opioid-induced hyperalgesia is characterized by hypersensitivity to innocuous or noxious stimuli during sustained opiate administration. Microinjection of lidocaine into the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), or dorsolateral funiculus (DLF) lesion, abolishes opioid-induced hyperalgesia, suggesting the importance of descending pain facilitation mechanisms. Here, we investigate the possibility t...

In this study we present an advanced Bayesian framework for the analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data that simultaneously employs both spatial and sparse properties. The basic building block of our method is the general linear model (GML) that constitute a well-known probabilistic approach for regression. By treating regression coefficients as random variables, we can ap...

40 Respiratory depression is a therapy-limiting side-effect of opioid analgesics, yet our 41 understanding of the brain circuits mediating this potentially lethal outcome remains incomplete. 42 Here we studied the contribution of the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), a region long 43 implicated in pain modulation and homeostatic regulation, to opioid-induced respiratory 44 depression. Microin...

BACKGROUND Metamorphopsia is a visual illusion that distorts the size, shape, or inclination of objects. Reversal of vision metamorphopsia (RVM) is a rare transient form of metamorphopsia described as an upside-down, 180 degrees rotation of the visual field in the coronal plane. The pathophysiological characteristics of RVM remain unclear. DESIGN Patients with RVM had a complete neurologic ex...

Relevance vector machines (RVM) is a family of machine learning methods, introduced by Tipping, that represent a bayesian approach to the training of general linear models (GLM). RVM-s are reported to be able to e ectively produce convenient sparse representations of data thus competing with the popular support vector machines. When used with a suitable set of basis functions, RVM-s can be appl...

......................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION......................................................................................12 CHAPTER 2: MATERIALS & METHODS.....................................................................24 2.1 Animals......................................................

Pro-nociceptive ON-cells in the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) facilitate nociceptive processing and contribute to descending serotonergic controls. We use RVM injections of neurotoxic dermorphin-saporin (Derm-SAP) in rats to evaluate the role of putative ON-cells, or μ-opioid receptor-expressing (MOR) neurones, in visceral pain processing. Our immunohistochemistry shows that intra-RVM Derm...

Maximum likelihood (ML) in the linear model overfits when the number of predictors (M) exceeds the number of objects (N). One of the possible solution is the relevance vector machine (RVM) which is a form of automatic relevance detection and has gained popularity in the pattern recognition machine learning community by the famous textbook of Bishop (2006). RVM assigns individual precisions to w...