Cerebral Dopamine Neurotrophic Factor (CDNF) and Mesencephalic Astrocyte-derived Neurotrophic factor (MANF) are members of a recently discovered family of neurotrophic factors (NTFs). Here, we used intranigral or intrastriatal lentiviral vector-mediated expression to evaluate their efficacy at protecting dopaminergic function in the 6-OHDA model of Parkinson's disease (PD). In contrast to the w...

Background/introduction Microbubbles (MBs) are small (1-5 μm diameter), perfluorcarbon gas filled lipid microspheres used for contrast enhancement during ultrasound imaging. MBs (Definity, others) are approved for contrast echocardiography and widely used (6 M patient injections) as ultrasound contrast agents with established pharmacokinetics and clearance data. Recent research has shifted to t...

Backgrounds: The loss of dopamine-secreting cells and the decrease in the status of antioxidant is associated with incidents of Parkinson's disease. The purpose of the present study was to determine the protective effect of a 12- weeks voluntary wheel running (VWR) along with the injection of eriobotrya japonica flower extract (EJFE, 200 mg/kg body weight, 3 days a week) on cer...

We compare two learning algorithms for generating contextual assumptions in automated assume-guarantee reasoning. The CDNF algorithm implicitly represents contextual assumptions by a conjunction of DNF formulae, while the OBDD learning algorithm uses ordered binary decision diagrams as its representation. Using these learning algorithms, the performance of assume-guarantee reasoning is compared...

We propose a purely implicit solution to the contextual assumption generation problem in assume-guarantee reasoning. Instead of improving the L∗ algorithm — a learning algorithm for finite automata, our algorithm computes implicit representations of contextual assumptions by the CDNF algorithm — a learning algorithm for Boolean functions. We report three parametrized test cases where our soluti...