Abstract Background We have proposed that cognitive resilience (CR) counteracts brain damage from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or AD-related dementias such that older individuals who harbor neurodegenerative disease burden sufficient to cause dementia remain cognitively normal. However, CR traditionally is considered a binary trait, capturing only the most extreme examples, and is often inconsistently defined. Methods This study addressed existing discrepancies and shortcomings of the current CR definition by proposing a framework for defining CR as a continuous variable for each neuropsychological test. The linear equations clarified CR’s relationship to closely related terms, including cognitive function, reserve, compensation, and damage. Primarily, resilience is defined as a function of cognitive performance and damage from neuropathologic damage. As such, the study utilized data from 844 individuals (age = 79 ± 12, 44% female) in the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center cohort that met our inclusion criteria of comprehensive lesion rankings for 17 neuropathologic features and complete neuropsychological test results. Machine learning models and GWAS then were used to identify medical and genetic factors that are associated with CR. Results CR varied across five cognitive assessments and was greater in female participants, associated with longer survival, and weakly associated with educational attainment or APOE ε4 allele. In contrast, damage was strongly associated with APOE ε4 allele ( P value < 0.0001). Major predictors of CR were cardiovascular health and social interactions, as well as the absence of behavioral symptoms. Conclusions Our framework explicitly decoupled the effects of CR from neuropathologic damage. Characterizations and genetic association study of these two components suggest that the underlying CR mechanism has minimal overlap with the disease mechanism. Moreover, the identified medical features associated with CR suggest modifiable features to counteract clinical expression of damage and maintain cognitive function in older individuals.
This paper shows a research for enhancing the rays of sunlight towards solar panels by designing the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that works on the solar tracking control system. The mechanism of whole design keeps the solar panel in horizontal rotation in order to get maximum energy from the sun during the day. The mechanical assemble of prototype solar cell is manufactured to change the position of panel from 180 degree East to West. Also we used the electronic circuit, which has quality for sensing the sunlight as well as controlling the servo motor. The tracking system is operated by using the software Altera Quartus-II. The process is gone through the programming and loaded into Altera DE2 FPGA board and tested successfully in the laboratory. This system has more energy concentration and has more improvement factor rather than using fixed solar panel system.
Document layout analysis is the most important part of converting scanned page images into search-able full text. An intensive amount of research is going on in the field of structured and semi-structured documents (journal articles, books, magazines, invoices) but not much in historical documents. Historical document digitization is a more challenging task than regular structured documents due to poor image quality, damaged characters, big amount of textual and non-textual noise. In the scientific community, the extraneous symbols from the neighboring page are considered as textual noise, while the appearances of black borders, speckles, ruler, different types of image etc. along the border of the documents are considered as non-textual noise. Existing historical document analysis method cannot handle all of this noise which is a very strong reason of getting undesired texts as a result from the output of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that needs to be removed afterward with a lot of extra afford. This paper presents a new perspective especially for the historical document image cleanup by detecting the page frame of the document. The goal of this method is to find actual contents area of the document and ignore noises along the page border. We use morphological transforms, the line segment detector, and geometric matching algorithm to find an ideal page frame of the document. After the implementation of page frame method, we also evaluate our approach over 16th-19th century printed historical documents. We have noticed in the result that OCR performance for the historical documents increased by 4.49% after applying our page frame detection method. In addition, we are able to increase the OCR accuracy around 6.69% for contemporary documents too.
Protein architecture refers to similar secondary structural arrangements irrespective of their connectivity. Here we aim to explore the evolution of protein architectures by benchmarking CATH and SCOP annotations. For example, we explore the appearance and diversification of protein architectures such as sandwiches, bundles, barrels, solenoids, ribbons, trefoils, prisms and propellers. Structural phylogenies generated at CATH "A", "T" and "H" levels of structural abstraction revealed patterns of reductive evolution and three epochs in the evolution of protein world. Although CATH and SCOP differ significantly in their protein domain definitions and in the hierarchical partitioning of fold space, our findings strongly support the fact that both protein structural classification systems classify a protein on a very similar theoretical basis by taking into account their structural, functional and evolutionary roles. The tree of "A" showed that the 3-layer (aba) sandwich (3.40), the orthogonal bundle (1.10) and the alpha-beta complex (3.90) harbor simple secondary structure arrangements that are the most ancient, popular and abundant architectures in the protein world.
Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia. AD neuropathologic change (ADNC) likely begins decades before clinical manifestations. One mechanism implicated in AD is oxidative stress. We explored the potential association of ADNC with antioxidant vitamin supplements taken about 30 years before death. Methods: The 264 brain-autopsied participants were part of The 90+ Study, a longitudinal study of aging among people aged 90+ years, and originally members of the Leisure World Cohort Study, a population-based health study established in the 1980s. Intake of supplemental vitamins A, C, and E was collected by the Leisure World Cohort Study about 30 years before ADNC assessment. Odds ratios of ADNC (intermediate/high vs. none/low) for vitamin intake were estimated using logistic regression. Results: The adjusted odds ratio (95% CI) of ADNC was 0.52 (0.29-0.92) for vitamin E supplements and 0.51 (0.27-0.93) for vitamin C supplements. Supplemental vitamin E intake was the first variable, after education, to enter the stepwise model. Intake of vitamin A or C did not improve the model fit. Conclusions: The observed association of ADNC and supplemental vitamin E intake decades earlier suggests a beneficial effect and supports further investigation into a nutritional approach to preventing AD with vitamin supplementation.
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