The application of ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) to the cut ends of transected facial nerves in newborn rats has been reported to reduce the death of facial motoneurons (FMns) axotomized by the transection. Systemically delivered CNTF has been found to cause cachexia in adult mice. We compared the influence of dosage of CNTF and (-)-deprenyl on FMn death, weight loss, and animal survival in rat pups that underwent facial nerve transection at the 14th postnatal day (P14). CNTF was administered by osmotic mini-pumps connected to tubing ending either intrathecally or extrathecally near the craniocervical junction. CNTF caused weight loss and animal death that was similar to the cachexia reported in mice if administered in amounts of 1.1 microgram/day or greater. At the same doses, intrathecal CNTF was more effective than extrathecal CNTF in inducing the cachexia. (-)-Deprenyl did not alter animal survival or weight gain, even at high doses (10 mg/kg every 2 days). Intrathecal CNTF and intraperitoneal (-)-deprenyl, but not extrathecal CNTF, significantly increased the survival of the axotomized FMns. (-)-Deprenyl administered twice daily at 0.01 mg/kg was considerably more effective than CNTF in increasing FMn survival due to the limitation on CNTF dosage caused by the animal death.
Recently there has been a lot of interest in improving the infrastructure used in medical applications. In particular, there is renewed interest on non-invasive, high-resolution diagnostic methods. One such method is digital, 3D ultrasound medical imaging. Current state-of-the-art ultrasound systems use specialized hardware for performing advanced processing of input data to improve the quality of the generated images. Such systems are limited in their capabilities by the underlying computing architecture and they tend to be expensive due to the specialized nature of the solutions they employ.Our goal in this work is twofold: (i) To understand the behavior of this class of emerging medical applications in order to provide an efficient parallel implementation and (ii) to introduce a new benchmark for parallel computer architectures from a novel and important class of applications. We address the limitations faced by modern ultrasound systems by investigating how all processing required by advanced beamforming algorithms can be performed on modern clusters of high-end PCs connected with low-latency, high-bandwidth system area networks. We investigate the computational characteristics of a state-of-the-art algorithm and demonstrate that today's commodity architectures are capable of providing almost-real-time performance without compromising image quality significantly.
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