1,720,961 research outputs found
Prediction of perivascular drainage of Aβ from the brain using computational modelling : implications for Alzheimer's Disease
VaMpy: A Python Package to Solve 1D Blood Flow Problems
Finite-differences methods such as the Lax-Wendroff method (LW) are commonly used to solve 1D models of blood flow. These models solve for blood flow and lumen area and are useful in disease research, such as hypertension and atherosclerosis, where flow and pressure are good indicators for the presence of disease. Despite the popularity of the LW method to solve the blood flow equations, no implementation of a LW solver for these equations has been published and made publicly available. This leads to the reimplementation of the same methods within different research groups and makes verification of results more difficult. The Vascular Modelling in Python (VaMpy) toolkit is a Python package that aims to fill this gap. It implements Richtmyer’s two-step Lax-Wendroff scheme to solve 1D model equations of blood flow in arterial trees and aims at facilitating the solution of blood flow problems for various medical applications. Funding statement: The development of this software was supported by an EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre grant (EP/G03690X/1)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Data for paper "A simulation model of periarterial clearance of amyloid-beta from the brain"
The accumulation of soluble and insoluble amyloid-beta (A-beta) in the brain indicates failure of elimination of A-beta from the brain with age and Alzheimer's disease. There is a variety of mechanisms for elimination of A-beta from the brain. They include the action of microglia and enzymes together with receptor-mediated absorption of A-beta into the blood and periarterial lymphatic drainage of A-beta. Although the brain possesses no conventional lymphatics, experimental studies have shown that fluid and solutes, such as A-beta, are eliminated from the brain along 100 nm wide basement membranes in the walls of cerebral capillaries and arteries. This lymphatic drainage pathway is reflected in the deposition of A-beta in the walls of human arteries with age and Alzheimer's disease as cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). Initially, A-beta diffuses through the extracellular spaces of grey matter in the brain and then enters basement membranes in capillaries and arteries to flow out of the brain. Although diffusion through the extracellular spaces of the brain has been well characterised, the exact mechanism whereby perivascular elimination of A-beta occurs has not been resolved. Here we use a computational model to describe the process of periarterial drainage in the context of diffusion in the brain, demonstrating that periarterial drainage along basement membranes is very rapid compared with diffusion. Our results are a validation of experimental data and are significant in the context of failure of periarterial drainage as a mechanism underlying the pathogenesis of AD as well as complications associated with its immunotherapy.</span
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