Voltage-gated L-type Ca(2+) current (ICa,L) induces contraction of arterial smooth muscle cells (ASMCs), and ICa,L is increased by H2O2 in ASMCs. Superoxide released from the mitochondrial respiratory chain (MRC) is dismutated to H2O2 We studied whether superoxide per se acutely modulates ICa,L in ASMCs using cultured A7r5 cells derived from rat aorta. Rotenone is a toxin that inhibits complex ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The presence and importance of hemodynamic factors to the beneficial effect of carotid endarterectomy (CEA) in patients with severe stenosis of the internal carotid artery (ICA) is unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible hemodynamic changes caused by a severe ICA stenosis and the subsequent changes after CEA. METHODS Hemodynamic parameters were ac...

Despite the growing use of independent component analysis (ICA) algorithms for isolating and removing eyeblink-related activity from EEG data, we have limited understanding of how variability associated with ICA uncertainty may be influencing the reconstructed EEG signal after removing the eyeblink artifact components. To characterize the magnitude of this ICA uncertainty and to understand the ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE We attempted ultrasonographic evaluation of the distal extracranial internal carotid artery (ICA) using the transoral method (transoral carotid ultrasonography [TOCU]). METHODS The subjects consisted of five healthy volunteers and seven stroke patients. Examinations were performed with a color Doppler flow imaging system equipped with convex array transducers (7 or 9.5 ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Carotid artery dissection (CAD) is more common with increased styloid process length. Our goal was to determine whether proximity of the styloid process and the hyoid bone to the internal carotid artery (ICA) was a risk factor for CAD. METHODS We studied axial slices on computed tomography angiograms of 88 patients with nonaneurysmal CAD, from 88 age- and sex-matched co...

A 72-year-old man presented with a 3-day history of recurrent transient ischaemic attacks comprising slurred speech, left arm weakness and paresthesia. Carotid Doppler revealed total occlusion of the right internal carotid artery (ICA). Computed tomography angiography demonstrated occlusion of the proximal right ICA over a length of 1.5 cm. The ICA distal to the occlusion was entirely normal. I...

Recently, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been applied to not only problems of blind signal separation, but also feature extraction of patterns. However, the effectiveness of features extracted by ICA (ICA features) has not been verified yet. As one of the reasons, it is considered that ICA features are obtained by increasing their independence rather than by increasing their class sep...

We propose an unsupervised methodology using independent component analysis (ICA) to cluster genes from DNA microarray data. Based on an ICA mixture model of genomic expression patterns, linear and nonlinear ICA finds components that are specific to certain biological processes. Genes that exhibit significant up-regulation or down-regulation within each component are grouped into clusters. We t...

To study the effects of myocardial hypertrophy resulting from chronic pressure overload on excitation-contraction coupling, the cardiac transmembrane L-type calcium current (ICa) was investigated in the Goldblatt renovascular hypertensive (HBP) rat. ICa was measured in single myocytes enzymatically isolated from control (CTRL) and HBP rat hearts using the whole-cell, patch-clamp method. The pea...

BACKGROUND Independent component analysis (ICA) has been often used to decompose fMRI data mostly for the resting-state, block and event-related designs due to its outstanding advantage. For fMRI data during free-listening experiences, only a few exploratory studies applied ICA. NEW METHOD For processing the fMRI data elicited by 512-s modern tango, a FFT based band-pass filter was used to fu...