“
“We propose

a new method to provide a functional interpretation of motor commands (i.e., muscle activities) and their relationship to movement kinematics. We evaluated our method by analyzing the motor commands of normal controls and patients with cerebellar disorders for visually guided tracking movement of the wrist joint. Six control subjects and six patients with cerebellar disorders participated in this study. We asked the subjects to perform visually guided smooth tracking movement of the wrist joint with a manipulandum, and recorded the movements of the wrist joint and activities of the four wrist prime movers with surface electrodes. We found Histone Methyltransf inhibitor a symmetric relationship between the second-order linear equation of motion for the wrist joint and the linear Fludarabine sum of activities of the four wrist prime movers. The symmetric relationship determined a set of parameters to characterize the muscle activities and their similarity to the components of movement kinematics

of the wrist joint. We found that muscle activities of the normal controls encoded both the velocity and the position of the moving target, resulting in precise tracking of the target. In contrast, muscle activities of the cerebellar patients were characterized by a severer impairment for velocity control and more dependence on position control, resulting in poor tracking of the smoothly moving target with many step-like awkward movements. Our results suggest that the cerebellum plays an important role in the generation of motor commands for smooth velocity and position control.”
“Objective. To evaluate the three dimensional ultrasound (3D) in the volume assessment of the gestational contents during the 1st trimester of pregnancy. Our aim was to correlate the embryo, gestational sac, and placenta volume with the birth weight. To monitor the increase of these volumes according to the gestational age.

Method. Prospective study of 199 singleton low risk pregnant women undergoing the 1st trimester ultrasound for fetal anomalies. In these women, gestational volumetry was performed and it was compared with the crown-rump length (CRL). Regression models were

computed in order to analyze the dependence of birth weight with the volumes.

Results. The embryo volume reveals the strongest association with the birth weight at delivery (beta = 0.24), followed by the CRL (beta = 0.20) and the gestational sac this website volume (beta = 0.20). The placenta volume appears the weakest association with fetal weight at delivery (beta = 0.16). All volumes increased significantly from 11(+0)-11(+6) to 13(+0)-13(+6) weeks of gestation (p < 0.001). Ten cubic millimeter increase in embryo volume corresponds to a mean birth weight increase of 75 g, while 1 mm increase in the CRL corresponds to a birth weight increase of 113 g.

Conclusion. Our results provide evidence that the embryo volume during the first trimester of pregnancy correlates better with birth weight than the CRL.