Tomoaki Shirao - Böcker

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Brain and Health Informatics, BHI 2013, held in Maebashi, Japan, in October 2013. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 8 workshop papers and 12 special session papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on thinking and perception-centric Investigations of human Information processing system; information technologies for curating, mining, managing and using big brain/health data; information technologies for healthcare; data analytics, data mining, and machine learning; and applications. The topics of the workshop papers are: mental health with ICT; and granular knowledge discovery in biomedical and active-media environments; and the topics of the special sessions are: human centered computing; neuro-robotics; and intelligent healthcare data analytics.

This book is the first comprehensive review of drebrin, which plays pivotal roles in various cellular events, via forming unique actin cytoskeletons, including synapse formation and in synaptic function. Particularly the loss of drebrin from dendritic spines is used as a marker of dementia in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Since drebrin was first identified by our group in 1985, many studies of drebrin have been done in various fields, including not only molecular biology, biophysics, cell biology, neuroscience, clinical studies, spermatogenesis, immunology, and cancer metastasis, but others as well. The structure of this book facilitates the understanding of the whole picture of studies on drebrin. The volume begins with a general introduction to drebrin, and then the chapters in the second part provide the basic knowledge for further understanding. The third part examines its function in the nervous system, and the fourth part discusses its function in the non-nervous system. This work will appeal to researchers who are interested in cytoskeletal dynamics at membrane-cytoskeletal interface as well as the number of them who use drebrin as a tool, such as a marker of synaptic function or a disease marker. This volume is kept as concise as possible in order to be understood by readers in diverse scientific disciplines.