Pelodera (syn. Rhabditis) strongyloides as a cause of dermatitis – a report of 11 dogs from Finland

Background  

Pelodera (Rhabditis) strongyloides is a small saprophytic nematode that lives in decaying organic matter. On rare occasions, it can invade the mammalian skin, causing a pruritic, erythematous, alopecic and crusting dermatitis on skin sites that come into contact with the ground. Diagnosis of the disease is based on case history (a dog living outdoors on damp straw bedding) with characteristic skin lesions and on the demonstration of typical larvae in skin scrapings or biopsy. Pelodera (rhabditic) dermatitis cases have been reported mainly from Central European countries and the United States.     

Multimodal information improves the rapid detection of mental fatigue

One of the major challenge in the detection of mental states is improving the accuracy of brain activity-based detectors with additional information from extracranial signals. We assessed the suitability, for real-time mental fatigue detection, of EEG, EOG and ECG measurements, taken separately or together. Thirteen subjects performed six blocks of switching tasks. For each participant, the block with the lowest error rate from the first two blocks and the block with the highest error rate from the last three blocks were discriminated with a machine learning algorithm (support vector machine). The classification scores obtained with ECG or EOG were greater than would be expected by chance (>50%) for time windows of at least 8 s. EEG was the best single mode of detection, with classification scores ranging from 80 ± 3% with a 4 s time window to 94 ± 2% with a 30 s time window. The addition of ECG and EOG features to EEG features significantly increased classification scores for short time windows (e.g., to 86 ± 3% with a 4 s time window, p < 0.001). For short time windows (up to 12 s), ECG significantly increased the discriminatory power of EEG, whereas EOG did not. These results demonstrate that mental state detection on the basis of extracerebral measurements is feasible and that a combination of EEG and ECG is particularly appropriate for the rapid detection of mental fatigue.     

Bases and spaces: resources on the web for accessing the draft human genome - II - After publication of the draft

The volume of human genome sequence and the variety of web-based tools to access it continue to grow at an impressive rate, but a working knowledge of certain key resources can be sufficient to get the most from your genome. This article provides an update to Genome Biology 2000, 1(4):reviews2001.1-2001.5.