Fine motor skill training enhances functional plasticity of the corticospinal tract after spinal cord injury

Following central nervous system injury, axonal sprouts form distal to the injury site and extend into the denervated area, reconstructing neural circuits through neural plasticity. How to facilitate this plasticity has become the key to the success of central nervous system repair. It remains controversial whether fine motor skill training contributes to the recovery of neurological function after spinal cord injury. Therefore, we established a rat model of unilateral corticospinal tract injury using a pyramidal tract cutting method. Horizontal ladder crawling and food ball grasping training procedures were conducted 2 weeks before injury and 3 days after injury. The neurological function of rat forelimbs was assessed at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 weeks after injury. Axon growth was observed with biotinylated dextran amine anterograde tracing in the healthy corticospinal tract of the denervated area at different time periods. Our results demonstrate that compared with untrained rats, functional recovery was better in the forelimbs and forepaws of trained rats. The number of axons and the expression of growth associated protein 43 were increased at the injury site 3 weeks after corticospinal tract injury. These findings confirm that fine motor skill training promotes central nervous system plasticity in spinal cord injury rats.

Improved shape hardening function for bounding surface model for cohesive soils

A shape hardening function is developed that improves the predictive capabilities of the generalized bounding surface model for cohesive soils, especially when applied to overconsolidated specimens. This improvement is realized without any changes to the simple elliptical shape of the bounding surface, and actually reduces the number of parameters associated with the model by one.

Review of Proposed Stress-dilatancy Relationships and Plastic Potential Functions for Uncemented and Cemented Sands

Stress-dilatancy relationship or plastic potential function are crucial components of every elastoplastic constitutive model developed for sand or cemented sand.This is because the associated flow rule usually does not produce acceptable outcomes for sand or cemented sand.Many formulas have been introduced based on the experimental observations in conventional and advanced plasticity models in order to capture ratio of plastic volumetric strain increment to plastic deviatoric strain increment(i.e.dilatancy rate).Lack of an article that gathers these formulas is clear in the literature.Thus,this paper is an attempt to summarize plastic potentials and specially stress-dilatancy relations so far proposed for constitutive modelling of cohesionless and cemented sands.Stress-dilatancy relation is usually not the same under compression and extension conditions.Furthermore,it may also be different under loading and unloading conditions.Therefore,the focus in this paper mainly places on the proposed stress-dilatancy relations for compressive monotonic loading.Moreover because plastic potential function can be calculated by integration of stress-dilatancy relationship,more weight is allocated to stress-dilatancy relationship in this research.

Gait improvement after treadmill training in ischemic stroke survivors A critical review of functional MRI studies

Stroke survivors often present with abnormal gait, movement training can improve the walking performance post-stroke, and functional MRI can objectively evaluate the brain functions before and after movement training. This paper analyzes the functional MRI changes in patients with ischemic stroke after treadmill training with voluntary and passive ankle dorsiflexion. Functional MRI showed that there are some changes in some regions of patients with ischemic stroke including primary sensorimotor cortex, supplementary motor area and cingulate motor area after treadmill training. These findings suggest that treadmill training likely improves ischemic stroke patients＇ lower limb functions and gait performance and promotes stroke recovery by changing patients＇ brain plasticity; meanwhile, the novel treadmill training methods can better training effects.

Finite Element Implementation of the Exponential Drucker-Prager Plasticity Model for Adhesive Joints

This paper deals with the numerical implementation of the exponential Drucker-Parger plasticitymodel in the commercial finite element software,ABAQUS,via user subroutine UMAT for adhesive joint simulations.The influence of hydrostatic pressure on adhesive strength was investigated by a modified Arcan fixture designed particularly to induce a different state of hydrostatic pressure within an adhesive layer.The developed user subroutine UMAT,which utilizes an associated plastic flow during a plastic deformation,can provide a good agreement between the simulations and the experimental data.Better numerical stability at highly positive hydrostatic pressure loads for a very high order of exponential function can also be achieved compared to when a non-associated flow is used.

A useful electroencephalography(EEG) marker of brain plasticity: delta waves

Plasticity is a natural property of living organisms that is crucial for adaptation and evolution.Over the last decades,the availability of sophisticated neuroimaging techniques（in particular,functional magnetic resonance imaging（f MRI）,and transcranial magnetic stimulation（TMS））,has made it possible to explore in vivo the on-line functioning of brain and its plasticity.However,

Study on Functional Connectivity Density in Patients with Frontal Lobe Tumor at Resting-State

At present, the neuropathological mechanisms and the plastic changes of brain cognitive function in patents with front lobe tumor remain unclear, most studies just focused on global measures of brain functional connectivity without considering the time correlation in the different regions of the brain. This study aims to investigate brain cognitive alterations and functional plasticity in patients with front lobe tumor at resting-state by conducting functional connectivity density(FCD) mapping and granger causality analysis(GCA). Firstly, FCD mapping was used to extract abnormal functional connectivity(FC) of patients with frontal lobe tumor, and analyzed altered brain FC in both short-and long-range FCD. Then, the voxel-wise GCA method was used to analyze the causal relationship between altered FC regions and other regions in order to detect the time correlation between regions of interest(ROI) and reveal the direction of information flow between brain ROIs. It was found that patients had increased short-range FCD in motor and space attention function areas, had increased short-and long-range FCDs both in Temporal and Insula, and the causal coefficients were changed obviously in Temporal and Frontal. The results show that there is a functional plasticity in space attention function areas. Temporal and Insula are affected by tumor in frontal lobe, and functional reorganization appears inside Temporal.

Prediction of Forming Limit Diagrams for Materials with HCP Structure

The forming limit diagram（FLD） is an important tool to be used when characterizing the formability of metallic sheets used in metal forming processes. Experimental measurement and determination of the FLD is timeconsuming and therefore the analytical prediction based on theory of plasticity and instability criteria allows a direct and efficient methodology to obtain critical values at different loading paths, thus carrying significant practical importance.However, the accuracy of the plastic instability prediction is strongly dependent on the choice of the material constitutive model [1–3]. Particularly for materials with hexagonal close packed（HCP） crystallographic structure, they have a very limited number of active slip systems at room temperature and demonstrate a strong asymmetry between yielding in tension and compression [4, 5]. Not only the magnitude of the yield locus changes, but also the shape of the yield surface is evolving during the plastic deformation [4]. Conventional phenomenological constitutive models of plasticity fail to capture this unconventional mechanical behavior [4, 6]. Cazacu and Plunkett [6] have proposed generic yield criteria, by using the transformed principal stress, to account for the initial plastic anisotropy and strength differential（SD） effect simultaneously. In this contribution, a generic FLD MATLAB script was developed based on Marciniak–Kuczynski analytical theory and applied to predict the localized necking. The influence of asymmetrical effect on the FLD was evaluated. Several yield functions such as von Mises, Hill, Barlat89, and Cazacu06 were incorporated into analysis. The paper also presents and discusses the influence of different hardening laws on the formability of materials with HCP crystal structures. The findings indicate that the plastic instability theory coupled with Cazacu model can adequately predict the onset of localized necking for HCP materials under different strain paths.

Simple approach for solution of the quasi-plane-strain problem in a circular tunnel in a strain-softening rock mass considering the out-of-plane stress effect

The out-of-plane stress is sometimes the major or intermediate principal stress in a circular tunnel opening.The influences of the outof-plane stress and axial strain are often neglected in the stability analyses of tunnel excavation,which can induce significant errors in the determination of surrounding rock deformations.In this paper,the use of a simple approach is proposed to solve the quasi-plane-strain problem of circular tunneling considering the effect of the out-of-plane stress,which is deformation-dependent and influenced by the in situ stress.As the intermediate principal stress is deformation-dependent,to obtain the numerical solution of the intermediate principal stress,the quasi-plane-strain problem is defined based on assumptions that the initial axial total strain is a nonzero constant(e0)and that the axial plastic strain is nonzero.With the numerical solution for the plastic strain,obtained using the plastic potential functions based on the three-dimensional failure criteria,the formula for the intermediate principal stress can be derived using Hooke’s law.The proposed approach can be utilized to obtain the numerical solution for the intermediate principal stress,which is deformationdependent,and the numerical results can be simplified as the solution presented by Pan and Brown.The proposed approach can also be used to obtain the solution for the strain softening of the surrounding rock.To verify its validity and accuracy,the results obtained using the proposed approach are compared with the solution of Pan and Brown.In addition,parametric studies are performed to address the influences of the out-of-plane stress on the stress and displacement in the circular tunnel.