Mechanical, optical, and physicochemical properties of HPMC-based doxazosin mesylate orodispersible films

Abstract In this study, orodispersible films formed from hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) E6 (2, 2.5, and 3%) and plasticizers ((glycerin (Gly), propylene glycol (PP), or polyethylene glycol (PEG)), containing doxazosin mesylate, were prepared by the solvent casting method and characterized. Design of experiments (DoE) was used as a statistical tool to facilitate the interpretation of the experimental data and allow the identification of optimal levels of factors for maximum formulation performance. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) curves and X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) diffractograms showed doxazosin mesylate amorphization, probably due to complexation with the polymer (HPMC E6), and the glass transition temperature of the polymer was reduced by adding a plasticizer. Fourier transformed infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy results showed that the chemical structure of doxazosin mesylate was preserved when introduced into the polymer matrix, and the plasticizers, glycerin and PEG, affected the polymer matrix with high intensity. The addition of plasticizers increased the elongation at break and adhesiveness (Gly > PEG > PP), confirming the greater plasticizer effect of Gly observed in DSC and FTIR studies. Greater transparency was observed for the orodispersible films prepared using PP. The addition of citric acid as a pH modifier was fundamental for the release of doxazosin mesylate, and the desirability formulation had a release profile similar to that of the reference product

An overview of preparation and characterization of solid binary system and its application on transdermal film with variation of plasticizers

Chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) and post-operative nausea and vomiting (PONV) is a problem, often occurs in patient. Inspite of high bioavailability, the demerits such as: hepatic first pass metabolism and invasive nature of oral and parenteral dosage forms can be avoided with anti-emetic therapy of transdermal device. The major objective of the present study is to modify the hydrochloride (HCl) form of Ondansetron (OND) to the base form followed by improvement of solubility and permeability of OND by employing solid dispersion (SD) loaded patches. Preformulation study, as observed, begins with an approach to enthuse solubility of OND by SD technique choosing different carriers. The choice of carriers was rationalized by phase solubility study. Several combinations of transdermal films were prepared with pure drug, carriers and SDs with plasticizer Ka values of OND-HPßCD binary system were found lower (54.43 to 187.57 M-1) than that of OND-PVP K-30 binary system (1156.77 to 12203.6 M-1). The drug content of SDs and patches were found satisfactory. Better permeation rate (236.48±3.66 µg/3.935 cm2) with promising flux enhancement (8.30 fold) was found with DBP loaded SD patch (P6*). Hence, enhancement of solubility and permeability of P6* ensures that it can successfully enhance the bioavailability

A computational lens into how music characterizes genre in film.

Film music varies tremendously across genre in order to bring about different responses in an audience. For instance, composers may evoke passion in a romantic scene with lush string passages or inspire fear throughout horror films with inharmonious drones. This study investigates such phenomena through a quantitative evaluation of music that is associated with different film genres. We construct supervised neural network models with various pooling mechanisms to predict a film's genre from its soundtrack. We use these models to compare handcrafted music information retrieval (MIR) features against VGGish audio embedding features, finding similar performance with the top-performing architectures. We examine the best-performing MIR feature model through permutation feature importance (PFI), determining that mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and tonal features are most indicative of musical differences between genres. We investigate the interaction between musical and visual features with a cross-modal analysis, and do not find compelling evidence that music characteristic of a certain genre implies low-level visual features associated with that genre. Furthermore, we provide software code to replicate this study at https://github.com/usc-sail/mica-music-in-media. This work adds to our understanding of music's use in multi-modal contexts and offers the potential for future inquiry into human affective experiences.

Movie viewing elicits rich and reliable brain state dynamics.

Adaptive brain function requires that sensory impressions of the social and natural milieu are dynamically incorporated into intrinsic brain activity. While dynamic switches between brain states have been well characterised in resting state acquisitions, the remodelling of these state transitions by engagement in naturalistic stimuli remains poorly understood. Here, we show that the temporal dynamics of brain states, as measured in fMRI, are reshaped from predominantly bistable transitions between two relatively indistinct states at rest, toward a sequence of well-defined functional states during movie viewing whose transitions are temporally aligned to specific features of the movie. The expression of these brain states covaries with different physiological states and reflects subjectively rated engagement in the movie. In sum, a data-driven decoding of brain states reveals the distinct reshaping of functional network expression and reliable state transitions that accompany the switch from resting state to perceptual immersion in an ecologically valid sensory experience.

Los trastornos del neurodesarrollo son "de cine"... y quedan muchos guiones por escribir / Neurodevelopmental disorders are "from cinema"... and there are many scripts to write

Los trastornos del neurodesarrollo, como el autismo, aunque presentes principalmente en la infancia, son una afección de por vida. Uno de los principales retos en el campo de los trastornos del neurodesarrollo es que estas entidades se hagan visibles. Y un terreno esencial para trabajar por su visualización son los medios de comunicación, siendo el cine un recurso esencial. El proyecto Cine y Pediatría apuesta por el objetivo de mejorar la humanización de nuestra práctica clínica a través de la prescripción de películas. Y en este artículo proponemos 22 películas sobre trastornos del neurodesarrollo en la infancia y adolescencia para vivir las emociones y reflexiones que nos devuelven sus protagonistas y familias. Estas son las películas prescritas que abordan el trastorno del espectro autista: Mater amatísima, Rain Man, Paraíso oceánico, Un viaje inesperado, Mozart y la ballena, Ben-X, El niño de Marte, Mary and Max, María y yo, Mi nombre es Khan, Tan fuerte, tan cerca, La sonrisa verdadera, Especiales. Y estas son las películas prescritas que versan sobre otros trastornos del neurodesarrollo: El milagro de Anna Sullivan, Forrest Gump, Estrellas en la Tierra, El primero de la clase, Gabrielle, Cromosoma 5, La historia de Marie Heurtin, Línea de meta, Dora y la revolución sexual. La observación narrativa de estas películas argumentales nos permitirá acercarnos a este apasionante mundo, pero sobre todo a las extraordinarias personas y familias que hay detrás del frío nombre de cada entidad médica. Y aunque hemos "prescrito" 22 historias "de cine", seguro que en los trastornos del neurodesarrollo quedan muchos guiones por escribir

Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, although most commonly present in childhood, can be lifelong conditions. One of the main challenges in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders is that these entities become visible. For that purpose, media is playing a relevant role in order to achieve such a challenge, and cinema is one of the essentials. Cine y Pediatría project aims to improve the humanization of our clinical practice through the prescription of films. In this article we propose 22 films whose protagonists are children or adolescents with neurodevelopment disorders, essential to experience the emotions and reflections that their heroes and families give us back. These are the prescribed movies regarding autism spectrum disorder: Mater amatísima, Rain Man, Ocean Heaven, Miracle Run, Mozart and the Whale, Ben-X, Martian Child, Mary and Max, María y yo, My name is Khan, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Closer, La sonrisa verdadera and Hors normes. And these are the prescribed movies regarding other neurodevelopmental disorders: The Miracle Worker, Forrest Gump, Taare Zameen Par, Front of the class, Gabrielle, Cromosoma 5, Marie Heurtin, Línea de meta and Dora or The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents. The narrative observation of these main plot films will allow us to approach this exciting world, but above all the extraordinary people and families behind the cold name of each medical entity. And although we have "prescribed" 22 "cinema" stories, surely in neurodevelopmental disorders there are many scripts to write

Towards story-based classification of movie scenes.

Humans are entertained and emotionally captivated by a good story. Artworks, such as operas, theatre plays, movies, TV series, cartoons, etc., contain implicit stories, which are conveyed visually (e.g., through scenes) and audially (e.g., via music and speech). Story theorists have explored the structure of various artworks and identified forms and paradigms that are common to most well-written stories. Further, typical story structures have been formalized in different ways and used by professional screenwriters as guidelines. Currently, computers cannot yet identify such a latent narrative structure of a movie story. Therefore, in this work, we raise the novel challenge of understanding and formulating the movie story structure and introduce the first ever story-based labeled dataset-the Flintstones Scene Dataset (FSD). The dataset consists of 1, 569 scenes taken from a manual annotation of 60 episodes of a famous cartoon series, The Flintstones, by 105 distinct annotators. The various labels assigned to each scene by different annotators are summarized by a probability vector over 10 possible story elements representing the function of each scene in the advancement of the story, such as the Climax of Act One or the Midpoint. These elements are learned from guidelines for professional script-writing. The annotated dataset is used to investigate the effectiveness of various story-related features and multi-label classification algorithms for the task of predicting the probability distribution of scene labels. We use cosine similarity and KL divergence to measure the quality of predicted distributions. The best approaches demonstrated 0.81 average similarity and 0.67 KL divergence between the predicted label vectors and the ground truth vectors based on the manual annotations. These results demonstrate the ability of machine learning approaches to detect the narrative structure in movies, which could lead to the development of story-related video analytics tools, such as automatic video summarization and recommendation systems.

A multimodal convolutional neuro-fuzzy network for emotion understanding of movie clips.

Multimodal emotion understanding enables AI systems to interpret human emotions. With accelerated video surge, emotion understanding remains challenging due to inherent data ambiguity and diversity of video content. Although deep learning has made a considerable progress in big data feature learning, they are viewed as deterministic models used in a "black-box" manner which does not have capabilities to represent inherent ambiguities with data. Since the possibility theory of fuzzy logic focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty, we intend to incorporate the concepts of fuzzy logic into deep learning framework. This paper presents a novel convolutional neuro-fuzzy network, which is an integration of convolutional neural networks in fuzzy logic domain to extract high-level emotion features from text, audio, and visual modalities. The feature sets extracted by fuzzy convolutional layers are compared with those of convolutional neural networks at the same level using t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding. This paper demonstrates a multimodal emotion understanding framework with an adaptive neural fuzzy inference system that can generate new rules to classify emotions. For emotion understanding of movie clips, we concatenate audio, visual, and text features extracted using the proposed convolutional neuro-fuzzy network to train adaptive neural fuzzy inference system. In this paper, we go one step further to explain how deep learning arrives at a conclusion that can guide us to an interpretable AI. To identify which visual/text/audio aspects are important for emotion understanding, we use direct linear non-Gaussian additive model to explain the relevance in terms of causal relationships between features of deep hidden layers. The critical features extracted are input to the proposed multimodal framework to achieve higher accuracy.

On the influence of low-level visual features in film classification.

BACKGROUND: In this paper we present a model of parameters to aesthetically characterize films using a multi-disciplinary approach: by combining film theory, visual low-level video descriptors (modeled in order to supply aesthetic information) and classification techniques using machine and deep learning. METHODS: Four different tests have been developed, each for a different application, proving the model's usefulness. These applications are: aesthetic style clustering, prediction of production year, genre detection and influence on film popularity. RESULTS: The results are compared against high-level information to determine the accuracy of the model to classify films without knowing such information previously. The main difference with other film characterization approaches is that we are able to isolate the influence of high-level descriptors to really understand the relevance of low-level features and, accordingly propose a useful set of low-level visual descriptors for that purpose. This model has been tested with a representative number of films to prove that it can be used for different applications.

Proof of concept study: Testing human volatile organic compounds as tools for age classification of films.

Humans emit numerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through breath and skin. The nature and rate of these emissions are affected by various factors including emotional state. Previous measurements of VOCs and CO2 in a cinema have shown that certain chemicals are reproducibly emitted by audiences reacting to events in a particular film. Using data from films with various age classifications, we have studied the relationship between the emission of multiple VOCs and CO2 and the age classifier (0, 6, 12, and 16) with a view to developing a new chemically based and objective film classification method. We apply a random forest model built with time independent features extracted from the time series of every measured compound, and test predictive capability on subsets of all data. It was found that most compounds were not able to predict all age classifiers reliably, likely reflecting the fact that current classification is based on perceived sensibilities to many factors (e.g. incidences of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language) rather than the visceral biological responses expressed in the data. However, promising results were found for isoprene which reliably predicted 0, 6 and 12 age classifiers for a variety of film genres and audience age groups. Therefore, isoprene emission per person might in future be a valuable aid to national classification boards, or even offer an alternative, objective, metric for rating films based on the reactions of large groups of people.

Injuries Depicted in Sport-Related Films.

The perception that children and adolescents have of injuries may be influenced by their depiction in sport-related films. The objective of this study was to determine the depiction of injuries in a select number of sport-related films. Forty-four films were analyzed. Injury category, on-the-field management, and long-term management were determined for each injury. Major injuries were defined as injuries requiring prompt intervention and immediate discontinuation of sport participation. A total of 49 injuries were depicted, categorized as fracture (n = 11), contusion (n = 10), brain concussion (n = 8), muscle cramps (n = 5), laceration/abrasion (n = 4), ligamentous knee injury (n = 4), shoulder dislocation (n = 2), rotator cuff injury (n = 2), ankle sprain (n = 2), and unspecified injury (n = 1). Of the 38 (78%) injuries considered major, immediate return to the game was the disposition for 13 injuries (34%). Pediatric health care providers, coaching staff, and parents should stress the importance of injury recognition/disclosure and realistic expectations for rehabilitation to pediatric athletes.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal en la literatura, el cine y la televisión / Santiago Ramón y Cajal in literature, cinema and television

Introducción. La vida y obra de Santiago Ramón y Cajal ha sido recogida en artículos científicos, obras biográficas y autobiográficas, cómics, películas, series televisivas o documentales que han intentado reflexionar sobre su vida o sus aportaciones a la ciencia y acercarlo a la población general. Objetivo. Analizar cómo ha sido representada la figura de Santiago Ramón y Cajal en la literatura, el cine y la televisión, y conocer al científico a través de su obra de ficción. Desarrollo. Son múltiples las obras biográficas escritas sobre Santiago Ramón y Cajal, artículos científicos, cómics, libros para niños y jóvenes, sin olvidar las obras autobiográficas, ensayos, e incluso literatura de ciencia ficción, que permiten una buena aproximación a la vida del científico y a su obra. Su figura ha sido también llevada al cine (Salto a la gloria) o a la televisión (Ramón y Cajal, historia de una voluntad; Las mariposas del alma), que han acercado a Cajal, con mayor o menor acierto y exactitud, a la población general. Conclusiones. A través de los numerosos escritos biográficos, apuntes históricos, artículos, la propia obra científica, de ensayo y de ficción de Cajal, así como de las representaciones que el cine y la televisión han hecho del Nobel español, podemos realizar una interesante aproximación al científico, al profesor, al divulgador, al médico humanista y, en suma, al hombre que realizó tan importantes aportaciones a la neurociencia (AU)

Introduction. The life and work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal has been portrayed in scientific papers, biographical and autobiographical works, comics, films, television series or documentaries that have attempted to reflect upon his life or his contributions to science and to bring him closer to the general public. Aims. To analyse the different ways Santiago Ramón y Cajal has been represented in literature, cinema and television, and to become more closely acquainted with this scientist through his fictional writings. Development. A number of biographical works have been written about Santiago Ramón y Cajal, including scientific papers, comics, books for children and youngsters, as well as the autobiographical writings, essays and even science fiction stories, which provide a good introduction to the life of the scientist and his work. His life has also been adapted to film (Leap to fame) or television (Ramón y Cajal, historia de una voluntad; The butterflies of the soul), which have, with varying degrees of success and accuracy, made him better known to the general population. Conclusions. The numerous biographical writings, historical notes, articles, the scientific work itself, the essays and fictional works by Cajal, as well as the portrayals of the Spanish Nobel Prize winner produced for films and television, can be used to obtain some interesting insights into the scientist, teacher, science populariser, humanist physician and, in short, the man who made such important contributions to neuroscience (AU)

Emotional Sentence Annotation Helps Predict Fiction Genre.

Fiction, a prime form of entertainment, has evolved into multiple genres which one can broadly attribute to different forms of stories. In this paper, we examine the hypothesis that works of fiction can be characterised by the emotions they portray. To investigate this hypothesis, we use the work of fictions in the Project Gutenberg and we attribute basic emotional content to each individual sentence using Ekman's model. A time-smoothed version of the emotional content for each basic emotion is used to train extremely randomized trees. We show through 10-fold Cross-Validation that the emotional content of each work of fiction can help identify each genre with significantly higher probability than random. We also show that the most important differentiator between genre novels is fear.

La imagen del magnetismo animal en la literatura de ficción: los casos de Poe, Doyle y Du Maurier / The image of animal magnetism in fictional literature: the cases of Poe, Doyle and Du Maurier

En el presente trabajo nos acercamos a la imagen social del fenómeno conocido como mesmerismo o magnetismo animal a través del análisis de las obras: The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar (1845) de Edgar Allan Poe, The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1885) de Conan Doyle y Trilby (1894) de George Du Maurier. Mostraremos cuál es el estereotipo del magnetizador y los usos que observamos del mesmerismo. Nos acercaremos a los espacios y actores del trasunto mesmerico presentado en los relatos. Tendremos en cuenta la recepción por parte del público de estas historias y las relaciones con los conocimientos mesmericos e hipnóticos que tenían los autores de éstas. En la actualidad, investigadores académicos, dentro de la disciplina de la psicología, publican artículos y libros sobre los mitos populares de la hipnosis intentando poner de manifiesto las imágenes distorsionadas referentes a este fenómeno. Esta imagen distorsionada del proceso hipnótico, y del hipnotizador, proviene de los espectáculos circenses de hipnosis (stage hypnosis), del cine, de la televisión y de la literatura de ficción. Por otro lado, tenemos en la literatura de ficción una fuente única e inestimable de datos, ideas, especulaciones, preocupaciones y posibilidades en torno al magnetismo animal e hipnosis que convierten su estudio y análisis en un capítulo imprescindible de cualquier trabajo histórico de este tema. Veremos cómo el uso literario del mesmerismo en el caso de Poe, Doyle y Du Maurier no es algo casual o periférico, sino que todos ellos estuvieron intelectualmente interesados y estimulados por estas ideas (AU)

In this article, we focus on the social image of the phenomenon known as mesmerism, or animal magnetism, through analysis of the works: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe, The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1885) by Conan Doyle and Trilby (1894) by George Du Maurier. We describe the stereotype of the mesmerist and the uses of mesmerism observed. We pay attention to the spaces and actors of the mesmeric transcript presented in the stories. We consider the reception of these stories by the public and the relationship of the authors with mesmeric and hypnotic knowledge. Nowadays, academic researchers in the discipline of psychology publish articles and books on popular myths about hypnosis in attempts to depict the distorted images related to this phenomenon. This distorted image of the hypnotic process and the hypnotist derives from "circus" hypnotism shows (stage hypnosis), the cinema, television and fictional literature. Works of fiction represent a unique and invaluable source of information, ideas, speculations, concerns and opportunities around animal magnetism and hypnosis, and the exploration and analysis of this literature is an essential chapter in any historical study of this topic. We see how the literary use of mesmerism by Poe, Doyle and Du Maurier is not chance or peripheral, with all three being intellectually interested in and stimulated by these ideas (AU)

Exposure to smoking in movies and smoking initiation among black youth.

BACKGROUND: Black adolescents see more substance use in mainstream media but seem less responsive to it than other U.S. adolescents. Black-oriented media may be more personally relevant to them. PURPOSE: To determine smoking exposure separately for black-oriented (BSME) and mainstream (MMSE) movies and assess their longitudinal relationships with smoking among black and other-race adolescents. METHODS: Two-wave (2007-2009) national cohort survey of 2341 nonsmoking (at baseline) U.S. adolescents (aged 13-19 years), analyzed in 2012. The surveys determined BMSE and MMSE based on respondents' exposure to random subsets of 50 movies from a contemporary sample of 95 black-oriented and 288 mainstream movies previously content-coded for smoking. Outcome was smoking initiation. RESULTS: Black teens had significantly more BMSE and MMSE than other teens (p's <0.001). At follow-up, 23.5% of black and 29.0% of nonblack respondents had tried smoking. Among black respondents, BMSE was related to smoking initiation at follow-up but MMSE was not. For other adolescents, both BMSE and MMSE were related to smoking initiation. CONCLUSIONS: A prospective relationship was found between exposure to smoking in movies and smoking initiation. Among black adolescents in the U.S., this was only for black-oriented movies, suggesting the importance of personal relevance of the exposures. Parents, practitioners, and producers should be aware of these potential influences of media on black teen viewers.

Smoking in top-grossing US movies, 2011.

We reviewed the number of incidents of tobacco use (almost exclusively smoking) depicted in movies in the United States in 2011 to compare that with previously reported trends. We counted use or implied use of a tobacco product by an actor in all movies whose box office gross ranked in the top 10 for at least 1 week. Total tobacco incidents per movie rose 7% from 2010 to 2011, ending 5 years of decline; incidents rose 34% per movie rated G, PG, or PG-13 and 7% per R-rated movie. The reversal of progress toward less onscreen smoking in youth-rated movies underscores the need to rate movies with tobacco imagery as R, establishing an industry-wide market incentive to keep youth-marketed movies tobacco-free.

[Smoking in movies -- a new way of promotion]. / Fumatul în filme -- un nou mod de promovare.

Smoking in movies is a neglected aspect, even in Romania. The tobacco industry find out earlier what could be the impact of smoking on the initiation on smoking in teenagers. Later, we had reactions. In this article I am reviewing, from a epidemiological point of view, the effect of smoking in movies and I am analyzing the modalities of fighting and the actions for winning, also for teenagers, this battle in tobacco control.

Movies with smoking make less money.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the relationship between presence of smoking in films and total box office receipts. METHODS: Regression analysis of box office receipts as a function of film rating, production budget, year of release and presence of smoking for 1232 films released in the USA between 2002 and 2010. RESULTS: R-rated films made, on average, 87% (95% CI 83% to 90%) of what PG-13 films of similar smoking status made and smoking films made 87% (95% CI 79% to 96%) of what comparably rated smoke-free films made. Larger budget films made more money. There was no significant effect of release year or G/PG rating compared with PG-13-rated movies. CONCLUSIONS: Because PG-13 films without smoking (median $48.6 million) already make 41% more money at the box office than R-rated movies with smoking (median $34.4 million), implementing an R rating for smoking to remove it from youth-rated films will not conflict with the economic self-interest of producer-distributors.

Alcohol imagery and branding, and age classification of films popular in the UK.

BACKGROUND: Exposure to alcohol products in feature films is a risk factor for use of alcohol by young people. This study was designed to document the extent to which alcohol imagery and brand appearances occur in popular UK films, and in relation to British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) age ratings intended to protect children and young people from harmful imagery. METHODS: Alcohol appearances (classified as 'alcohol use, inferred alcohol use, other alcohol reference and alcohol brand appearances') were measured using 5-min interval coding of 300 films, comprising the 15 highest grossing films at the UK Box Office each year over a period of 20 years from 1989 to 2008. RESULTS: At least one alcohol appearance occurred in 86% of films, at least one episode of alcohol branding in 35% and nearly a quarter (23%) of all intervals analysed contained at least one appearance of alcohol. The occurrence of 'alcohol use and branded alcohol appearances' was particularly high in 1989, but the frequency of these and all other appearance categories changed little in subsequent years. Most films containing alcohol appearances, including 90% of those including 'alcohol brand appearances', were rated as suitable for viewing by children and young people. The most frequently shown brands were American beers: Budweiser, Miller and Coors. Alcohol appearances were similarly frequent in films originating from the UK, as from the USA. CONCLUSION: Alcohol imagery is extremely common in all films popular in the UK, irrespective of BBFC age classification. Given the relationship between exposure to alcohol imagery in films and use of alcohol by young people, we suggest that alcohol imagery should be afforded greater consideration in determining the suitability of films for viewing by children and young people.