[Purpose] The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a structured program of resistance training for the tongue in order to improve swallowing function in stroke patients with dysphagia. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-seven stroke patients with dysphagia were randomly divided into two groups. The experimental group participated in a resistance-training program involving a 1-repetition maximum, with an intensity of 80%, along with 50 repetitions per day each for the anterior and posterior regions of the tongue. Both groups received conventional therapy for dysphagia for 30 min per day, 5 times per week, for 6 weeks. [Results] The experimental group showed statistically significant improvements in both, the anterior and posterior regions of the tongue. In contrast, the control group showed significant improvements only in the anterior region of the tongue. In the videofluoroscopic dysphagia scale evaluation, improvement was noted at both, the oral and pharyngeal stages in the experimental group, whereas significant improvements were only noted in the oral stage and total score in the control group. [Conclusion] Our study confirmed that tongue resistance training is an effective intervention for stroke patients with dysphagia, offering improved tongue muscle strength and overall improvement in swallowing.

Tissue expansion techniques physically expand swellable gel‐embedded biological specimens to overcome the resolution limit of light microscopy. As the benefits of expansion come at the expense of signal concentration, imaging volume and time, and mechanical integrity of the sample, the optimal expansion ratio may widely differ depending on the experiment. However, existing expansion methods offer only fixed expansion ratios that cannot be easily adjusted to balance the gain and loss associated with expansion. Here, a hydrogel conversion‐based expansion method is presented, that enables easy adjustment of the expansion ratio for individual needs, simply by changing the duration of a heating step. This method, termed ZOOM, isotropically expands samples up to eightfold in a single expansion process. ZOOM preserves biomolecules for post‐processing labelings and supports multi‐round expansion for the imaging of a single sample at multiple zoom factors. ZOOM can be flexibly and scalably applied to nanoscale imaging of diverse samples, ranging from cultured cells to thick tissues, as well as bacteria, exoskeletal Caenorhabditis elegans, and human brain samples.

We demonstrated that neuromuscular electrical stimulation applied to the infrahyoid region combined with effortful swallowing effectively increased hyoid bone movement and reduced aspiration in dysphagic patients with Parkinson's disease.

This study demonstrated that CTAR is effective in improving the pharyngeal swallowing function in patients with dysphagia after stroke. Therefore, we recommend CTAR as a new remedial training alternative to HLE.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of virtual reality-based cognitive–motor rehabilitation (VRCMR) on the rehabilitation motivation and cognitive function in older adults. This study enrolled 40 older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), living in the community. The subjects were randomly assigned to a VRCMR group (n = 20) or a conventional cognitive rehabilitation (CCR) group (n = 20). The VRCMR group underwent VRCMR using MOTOcog, a computer recognition program, whereas the CCR group underwent conventional cognitive rehabilitation, which included puzzles, wood blocks, card play, stick construction activity, and maze activity. Both interventions were performed 30 min per day, 5 days/week, for 6 weeks. This study performed a cognitive assessment using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scale, Trail Making Test A and B (TMT-A/B), and Digit Span Test forward and backward (DST-forward/backward). In addition, a 0-to-10 numeric rating self-report scale was used to assess interest and motivation during the rehabilitation training. After the intervention, the VRCMR group showed a significantly greater improvement in the MoCA (p = 0.045), TMT-A (p = 0.039), TMT-B (p = 0.040), and DST-forward (p = 0.011) scores compared to the CCR group, but not in the DST-backward score (p = 0.424). In addition, subjects in the experimental group had significantly higher interest (p = 0.03) and motivation (p = 0.03) than those in the control group. Cohen’s d effect size was 0.4, 0.3, 0.35, 0.4, and 0.5 for the MoCA, TMT-A, TMT-B, DST-forward, and DST-backward tests, respectively. This study demonstrates that VRCMR enhances motivation for rehabilitation and cognitive function in older adults with MCI better than CCR.

In the present report, gallic acid was used as both a reducing and stabilizing agent to synthesize gold and silver nanoparticles. The synthesized gold and silver nanoparticles exhibited characteristic surface plasmon resonance bands at 536 and 392 nm, respectively. Nanoparticles that were approximately spherical in shape were observed in high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy images. The hydrodynamic radius was determined to be 54.4 nm for gold nanoparticles and 33.7 nm for silver nanoparticles in aqueous medium. X-ray diffraction analyses confirmed that the synthesized nanoparticles possessed a face-centered cubic structure. FT-IR spectra demonstrated that the carboxylic acid functional groups of gallic acid contributed to the electrostatic binding onto the surface of the nanoparticles. Zeta potential values of -41.98 mV for the gold nanoparticles and -53.47 mV for the silver nanoparticles indicated that the synthesized nanoparticles possess excellent stability. On-the-shelf stability for 4 weeks also confirmed that the synthesized nanoparticles were quite stable without significant changes in their UV-visible spectra. The synthesized nanoparticles exhibited catalytic activity toward the reduction reaction of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol in the presence of sodium borohydride. The rate constant of the silver nanoparticles was higher than that of the gold nanoparticles in the catalytic reaction. Furthermore, the conversion yield (%) of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol was determined using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection at 254 nm. The silver nanoparticles exhibited an excellent conversion yield (96.7-99.9 %), suggesting that the synthesized silver nanoparticles are highly efficient catalysts for the 4-nitrophenol reduction reaction.

We present VERISMART, a highly precise verifier for ensuring arithmetic safety of Ethereum smart contracts. Writing safe smart contracts without unintended behavior is critically important because smart contracts are immutable and even a single flaw can cause huge financial damage. In particular, ensuring that arithmetic operations are safe is one of the most important and common security concerns of Ethereum smart contracts nowadays. In response, several safety analyzers have been proposed over the past few years, but state-of-the-art is still unsatisfactory; no existing tools achieve high precision and recall at the same time, inherently limited to producing annoying false alarms or missing critical bugs. By contrast, VERISMART aims for an uncompromising analyzer that performs exhaustive verification without compromising precision or scalability, thereby greatly reducing the burden of manually checking undiscovered or incorrectly-reported issues. To achieve this goal, we present a new domain-specific algorithm for verifying smart contracts, which is able to automatically discover and leverage transaction invariants that are essential for precisely analyzing smart contracts. Evaluation with real-world smart contracts shows that VERISMART can detect all arithmetic bugs with a negligible number of false alarms, far outperforming existing analyzers.

In this study, various concentrations of caffeic acid (CA) were used to synthesize gold nanoparticles (CA-AuNPs) in order to evaluate their catalytic activity in the 4-nitrophenol reduction reaction. To facilitate catalytic activity, caffeic acid was removed by centrifugation after synthesizing CA-AuNPs. The catalytic activity of CA-AuNPs was compared with that of centrifuged CA-AuNPs (cf-CA-AuNPs). Notably, cf-CA-AuNPs exhibited up to 6.41-fold higher catalytic activity compared with CA-AuNPs. The catalytic activity was dependent on the caffeic acid concentration, and the lowest concentration (0.08 mM) produced CA-AuNPs with the highest catalytic activity. The catalytic activities of both CA-AuNPs and cf-CA-AuNPs decreased with increasing caffeic acid concentration. Furthermore, a conversion yield of 4-nitrophenol to 4-aminophenol in the reaction mixture was determined to be 99.8% using reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. The product, 4-aminophenol, was purified from the reaction mixture, and its structure was confirmed by 1H-NMR. It can be concluded that the removal of the reducing agent, caffeic acid in the present study, significantly enhanced the catalytic activity of CA-AuNPs in the 4-nitrophenol reduction reaction.