Mensia (France)

BackgroundNeurofeedback (NF) has gained increasing interest among non-pharmacological treatments for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). NF training aims to enhance self-regulation of brain activities. The goal of the NEWROFEED study is to assess the efficacy of a new personalized NF training device, using two different protocols according to each child’s electroencephalographic pattern, and designed for use at home. This study is a non-inferiority trial comparing NF to methylphenidate.MethodsThe study is a prospective, multicentre, randomized, reference drug-controlled trial. One hundred seventy-nine children with ADHD, aged 7 to 13 years will be recruited in 13 clinical centres from 5 European countries. Subjects will be randomized to two groups: NF group (Neurofeedback Training Group) and MPH group (Methylphenidate group). Outcome measures include clinicians, parents and teachers’ assessments, attention measures and quantitative EEG (qEEG). Patients undergo eight visits over a three-month period: pre-inclusion visit, inclusion visit, 4 “discovery” (NF group) or titration visits (MPH group), an intermediate and a final visit. Patients will be randomized to either the MPH or NF group. Children in the NF group will undergo either an SMR or a Theta/Beta training protocol according to their baselineTheta/Beta Ratio obtained from the qEEG.DiscussionThis is the first non-inferiority study between a personalized NF device and pharmacological treatment. Innovative aspects of Mensia Koala™ include the personalization of the training protocol according to initial qEEG characteristics (SMR or Theta/Beta training protocols) and an improved accessibility of NF due to the opportunity to train at home with monitoring by the clinician through a dedicated web portal.Trial registrationNCT02778360. Date registration (retrospectively registered): 5-12-2016. Registered May 19, 2016

The correct ventilation for patients in intensive care units plays a critical role for the prognostic and the recovery during the stay in the hospital. Desynchronization between the ventilator and the patient is an important source of stress, emphasized by the lack of communication due to intubation or loss of consciousness. This contribution proposes a novel approach based on electroencephalographic (EEG) activity to detect breathing effort. Relying both on recent neuroscience finding on respiratory-related evoked potential and on latest development of information geometry, the proposed approach elaborates on Riemannian distances between EEG covariance matrices to differentiate among different respiratory loads. The results demonstrate that this approach outperform existing state-of-the-art methods quantitatively, in terms of mean accuracy, and qualitatively, being able to predict level of breathing discomfort.

Are the rhetorical markers in sociological discourse specific and of a «scientific» nature? To tackle this delicate question, let us start by drawing up the generic characteristics of sociological texts. Let us compare these characteristics with those of a literary genre: the French «roman à thèse» from the beginning of the XXth century. This old-fashioned and decried literature will serve as a driving bolt in order to demonstrate that a formalism sometimes asserted as scientific, does not guarantee scientific character, but just conformity to editorial requirement. To conclude, if the difference between sociological these and novel is not embedded in the text itself then, what eventually make its «scientific nature»? May be just the fragile conditions of its production and reception: debate and criticism of the sources if effectively implemented. But is this always the case?

The influence of thermal treatment (frying of plantain) on the micronutrients ascorbic acid, potassium and carotenoids is evaluated. Cylinders (diameter 30 mm, thickness 10 mm) of plantain (Musa AAB ‘barraganete’) were fried at four thermal treatments (120–180°C and from 24 to 4 min) to obtain products with approximately the same water content (≈0.8±0.02 kg/kg1) and fat content (≈0.15±0.06 kg/kg). The thermal study used the cook value and the mean cook value as indicators of the effect of several different treatment temperatures and times on quality. Deep-fat frying had no significant effect on carotenoid contents at any frying conditions, and on potassium content, except at 120°C and 24 min (loss ≤ 11%). There was a significant, but not complete, loss (≤45%) of ascorbic acid. The process with the greatest effect was low temperature and long time (120°C/24 min), as observed for potassium and ascorbic acid. These results are in agreement with other studies that demonstrated short thermal treatments at high temperatures protect food nutritional quality, as shown by the cook value and the mean cook value. In our work, deep-fat frying of plantain preserved most of the micronutrient contents that were evaluated.

ABSTRACT: Re‐evaluation of food processes seems to be a useful effort regarding current safety, environmental, and quality concerns in the food industry. Reverse engineering seems to be one of the ways to perform such a goal. There are only a few sets of applications with respect to food. Thermal unit operations are a good subject for this purpose. For baking and frying, for example, questions have arisen about acrylamide in heated foods. Some other examples lie with drying operations where a compromise must be found between drying ability and intensity and final food quality. Recently, we have developed a case study for a meat product produced in tropical countries. Traditional techniques for processing meat there usually involve salting, drying, and/or smoking. There is a wide range of beef products, such as charqui and carne‐de‐sol in South America, nham in Southeast Asia, and biltong in South Africa. Little is known of the traditional processing of pork other than the Nigerian product unam inung. Traditional processes for making boucané, a salted/dried/smoked pork belly product from Ré union Island, has not been the focus of any other scientific studies to date. Pork meat is salted and in the smoking oven, the boucan, smoke and heat from the hearth slowly cook the meat hanging over the fire. The product is stored beside the oven where smoke keeps flies away and the heat prevents moisture uptake by the product during the rainy season.

Indirect measurement of the alcohol concentration during the industrial distillation of Cognac.Distillate alcohol concentration is an important parameter in the two step distillation used to produce Cognac spirit.Consequently on line measurement of alcohol concentration is useful.Nevertheless the sensors currently marketed are not suitable, due to their lack of precision, their cost or due to volume implementation constraints.This paper reports the development of an indirect measure for industrial applications.It is based on the measurement of two parameters 1) the temperature of the saturated distillate steam, 2) the atmospheric pressure and also on a model relating these values to the alcohol concentration.Two models were proposed which allowed high precision over the whole range of alcohol concentrations (0-80% vol.):A polynomial model gave a good accuracy for high concentrations (from 80 to 60% vol.) corresponding to the extraction of the "heart", whilst a recurrent neural network was necessary for the lower range (from 60 to 2% vol.).The average accuracy of the measures was ± 0.7% vol.;The method was sucessfully tested on stills of various sizes (25 hL and 100 hL), thus demonstrating that is can be easily implemented in other industrial applications.The indirect evaluation of alcohol concentration reported herein, which was tested on two industrial stills, is now being routinely used for industrial distillation.

To improve the malt rootlet value, the antioxidant potentialities of this byproduct of the malting industry have been analyzed. Three extracts have been considered from the points of view of dry matter yield, level of antioxidant compounds, and efficiency and cost of the extraction protocols. They respectively contain rootlet oil, free phenolic compounds, and bound phenolic compounds. The rootlet oil contains only a low quantity of tocopherols (respectively, 20.6 and 4.2 microgram of alpha-tocopherol and gamma-tocopherol per gram of dry rootlets), and a weak antioxidant activity, evaluated in a stripped corn oil by following spectrophotometrically the conjugated dienes, has been pointed out. The bound compound extract presents a good antioxidant power mainly due to the presence of trans-ferulic and trans-p-coumaric acids, but the dry matter yield is low (2%). The free compound extract has a good antioxidant power, and the valuable dry matter, mainly composed of proteins (52%), sugars (33%), and reducing compounds (5.5%), has a yield of 12%. The mixing of bound and free compound extracts presents an antagonistic effect on the antioxidant power, but a synergistic effect has been pointed out for the mixing of alpha-tocopherol and free compound extract.