1,721,008 research outputs found
Stiramenti identitari. Strategie di integrazione degli strannieri nella provincia di Massa Carrara tra appartenenza etnica ed esperienza transnazionale
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Cranial nerve involvement as presenting sign of multifocal motor neuropathy.
No full textMultifocal motor neuropathy (MMN) is characterized by slowly progressive,predominantly distal,asymmetric limb weakness and partial conduction blocks (CB) of motor axons. Cranial nerve involvement and respiratory failure are uncommon. We report two patients who exhibited unilateral hypoglossal and abducens palsy as presenting signs. Other remarkable features were autonomic instability and respiratory failure due to bilateral phrenic nerve involvement. Treatment with intravenous (IV) immunoglobulin (Ig) resulted in an improvement. Patient 2,who showed IgM reactivity against ganglioside GM1,has been receiving maintenance therapy with IVIg for 7years. We speculate that cranial weakness of our patients could be due to CB similar to those detected in the motor nerves of the extremities
Dual tasking during quiet stance allows an accurate classification of subjects with Parkinson's disease and age-matched control
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Feature Selection for Accelerometer-Based Posture Analysis in Parkinson’s Disease
No full textPosture analysis in quiet standing is a key component
of the clinical evaluation of Parkinson’s disease (PD), postural instability being one of PD’s major symptoms. The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility of using accelerometers to characterize the postural behavior of early mild PD subjects. Twenty PD and 20 control subjects, wearing an accelerometer on the lower back, were tested in five conditions characterized by sensory and attentional perturbation. A total of 175 measures were computed from the signals to quantify tremor, acceleration, and displacement of body sway. Feature selection was implemented to identify the subsets of measures that better characterize the distinctive behavior of PD and control subjects. It was based on different classifiers and on a nested cross validation, to maximize robustness of selection with respect to changes in the training set. Several subsets of three features achieved misclassification rates as low as 5%. Many of them included a tremor-related measure, a posturalmeasure in the frequency domain, and a postural displacement measure. Results suggest that quantitative posture analysis using a single accelerometer and a simple test protocol may provide useful information to characterize early PD subjects. This protocol is potentially usable to monitor the disease’s progression
Feature Selection for the instrumented Timed Up and Go in Parkinson’s disease
No full textThe Timed Up and Go (TUG) is a widely used clinical test to assess mobility and fall risk in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The traditional outcome of this test is its duration. Since this single measure cannot provide insight on subtle differences in test performances, we considered an instrumented TUG (iTUG). The aim was to find, by means of a feature selection, the best set of quantitative measures that would allow an objective evaluation of gait function in PD. We instrumented the TUG using a triaxial accelerometer. Twenty early-mild PD and twenty age-matched control subjects were tested. The resulting selected features are all accelerometer-derived measures: they permit to obtain a good accuracy (7.5% of misclassification rate) in the classification of PD. Interestingly the traditional TUG duration was not selected in the best subsets
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
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