Epilepsy affects about 70 million people in the world. Every year, approximately 2.4 million people are diagnosed with epilepsy, two-thirds of them will not know the etiology of their disease, and 1% of these individuals will decease as a consequence of it. Due to the inherent complexity of predicting and explaining it, the mathematical model Epileptor was recently developed to reproduce seizure-like events, also providing insights to improve the understanding of the neural dynamics in the interictal and ictal periods, although the physics behind each parameter and variable of the model is not fully established in the literature. This paper introduces an approach to design a feedback-based controller for suppressing epileptic seizures described by Epileptor. Our work establishes how the nonlinear dynamics of this disorder can be written in terms of a combination of linear sub-models employing an exact solution. Additionally, we show how a feedback control gain can be computed to suppress seizures, as well as how specific shapes applied as input stimuli for this purpose can be obtained. The practical application of the approach is discussed and the results show that the proposed technique is promising for developing controllers in this field.

Titanium (Ti) and Ti-6 Aluminium-4 Vanadium alloys are the most common materials in implants composition but β type alloys are promising biomaterials because they present better mechanical properties. Besides the composition of biomaterial, many factors influence the performance of the biomaterial. For example, porous surface may modify the functional cellular response and accelerate osseointegration. This paper presents in vitro and in vivo evaluations of powder metallurgy-processed porous samples composed by different titanium alloys and pure Ti, aiming to show their potential for biomedical applications. The porous surfaces samples were produced with different designs to in vitro and in vivo tests. Samples were characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and elastic modulus analyses. Osteogenic cells from newborn rat calvaria were plated on discs of different materials: G1—commercially pure Ti group (CpTi); G2—Ti-6Al-4V alloy; G3—Ti-13 Niobium-13 Zirconium alloy; G4—Ti-35 Niobium alloy; G5—Ti-35 Niobium-7 Zirconium-5 Tantalum alloy. Cell adhesion and viability, total protein content, alkaline phosphatase activity, mineralization nodules and gene expression (alkaline phosphatase, Runx-2, osteocalcin and osteopontin) were assessed. After 2 and 4 weeks of implantation in rabbit tibia, bone ingrowth was analyzed using micro-computed tomography (μCT). EDS analysis confirmed the material production of each group. Metallographic and SEM analysis revealed interconnected pores, with mean pore size of 99,5μm and mean porosity of 42%, without significant difference among the groups (p>0.05). The elastic modulus values did not exhibit difference among the groups (p>0.05). Experimental alloys demonstrated better results than CpTi and Ti-6Al-4V, in gene expression and cytokines analysis, especially in early experimental periods. In conclusion, our data suggests that the experimental alloys can be used for biomedical application since they contributed to excellent cellular behavior and osseointegration besides presenting lower elastic modulus.

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The types of epileptiform activity occurring in the sclerotic hippocampus with highest incidence are interictal-like events (II) and periodic ictal spiking (PIS). These activities are classified according to their event rates, but it is still unclear if these rate differences are consequences of underlying physiological mechanisms. Identifying new and more specific information related to these two activities may bring insights to a better understanding about the epileptogenic process and new diagnosis. We applied Poincaré map analysis and Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) onto 35 in vitro electrophysiological signals recorded from slices of 12 hippocampal tissues surgically resected from patients with pharmacoresistant temporal lobe epilepsy. These analyzes showed that the II activity is related to chaotic dynamics, whereas the PIS activity is related to deterministic periodic dynamics. Additionally, it indicates that their different rates are consequence of different endogenous dynamics. Finally, by using two computational models we were able to simulate the transition between II and PIS activities. The RQA was applied to different periods of these simulations to compare the recurrences between artificial and real signals, showing that different ranges of regularity-chaoticity can be directly associated with the generation of PIS and II activities.

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Epilepsy is one of the most common brain disorders worldwide, affecting millions of people every year. Although significant effort has been put into better understanding it and mitigating its effects, the conventional treatments are not fully effective. Advances in computational neuroscience, using mathematical dynamic models that represent brain activities at different scales, have enabled addressing epilepsy from a more theoretical standpoint. In particular, the recently proposed Epileptor model stands out among these models, because it represents well the main features of seizures, and the results from its simulations have been consistent with experimental observations. In addition, there has been an increasing interest in designing control techniques for Epileptor that might lead to possible realistic feedback controllers in the future. However, such approaches rely on knowing all of the states of the model, which is not the case in practice. The work explored in this letter aims to develop a state observer to estimate Epileptor's unmeasurable variables, as well as reconstruct the respective so-called bursters. Furthermore, an alternative modeling is presented for enhancing the convergence speed of an observer. The results show that the proposed approach is efficient under two main conditions: when the brain is undergoing a seizure and when a transition from the healthy to the epileptiform activity occurs.

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