BACKGROUND/AIMS Respiratory symptoms are often associated with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Although the role of multichannel intraluminal impedance-pH (MII-pH) monitoring in GERD is clear, little is known regarding the characteristics of patients with respiratory symptoms based on MII-pH monitoring and anti-reflux therapy. We evaluated a cohort of GERD patients to identify the MII-p...

BACKGROUND We describe trends in characteristics and outcomes among adults initiating HIV care and treatment in Ethiopia from 2006-2011. METHODS We conducted a retrospective longitudinal analysis of HIV-positive adults (≥ 15 years) enrolling at 56 Ethiopian health facilities from 2006-2011. We investigated trends over time in the proportion enrolling through provider-initiated counseling and ...

Acute intermittent hypoxia (AIH) induces sympathetic and phrenic long-term facilitation (LTF), defined as a sustained increase in nerve discharge. We investigated the effects of AIH and acute intermittent optogenetic (AIO) stimulation of neurons labeled with AAV-CaMKIIa, hChR2(H134R), and mCherry in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) of anesthetized, vagotomized, and mechanically ventilate...

Addiction is characterized by compulsive alcohol or drug taking and seeking, and the dorsal striatum has been implicated in such maladaptive persistent habits. The NMDA receptor (NMDAR), which is a major target of alcohol, is implicated in striatal-based habit learning. We found that, in the dorsal striatum, alcohol (ethanol) exposure produced an increase in the phosphorylation of the NR2B subu...

Syntaxin has an important role in regulating vesicle docking and fusion essential for neurotransmitter release. Here, we demonstrate that the distribution of syntaxin mRNA in cell bodies of sensory neurons (SNs) of Aplysia maintained in cell culture is affected by synapse formation, synapse stabilization, and long-term facilitation (LTF) produced by 5-HT. The distribution of the mRNA in turn re...

We hypothesized that long-term facilitation (LTF) of minute ventilation and peak genioglossus muscle activity manifests itself in awake healthy humans when carbon dioxide is sustained at elevated levels. Eleven subjects completed two trials. During trial 1, baseline carbon dioxide levels were maintained during and after exposure to eight 4-min episodes of hypoxia. During trial 2, carbon dioxide...

This papers describes and analyzes algorithms for learning linear threshold function (LTFs) in the presence of classiication noise and monotonic noise. When there is classiication noise, each randomly drawn example is mislabeled (i.e., diiers from the target LTF) with the same probability. For monotonic noise, the probability of mis-labeling an example monotonically decreases with the separatio...

This paper describes an application of Local Transfer Function Classifier (LTF-C) to recognition of active and non-active bank clients, which was the problem of the 2 EUNITE Competition. LTF-C is a neural network solving classification problems. It has similar architecture as the Radial Basis Function neural network, but utilizes entirely different training algorithm. This algorithm is composed...

Activation of several signaling pathways contributes to long-term synaptic plasticity, but how brief stimuli produce coordinated activation of these pathways is not understood. In Aplysia, the long-term facilitation (LTF) of sensory neuron synapses by 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin; 5-HT) requires the activation of several kinases, including mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK). The 5-HT-enh...

Motivated by the resurgence of neural networks in being able to solve complex learning tasks we undertake a study of high depth networks using ReLU gates which implement the function x 7→ max{0, x}. We try to understand the role of depth in such neural networks by showing size lowerbounds against such network architectures in parameter regimes hitherto unexplored. In particular we show the foll...