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Seizure Jan 2024A clinical decision tool for Transient Loss of Consciousness (TLOC) could reduce currently high misdiagnosis rates and waiting times for specialist assessments. Most...
OBJECTIVE
A clinical decision tool for Transient Loss of Consciousness (TLOC) could reduce currently high misdiagnosis rates and waiting times for specialist assessments. Most clinical decision tools based on patient-reported symptom inventories only distinguish between two of the three most common causes of TLOC (epilepsy, functional /dissociative seizures, and syncope) or struggle with the particularly challenging differentiation between epilepsy and FDS. Based on previous research describing differences in spoken accounts of epileptic seizures and FDS seizures, this study explored the feasibility of predicting the cause of TLOC by combining the automated analysis of patient-reported symptoms and spoken TLOC descriptions.
METHOD
Participants completed an online web application that consisted of a 34-item medical history and symptom questionnaire (iPEP) and spoken interaction with a virtual agent (VA) that asked eight questions about the most recent experience of TLOC. Support Vector Machines (SVM) were trained using different combinations of features and nested leave-one-out cross validation. The iPEP provided a baseline performance. Inspired by previous qualitative research three spoken language based feature sets were designed to assess: (1) formulation effort, (2) the proportion of words from different semantic categories, and (3) verb, adverb, and adjective usage.
RESULTS
76 participants completed the application (Epilepsy = 24, FDS = 36, syncope = 16). Only 61 participants also completed the VA interaction (Epilepsy = 20, FDS = 29, syncope = 12). The iPEP model accurately predicted 65.8 % of all diagnoses, but the inclusion of the language features increased the accuracy to 85.5 % by improving the differential diagnosis between epilepsy and FDS.
CONCLUSION
These findings suggest that an automated analysis of TLOC descriptions collected using an online web application and VA could improve the accuracy of current clinical decisions tools for TLOC and facilitate clinical stratification processes (such as ensuring appropriate referral to cardiological versus neurological investigation and management pathways).
Topics: Humans; Seizures; Syncope; Unconsciousness; Epilepsy; Surveys and Questionnaires; Diagnosis, Differential
PubMed: 38091849
DOI: 10.1016/j.seizure.2023.11.022 -
European Journal of Ageing Aug 2023
Correction: The role of semantic assessment in the differential diagnosis between late‑life depression and Alzheimer's disease or amnestic mild cognitive impairment: systematic review and meta‑analysis.
PubMed: 37612530
DOI: 10.1007/s10433-023-00783-w -
Cognitive Processing Aug 2023This study aimed to examine whether Japanese participants condition spoken words' meanings to written pseudowords. In Survey 1, we selected spoken words associated with...
This study aimed to examine whether Japanese participants condition spoken words' meanings to written pseudowords. In Survey 1, we selected spoken words associated with negative (α = .91) and positive (α = .79) features for Experiment 1 and passive (α = .90) and active (α = .80) features for Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated four written pseudowords' emotional valence using a 7-point semantic differential scale (1: negative; 7: positive) before and after conditioning spoken words with negative, neutral, or positive features to each pseudoword. In the conditioning phase, participants read each pseudoword, listened to a spoken word, and verbally repeated each spoken word. The results showed that a pseudoword was conditioned to spoken words with positive and negative features. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated four pseudowords' activeness using a 7-point semantic differential scale (1: passive; 7: active) before and after conditioning spoken words of passive, neutral, and active features to each written pseudoword. In the conditioning phase, the participants read each written pseudoword, listened to a spoken word, and repeated the spoken word. The results showed that the activeness evaluations were more increased for pseudowords conditioned to spoken words of active and neutral features after conditioning than before conditioning but were unchanged for a pseudoword conditioned to those with passive features before and after conditioning. Additonally, Survey 2's results showed that although the positiveness and activeness responses of the words used in Experiments 1 and 2 were controlled well, the lack of significant differences among positiveness responses of words may influence the evaluative conditioning in Experiment 2. That is, when participants condition passive (low arousal) words' activeness (arousal) ratings to those of pseudowords, words' positiveness (valence) ratings would be important in the evaluative conditioning. Our findings suggest that participants can condition spoken word meanings of preference and activeness to those of written pseudowords. It also indicates that linguistically evaluative conditioning's effects are robust in a non-alphabetic language.
Topics: Humans; Auditory Perception; East Asian People; Emotions; Language; Reading; Writing; Speech; Language Arts
PubMed: 37450232
DOI: 10.1007/s10339-023-01138-0 -
International Journal of Environmental... Jul 2023The purpose of this study was to evaluate the physiological effects of visual stimulation by a unique Japanese low wooden table on the prefrontal cortex and autonomic...
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the physiological effects of visual stimulation by a unique Japanese low wooden table on the prefrontal cortex and autonomic nervous activities. A within-participants experiment with 26 male university students was conducted in a Japanese-style room. The visual stimuli were a low wooden table (WT) made of Japanese cypress and a low cloth-covered table (control) for an exposure time of 90 s. Near-infrared spectroscopy was used to measure the prefrontal cortex activity in the left and right prefrontal cortices as an indicator of oxyhemoglobin (oxy-Hb) concentration. Autonomic nervous activity was measured as an indicator of sympathetic (low-frequency/high-frequency component ratio, LF/HF), and parasympathetic (high-frequency components, HF) nervous activities were assessed by heart rate variability. Furthermore, the modified semantic differential method and the Profile of Mood States 2nd edition were used to measure psychological responses. Physiologically, the oxy-Hb concentration in the left prefrontal cortex and ln (LF/HF) were significantly lower during visual exposure to the WT than to the control. Psychologically, more comfortable, relaxed, and natural impressions, as well as improved mood states, were reported during visual stimulation to the WT than to the control. This study demonstrated that viewing a WT led to physiological relaxation and had a positive psychological effect on the participants.
Topics: Humans; Male; Photic Stimulation; Prefrontal Cortex; Heart Rate; Relaxation; Oxyhemoglobins
PubMed: 37510583
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph20146351 -
Scientific Reports Apr 2024This study aimed to investigate the effects of reproducing an ultrasonic sound above 20 kHz on the subjective impressions of water sounds using psychological and...
This study aimed to investigate the effects of reproducing an ultrasonic sound above 20 kHz on the subjective impressions of water sounds using psychological and physiological information obtained by the semantic differential method and electroencephalography (EEG), respectively. The results indicated that the ultrasonic component affected the subjective impression of the water sounds. In addition, regarding the relationship between psychological and physiological aspects, a moderate correlation was confirmed between the EEG change rate and subjective impressions. However, no differences in characteristics were found between with and without the ultrasound component, suggesting that ultrasound does not directly affect the relationship between subjective impressions and EEG energy at the current stage. Furthermore, the correlations calculated for the left and right channels in the occipital region differed significantly, which suggests functional asymmetry for sound perception between the right and left hemispheres.
Topics: Sound; Hearing; Electroencephalography; Auditory Perception; Acoustic Stimulation
PubMed: 38561365
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-57749-w -
Cellular and Molecular Biology... Nov 2023Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) is the most serious and costly chronic complication that may lead to disability and even death in patients suffering from diabetes mellitus...
Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) is the most serious and costly chronic complication that may lead to disability and even death in patients suffering from diabetes mellitus (DM). However, the clinical diagnosis and prognosis of DFU is inadequate. There is still a lack of effective biomarkers for its early diagnosis. We obtained the circRNA expression dataset GSE114248 and mRNA expression dataset GSE80178 from the GEO. R software was used to identify the differentially expressed circRNAs (DECs). The mRNAs associated with DFU were identified by a random forest algorithm and intersected with mRNAs predicted by circRNAs. Then, the circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network was established and the hub genes were screened using GO semantic similarity and were validated by the GSE199939 dataset. Meanwhile, the expression level of the biomarkers was verified by RT-PCR assays and immunohistochemistry. Finally, GSEA was conducted to determine differential immune cell infiltration and the immunological cells' relationships with hub genes. We identified three hub genes including KIAA1109, ENPP5, and NRP1 that might play an important role in DFU. ROC curve results also showed a good performance of these three genes in the validation dataset. Furthermore, RT-PCR assays and immunohistochemistry confirmed the results above. Immune infiltration analysis indicated that DFU had a significant increase in Neutrophils. Moreover, three hub genes were closely correlated with a variety of inflammatory cells. KIAA1109, ENPP5, and NRP1 are key hub genes of DFU. They might play an important role in the development of DFU and could be potential biomarkers in DFU.
Topics: Humans; Diabetic Foot; RNA, Circular; MicroRNAs; Computational Biology; RNA, Messenger; Diabetes Mellitus
PubMed: 38015522
DOI: 10.14715/cmb/2023.69.11.27 -
Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) Jul 2023The segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) organs is crucial in radiation therapy for treating GI cancer. It allows for developing a targeted radiation therapy plan while...
The segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) organs is crucial in radiation therapy for treating GI cancer. It allows for developing a targeted radiation therapy plan while minimizing radiation exposure to healthy tissue, improving treatment success, and decreasing side effects. Medical diagnostics in GI tract organ segmentation is essential for accurate disease detection, precise differential diagnosis, optimal treatment planning, and efficient disease monitoring. This research presents a hybrid encoder-decoder-based model for segmenting healthy organs in the GI tract in biomedical images of cancer patients, which might help radiation oncologists treat cancer more quickly. Here, EfficientNet B0 is used as a bottom-up encoder architecture for downsampling to capture contextual information by extracting meaningful and discriminative features from input images. The performance of the EfficientNet B0 encoder is compared with that of three encoders: ResNet 50, MobileNet V2, and Timm Gernet. The Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is a top-down decoder architecture used for upsampling to recover spatial information. The performance of the FPN decoder was compared with that of three decoders: PAN, Linknet, and MAnet. This paper proposes a segmentation model named as the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), with EfficientNet B0 as the encoder. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid model is analyzed using Adam, Adadelta, SGD, and RMSprop optimizers. Four performance criteria are used to assess the models: the Jaccard and Dice coefficients, model loss, and processing time. The proposed model can achieve Dice coefficient and Jaccard index values of 0.8975 and 0.8832, respectively. The proposed method can assist radiation oncologists in precisely targeting areas hosting cancer cells in the gastrointestinal tract, allowing for more efficient and timely cancer treatment.
PubMed: 37510142
DOI: 10.3390/diagnostics13142399 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Feb 2024Understanding visual narrative sequences, as found in comics, is known to recruit similar cognitive mechanisms to verbal language. As measured by event-related... (Review)
Review
Understanding visual narrative sequences, as found in comics, is known to recruit similar cognitive mechanisms to verbal language. As measured by event-related potentials (ERPs), these manifest as initial negativities (N400, LAN) and subsequent positivities (P600). While these components are thought to index discrete processing stages, they differentially arise across participants for any given stimulus. In language contexts, proficiency modulates brain responses, with smaller N400 effects and larger P600 effects appearing with increasing proficiency. In visual narratives, recent work has also emphasized the role of proficiency in neural response patterns. We thus explored whether individual differences in proficiency modulate neural responses to visual narrative sequencing in similar ways as in language. We combined ERP data from 12 studies examining semantic and/or grammatical processing of visual narrative sequences. Using linear mixed effects modeling, we demonstrate differential effects of visual language proficiency and "age of acquisition" on N400 and P600 responses. Our results align with those reported in language contexts, providing further evidence for the similarity of linguistic and visual narrative processing, and emphasize the role of both proficiency and age of acquisition in visual narrative comprehension.
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Evoked Potentials; Comprehension; Electroencephalography; Individuality; Language; Brain; Semantics
PubMed: 37578688
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02334-x -
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging Sep 2023Despite the tremendous progress made by deep learning models in image semantic segmentation, they typically require large annotated examples, and increasing attention is...
Despite the tremendous progress made by deep learning models in image semantic segmentation, they typically require large annotated examples, and increasing attention is being diverted to problem settings like Few-Shot Learning (FSL) where only a small amount of annotation is needed for generalisation to novel classes. This is especially seen in medical domains where dense pixel-level annotations are expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose Regularized Prototypical Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (R-PNODE), a method that leverages intrinsic properties of Neural-ODEs, assisted and enhanced by additional cluster and consistency losses to perform Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) of organs. R-PNODE constrains support and query features from the same classes to lie closer in the representation space thereby improving the performance over the existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based FSS methods. We further demonstrate that while many existing Deep CNN-based methods tend to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks, R-PNODE exhibits increased adversarial robustness for a wide array of these attacks. We experiment with three publicly available multi-organ segmentation datasets in both in-domain and cross-domain FSS settings to demonstrate the efficacy of our method. In addition, we perform experiments with seven commonly used adversarial attacks in various settings to demonstrate R-PNODE's robustness. R-PNODE outperforms the baselines for FSS by significant margins and also shows superior performance for a wide array of attacks varying in intensity and design.
Topics: Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Neural Networks, Computer; Semantics
PubMed: 37030728
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2023.3258069 -
Journal of Clinical Medicine May 2024: The subject of this article is the reflection on hope-one of the most important predictors and motivators of human actions. Hope is our response to a threat, and it is...
: The subject of this article is the reflection on hope-one of the most important predictors and motivators of human actions. Hope is our response to a threat, and it is also the emotion that allows us to overcome hopelessness and to reduce suffering. Hoping is a human capacity with varying cognitive, emotional, and functional dimensions. Psychological, pedagogical (particularly in the framework of special-needs pedagogy and thanatological pedagogy), and theological reflection on hope can be helpful for dying people. The objective of this study was to characterize hope in the semantic space of individuals in the terminal stage of cancer and to verify whether age is a variable that determines this hope. : To complete the study, the Osgood semantic differential method was applied, as modified by Polish psychologist Dr. Boguslaw Block (the DSN-3 test). The research technique consisted of a therapeutic conversation. : Research results show that, in general, those in the terminal stage have positive associations with hope. In all three aspects of the used test, namely the cognitive, emotional, and functional aspects, the highest scores assigned to the perception of hope were obtained from men up to 35 years of age. Depending on the ages of patients, one could observe certain semantic shifts, but they did not prove to be statistically significant. : Polish males surveyed at the end of life due to cancer generally perceived hope as a supportive force. Therefore, hope can provide emotional support to patients in the terminal stage of cancer and improve their quality of life.
PubMed: 38892872
DOI: 10.3390/jcm13113162