OBJECTIVE To prospectively evaluate the ability of CT urography with a low-dose multi-phasic excretory phase for opacification of the urinary system. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-two patients underwent CT urography with low-dose multi-phasic s using adaptive iterative dose reduction 3D acquired at 5-, 10-, and 15-minute delays. Opacification scores of the upper urinary tracts and the urinary ...

Phasic increases in dopamine (DA) are involved in the detection and selection of relevant sensory stimuli. The DAergic and cholinergic system dynamically interact to gate and potentiate sensory inputs to striatum. Striatal cholinergic interneurons (CINs) respond to relevant sensory stimuli with an initial burst, a firing pause, or a late burst, or a combination of these three components. CIN re...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Chronic pain and hyperalgesia can be difficult to treat with classical opioids acting predominately at the µ-opioid receptor. Buprenorphine and its active metabolite are believed to act through µ-, κ- and δ-receptors and may therefore possess different analgesic and anti-hyperalgesic effects compared with pure µ-receptor agonists, for example, fentanyl. Here, we have comp...

Data from human clinical trials have shown that the hepatitis B virus (HBV) follows complex profiles, such as bi-phasic, tri-phasic, stepwise decay and rebound. We utilized a deterministic model of HBV kinetics following antiviral therapy to uncover the mechanistic interactions behind HBV dynamics. Analytical investigation of the model was used to separate the parameter space describing virus d...

Dopamine has a crucial role in anticipation of motivational events. To investigate the underlying mechanisms of this process, we analyzed the activity of dopamine neurons and one of their major sources of input, neurons in the lateral habenula, while animals anticipated upcoming behavioral tasks. We found that lateral habenula and dopamine neurons anticipated tasks in two distinct manners. Firs...

1 I n the recently published American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) scoring manual for sleep stages, 1 the term phasic was replaced throughout by transient. Recommendations for changes in terminology should be made with great care, especially when terminology is a core topic, as indicated by the subtitle of the AASM manual, " Rules, Terminology, and Technical Specifications. " The decision b...

1. The minimally distinct border method involves setting the relative radiances of two adjacent, differently coloured fields until the border between them is minimally distinct. At these radiance settings, the two fields are found to be of equal luminance. The task shares with flicker photometry all the requirements of a photometric method. 2. We have recorded responses of macaque ganglion cell...

Differential Susceptibility Theory explains long-term associations between neurobiological sensitivity and cognitive outcomes, but no comparable theoretical framework exists to understand how neurobiological sensitivity and cognitive performance inter-relate on shorter time-frames. Here, we evaluate a framework proposed by Aston-Jones and colleagues, building on the Yerkes-Dodson model, to unde...

A method for the recovery of the temporal structure and phases in natural gesture is presented. The work is motivated by recent developments in the theory of natural gesture which have identified several key aspects of gesture important to communication. In particular, gesticulation during conversation can be coarsely characterized as periods of bi-phasic or tri-phasic gesture separated by a re...

Synaptic glutamate release involves the accumulation of cytoplasmic glutamate in synaptic vesicles, whereafter it is released by triggered exocytosis. As glutamatergic terminals are known to be functionally diverse it was of interest to examine whether the presynaptic glutamate supply differs between individual axon terminals with distinct release properties. The glutamatergic terminals in the ...