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PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To describe features and implications of chronic systemic inflammation in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) and to summarize the growing therapeutic possibilities to explore the vagus nerve-mediated inflammatory reflex in this context. RECENT FINDINGS: The discovery of the inflammatory reflex provides a rationale to explore neuromodulation modalities, that is, electrical vagus nerve stimulation and pharmacological cholinergic modalities to regulate inflammation after SCI. SUMMARY: Inflammation in individuals with SCI may negatively impact functional recovery and medical consequences after SCI. Exploring the potential of the vagus nerve-based inflammatory reflex to restore autonomic regulation and control inflammation may provide a novel approach for functional improvement in SCI.

A series of biorelevant triethylammonium isatin hydrazones containing various substituents in the aromatic fragment have been synthesized. Their structure and composition were confirmed by NMR- and IR-spectroscopies, mass-spectrometry and elemental analysis. It was found that some representatives show activity against Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus higher or at the level of norfloxacin, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains. The study also showed low hemo- and cytotoxicity (Chang Liver) and high antiaggregatory and anticoagulant activity of these compounds. The high potential of new ammonium isatin-3-acylhydrazones in the search for antimicrobial activity against phytopathogens of bacterial and fungal nature has been shown for the first time.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Intraperitoneal administration of famotidine did not significantly alter IL-1β or CXCL1 levels at 2.5 or 6 h post LPS exposure. A–D Male C57BL/6 mice, 8–12 weeks of age, were injected with LPS (7 mg/kg) with or without famotidine (FM, 0.4 or 4 mg/kg, in 100 µl volume), intraperitoneally 30 min before LPS injection. Mice were euthanized 2.5 h after LPS or FM administration. Serum and spleen IL-1β and CXCL1 were measured (N = 10 mice per group), as well as serum IL-6 (N = 5 mice per group). E–H Mice received an IP injection of famotidine or vehicle (0.04 or 0.4 mg/kg, in 5 µl volume) 30 min before LPS injection. LPS was administered IP at 7 mg/kg. Mice were euthanized 6 h post-LPS injection. N = 5 for normal group. N = 13–14 for others. Figure S2. Effects of other histamine 2 receptor antagonists. A–D Male C57BL/6 mice had ICV injection of PBS or tiotidine (0.04 or 0.4 mg/kg in 5 µl volume) 30 min before LPS. LPS was administered IP at 7 mg/kg. Mice were euthanized 2.5 h post-LPS injection and levels of serum and spleen TNF and IL-6 were measured. N = 5 for normal group. N = 4 for tiotidine 4 mg/kg group and N = 8 for other groups. *P

In April 2019, a select group of medical, academic, and private-sector leaders in bioelectronic medicine convened in Geneva to discuss the potential for building a cross-disciplinary movement that would advance the field with key stakeholders – both those who are already active in research and commercialization as well as those who will influence the pace of development and uptake of innovative technologies and treatments. Hosted by BioSig Technologies and physicians from the Mayo Clinic, the roundtable was unique in its focus on what it will take to advance awareness of bioelectronic medicine, including a shared definition, unified narrative, and set of tailored messages to win over key audiences. The attendees developed a consensus on these issues and agreed to form a working group beyond the roundtable, which has since evolved into the Alliance for Advancing Bioelectronic Medicine. This meeting report summarizes the key insights from the roundtable, including a call to action aimed at accelerating growth and collaboration across the field.

Conference Abstracts

Supplementary material, approximately 406 KB.

ExaFMM is a highly scalable implementation of the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) – an O(N) algorithm for solving N-body interaction with applications in gravitational and electrostatic simulations. The authors report scaling on large systems with O(100k) cores with support for MPI, OpenMP and SIMD vectorization. The library also includes GPU kernels capable of running on a multi-GPU system. The objective of the project is to enable the use of the ExaFMM solver in the MIC architecture by performing porting, verification, scalability testing and providing configuration suggestions to its potential users.

Supplementary material, approximately 447 KB.

The SPECFEM3D package simulates seismic wave propagation using a parallel implementation of a variation of the Galerkin procedure called Spectral Element Method (SEM). The advantage of this method is that it produces a diagonal mass matrix which allows for quick explicit solving of the seismic wave equations. The drawback is that using an explicit method the solver is not stable unless the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition for convergence holds, imposing a certain inequality relation between the time step and spatial size of the spectral elements. The internal mesher provided with the package uses a partitioning approach that directly links the number of parallel solver tasks with the spatial size of the elements. For any given mesh, increasing the number of parallel processes leads to decreasing the element size, and via the CFL condition to decreasing the time step. This directly compromises the scalability of the solver by requiring more time steps for the same amount of work with no gain in performance. The goal of this project is to improve the scalability of the package by reconsidering the partitioning approach of the internal mesher. We analyze the existing approach and propose a new one, based on using the SCOTCH partitioning library, already integrated in the workflow for solving the problem on externally generated mesh. Our results indicate that the modified partitioning scheme leads to substantial performance benefits for regional modeling with the internal mesher in petascale environments. We validate the results by running the examples included in the package and observe that the solver produces identical synthetic seismograms when run with meshes generated by the original and modified internal mesher.

Изучены закономерности распределения дополнительных остаточных напряжений в упрочнённых полых и сплошных цилиндрических деталях после нанесения кольцевых надрезов полукруглой формы с различными вариантами изменения остаточных усилий гладких деталей.