The cingulate motor areas are a recently discovered group of discrete cortical regions located in the cingulate sulcus with direct connections to the primary motor cortex and spinal cord. Although much is known about their anatomical relationship with other motor areas, relatively little is known about their functional neurophysiology. We investigated neural mechanisms of motor processing in th...

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to flexibly control actions. This can occur either proactively to anticipate task requirements, or reactively in response to sudden changes. Here we report neuronal activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA) that is correlated with both forms of behavioral control. Single-unit and multiunit activity and intracranial local field potentials (LFPs) were r...

AIMS Smooth muscle actin (SMA) positive myofibroblasts have been implicated in tumour invasion; however, acquisition of SMA is not limited to peritumorous fibroblasts and other changes in fibroblasts may be more specifically related to the malignant environment. CD34 is a sialomucin expressed by normal breast fibroblasts but lost in invasive carcinomas. The aim of this study was to establish th...

The diagnostic and prognostic significance of the different types of serum smooth muscle antibodies (SMA) were investigated in sera of 24 patients with chronic active hepatitis (CAH) and 15 patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC). SMA of IgG class were found in 92% of sera from patients with CAH but in only 20% of sera from PBC patients, whereas the incidence of IgM-SMA was higher in PBC ...

BACKGROUND We undertook the current study to assess whether an accelerometer-based physical activity monitor, the SenseWear Mini Armband (SMA), could be used to provide data on static arm elevation, and to assess the agreement between static arm elevation measures obtained using SMA-derived data and those obtained with a universal goniometer. METHODS Using a universal goniometer, healthy adul...

Lignin fibers typically influence the mixture performance of stone matrix asphalt (SMA), such as strength, stability, durability, noise level, rutting resistance, fatigue life, and water sensitivity. However, limited studies were conducted to analyze the influence of fibers on the percent voids in mineral aggregate in bituminous mixture (VMA) during the mixture design. This study analyzed the e...

In this paper, we propose an original formalism inspired by Markov Decision Process in order to represent homogeneously actions and direct interactions between agents. Thanks to the introduction of individual rewards characterising the problem to be solved, this formalism is a first step towards the automatic computation of policies and use of available interactions. A simple problem of distrib...

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is an autosomal recessive disorder, which is the leading genetic cause of infantile death. SMA is the most common inherited motor neuron disease and occurs in approximately 1:6000 live births. The gene responsible for SMA is called Survival Motor Neuron-1 (SMN1). Interestingly, a human-specific copy gene is present on the same region of chromosome 5q, called SMN2. ...

Oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) is considered as a pre-cancerous condition of the oral mucosa and is highly associated with habitual areca quid chewing. Arecoline is the major alkaloid in areca quid and is thought to be involved in the pathogenesis of OSF. Our previous studies have demonstrated that arecoline could induce epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related factors in primary human bu...