Esophageal axial shortening is caused by longitudinal muscle (LM) contraction, but circular muscle (CM) may also contribute to axial shortening because of its spiral morphology. The goal of our study was to show patterns of contraction of CM and LM layers during peristalsis and transient lower esophageal sphincter (LES) relaxation (TLESR). In rats, esophageal and LES morphology was assessed by ...

Human vision can detect spatiotemporal information conveyed by first-order modulations of luminance and by second-order, non-Fourier modulations of image contrast. Models for second-order motion have suggested two filtering stages separated by a rectifying nonlinearity. We explore here the encoding of stationary first-order and second-order gratings, and their interaction. Stimuli consisted of ...

BACKGROUND There is limited data on the impact of specific patient characteristics, tumor subtypes or treatment interventions on survival in breast cancer LM. METHODS A systematic review was conducted to assess the impact of hormone receptor and HER-2 status on survival in breast cancer LM. A search for clinical studies published between 1/1/2007 and 7/1/2012 and all randomized-controlled tri...

AIM Open myomectomy (OM) was previously frequently performed; however, laparoscopic myomectomy (LM) has recently become more common. Nevertheless, myoma can recur after both LM and OM. In this study, we report our retrospective investigation of myoma recurrence by comparing LM and OM. METHODS A total of 474 patients underwent LM and 279 patients underwent OM. The patients were followed-up pos...

Perceptual learning was used as a tool for studying motion perception. The pattern of transfer of learning of luminance- (LM) and contrast-modulated (CM) motion is diagnostic of how their respective processing pathways are integrated. Twenty observers practiced fine direction discrimination with either additive (LM) or multiplicative (CM) mixtures of a dynamic noise carrier and a radially isotr...

The type I interferon (IFN) activated transcriptional response is a critical antiviral defense mechanism, yet its role in bacterial pathogenesis remains less well characterized. Using an intracellular pathogen Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) as a model bacterial pathogen, we sought to identify the roles of individual interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) in context of bacterial infection. Previously, ...

Central nervous system (CNS) metastasis from breast cancer may be characterized as either parenchymal brain metastasis (BM) or leptomeningeal (LM) metastasis. BM are much more common (about 80% of all CNS metastases), and have been more extensively studied than LM. CNS metastasis in breast cancer has been associated with reduced overall survival, with the shortest survival generally observed in...

The purpose of this paper is to describe string topology from the viewpoint of Chen’s iterated integrals. Let M be a compact closed oriented d-manifold and LM be the free loop space of M , the set of unbased smooth maps from S to M . Let H∗(LM) be the homology of the free loop space shifted by the dimension of the manifold i.e. H∗(LM) = H∗+d(LM). Chas and Sullivan found the product on H∗(LM) wh...