Mass-forming autoimmune pancreatitis caused after resection of an IgG4-related renal pelvic lesion

A 64-year-old man was found to have a 15-mm tumor in the pancreatic tail by CT angiography 1 year after resection of a left renal pelvic tumor. Clinically, the tumor was preoperatively suspected to be autoimmune pancreatitis. However, surgical resection was performed under a diagnosis of pancreatic ductal cancer, because atypical epithelial cells were detected by endoscopic ultrasonography-guided fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA). Pathological examination of the tumor revealed a mass-forming autoimmune pancreatitis. Mass-forming autoimmune pancreatitis is often difficult to preoperatively differentiate from pancreatic carcinoma. Response to steroid treatment and the detection of extrapancreatic lesions may contribute to an accurate diagnosis, thereby avoiding unnecessary surgery.     

Glutamine depletion induces murine neonatal melena with increased apoptosis of the intestinal epithelium

AIM:To investigate the possible biological outcome and effect of glutamine depletion in neonatal mice and rodent intestinal epithelial cells.METHODS:We developed three kinds of artificial milk with different amounts of glutamine;Complete amino acid milk (CAM),which is based on maternal mouse milk,glutamine-depleted milk (GDM),and glutaminerich milk (GRM).GRM contains three-fold more glutamine than CAM.Eighty-seven newborn mice were divided into three groups and were fed with either of CAM,GDM,or GRM via a r...     

Real-time simulation of a spiking neural network model of the basal ganglia circuitry using general purpose computing on graphics processing units

Real-time simulation of a biologically realistic spiking neural network is necessary for evaluation of its capacity to interact with real environments. However, the real-time simulation of such a neural network is difficult due to its high computational costs that arise from two factors: (1) vast network size and (2) the complicated dynamics of biologically realistic neurons. In order to address these problems, mainly the latter, we chose to use general purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs) for simulation of such a neural network, taking advantage of the powerful computational capability of a graphics processing unit (GPU). As a target for real-time simulation, we used a model of the basal ganglia that has been developed according to electrophysiological and anatomical knowledge. The model consists of heterogeneous populations of 370 spiking model neurons, including computationally heavy conductance-based models, connected by 11,002 synapses. Simulation of the model has not yet been performed in real-time using a general computing server. By parallelization of the model on the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 280 GPU in data-parallel and task-parallel fashion, faster-than-real-time simulation was robustly realized with only one-third of the GPU’s total computational resources. Furthermore, we used the GPU’s full computational resources to perform faster-than-real-time simulation of three instances of the basal ganglia model; these instances consisted of 1100 neurons and 33,006 synapses and were synchronized at each calculation step. Finally, we developed software for simultaneous visualization of faster-than-real-time simulation output. These results suggest the potential power of GPGPU techniques in real-time simulation of realistic neural networks.     

Patients with early-stage knee osteoarthritis and knee pain have decreased hip abductor muscle strength while descending stairs

Clinical Rheumatology - This study aimed to investigate the association between hip abductor muscle strength and knee pain in patients with early-stage knee osteoarthritis (OA) while ascending and...