Brain Functional Network Changes in Patients with Poststroke Cognitive Impairment Following Acupuncture Therapy

Background: The mechanisms by which acupuncture affects poststroke cognitive impairment (PSCI) remain unclear. Objective: To investigate brain functional network (BFN) changes in patients with PSCI after acupuncture therapy. Methods: Twenty-two PSCI patients who underwent acupuncture therapy in our hospital were enrolled as research subjects. Another 14 people matched for age, sex, and education level were included in the normal control (HC) group. All the subjects underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) scans;the PSCI patients underwent one scan before acupuncture therapy and another after. The network metric difference between PSCI patients and HCs was analyzed via the independent-sample t test, whereas the paired-sample t test was employed to analyze the network metric changes in PSCI patients before vs. after treatment. Results: Small-world network attributes were observed in both groups for sparsities between 0.1 and 0.28. Compared with the HC group, the PSCI group presented significantly lower values for the global topological properties (γ, Cp, and Eloc) of the brain;significantly greater values for the nodal attributes of betweenness centrality in the CUN. L and the HES. R, degree centrality in the SFGdor. L, PCG. L, IPL. L, and HES. R, and nodal local efficiency in the ORBsup. R, ORBsupmed. R, DCG. L, SMG. R, and TPOsup. L;and decreased degree centrality in the MFG. R, IFGoperc. R, and SOG. R. After treatment, PSCI patients presented increased degree centrality in the LING.L, LING.R, and IOG. L and nodal local efficiency in PHG. L, IOG. R, FFG. L, and the HES. L, and decreased betweenness centrality in the PCG. L and CUN. L, degree centrality in the ORBsupmed. R, and nodal local efficiency in ANG. R. Conclusion: Cognitive decline in PSCI patients may be related to BFN disorders;acupuncture therapy may modulate the topological properties of the BFNs of PSCI patients.

Progress of Brain Network Studies on Anesthesia and Consciousness: Framework and Clinical Applications

Although the relationship between anesthesia and consciousness has been investigated for decades, our understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of anesthesia and consciousness remains rudimentary, which limits the development of systems for anesthesia monitoring and consciousness evaluation. Moreover, the current practices for anesthesia monitoring are mainly based on methods that do not provide adequate information and may present obstacles to the precise application of anesthesia. Most recently, there has been a growing trend to utilize brain network analysis to reveal the mechanisms of anesthesia, with the aim of providing novel insights to promote practical application. This review summarizes recent research on brain network studies of anesthesia, and compares the underlying neural mechanisms of consciousness and anesthesia along with the neural signs and measures of the distinct aspects of neural activity. Using the theory of cortical fragmentation as a starting point, we introduce important methods and research involving connectivity and network analysis. We demonstrate that whole-brain multimodal network data can provide important supplementary clinical information. More importantly, this review posits that brain network methods, if simplified, will likely play an important role in improving the current clinical anesthesia monitoring systems.

GENERAL THEORETICAL RESULTS ON RECTILINEAR EMBEDABILITY OF GRAPHS

In the design of certain kinds of electronic circuits the following question arises:given a non-negative integer k, what graphs admit of a plane embedding such that every edge is a broken lineformed by horizontal and vertical segments and having at mort k bends? Any such graph is said tobe k--rectilinear. No matter what k is, an obvious necessary condition for k-rectilinearity is that thedegree of each vertex does not exceed four.Our main result is that every planar graph H satisfying this condition is 3--rectilinear:in fact,it is 2--rectilinear with the only exception of the octahedron. We also outline a polynomial-timealgorithm which actually constructs a plane embedding of H with at most 2 bends (3 bends if H isthe octahedron) on each edge. The resulting embedding has the property that the total number ofbends does not exceed 2n, where n is the number of vertices of H.

THEORETICAL RESULTS ON AT MOST 1-BEND EMBEDDABILITY OF GRAPHS

1. Introduction Let κ be a non-negative integer. A κ-bend graph is a plane graph in which every edgeis a broken line consisting of at most κ+ 1 horizontal or vertical segments. A bend is any point which is the intersection of a horizontal segment and a verticalsegment of an edge. A planar graph G is κ-rectilinear if it admits a plane embedding Gwhich is a κ-bend graph. In this case G is said to be a κ-embedding of G.

Aberrant functional connectivity network in subjective memory complaint individuals relates to pathological biomarkers

Background:Individuals with subjective memory complaints(SMC)feature a higher risk of cognitive decline and clinical progression of Alzheimer’s disease(AD).However,the pathological mechanism underlying SMC remains unclear.We aimed to assess the intrinsic connectivity network and its relationship with AD-related pathologies in SMC individuals.Methods:We included 44 SMC individuals and 40 normal controls who underwent both resting-state functional MRI and positron emission tomography(PET).Based on graph theory approaches,we detected local and global functional connectivity across the whole brain by using degree centrality(DC)and eigenvector centrality(EC)respectively.Additionally,we analyzed amyloid deposition and tauopathy via florbetapir-PET imaging and cerebrospinal fluid(CSF)data.The voxel-wise two-sample T-test analysis was used to examine between-group differences in the intrinsic functional network and cerebral amyloid deposition.Then,we correlated these network metrics with pathological results.Results:The SMC individuals showed higher DC in the bilateral hippocampus(HP)and left fusiform gyrus and lower DC in the inferior parietal region than controls.Across all subjects,the DC of the bilateral HP and left fusiform gyrus was positively associated with total tau and phosphorylated tau181.However,no significant between-group difference existed in EC and cerebral amyloid deposition.Conclusion:We found impaired local,but not global,intrinsic connectivity networks in SMC individuals.Given the relationships between DC value and tau level,we hypothesized that functional changes in SMC individuals might relate to pathological biomarkers.

Structural modeling of a typical gas turbine system

This paper presents an approach for the structural modeling and analysis of a typical gas turbine system. This approach has been applied to the systems and subsystems, which are integral parts of a typical gas turbine system. Since a gas turbine system performance is measured in terms of fluid flow ene：rgy transformations across its various assemblies and subassemblies, the performance of such subsystems affects the overall performance of the gas turbine system. An attempt has been made to correlate the associativity of such subsystems contributing to overall gas turbine system functional evaluation using graph theoretic approach. The characteristic equations at the system level as well as subsystem level have been developed on the basi.s of associativity of various factors affecting their performance. A permanent function has been proposed for the functional model of a gas turbine system, which further leads to selection, identification and optimal evaluation of gas turbine systems.

Optimal promotional policy of an innovation diffusion model incorporating the brand image in a segment-specific market

This paper addresses the problem of determining the optimal promotional policy for a diffusion model in a segment-specific market under the assumption that the additional demand of the new product also improves brand image in the form of goodwill of the firm.The model is framed with the assumption that the firm uses the mass and differentiated promotion effort for each segment.The differentiated promotional efforts target each market segment independently and the mass promotional effort reaches different segments with a fixed spectrum.We derive the optimal promotional effort policy for each segment using maximumprinciple and also analyze the stability of the dynamical system by constructing a Lyapunov function through the graph theoretic approach.The analysis gives a deep insight into how the promotional effort should be planned by the decision makers keeping in mind the financial constrains without hindering the promotional effort at the end of the planning period.

Cooperative visibility maintenance in SE（3） for multi-robot-networks with limited field-of-view sensors

Coordination of motion between multiple robots requires the robots to sense their relative poses. Common sensors depend on maintaining a line-of-sight between the sensor and the object being sensed. When the robots move relative to one another, they must coordinate their motions to ensure that these lines-of-sight are preserved. We propose a control method to preserve desired lines-of-sight in a multi-robot system where each robot has configuration space SE（3）. A key feature of the control method is its ability to reject persistent bounded disturbances, enabling its use alongside additional control tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the edge-preserving control in simulations involving additional input velocities that tend to break the edges.