Subjective uncertainty and limbic hyperactivation in obsessive‐compulsive disorder

Obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) is often associated with pathological uncertainty regarding whether an action has been performed correctly or whether a bad outcome will occur, leading to compulsive “evidence gathering” behaviors aimed at reducing uncertainty. The current study used event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural functioning in OCD patients and controls as subjective certainty was rated in response to sequential pieces of evidence for a decision. Uncertainty was experimentally manipulated so that some decisions were associated with no “objective” uncertainty (all observed evidence pointed to one correct choice), whereas other decisions contained calculable but varying levels of objective uncertainty based on displayed probabilities. Results indicated that OCD patients differed from controls on decisions that contained no objective uncertainty, such that patients rated themselves as more uncertain. Patients also showed greater activation in a network of brain regions previously associated with internally‐focused thought and valuation including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, parahippocampus, middle temporal cortex, as well as amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex/ventral anterior insula. In the patient group, a significantly greater number of positive intersubject correlations were found among several of these brain regions, suggesting that this network is more interconnected in patients. OCD patients did not differ from controls on decisions where task parameters led to uncertainty. These results indicate that OCD is associated with hyperactivation in a network of limbic/paralimbic brain regions when making decisions, which may contribute to the greater subjective experience of doubt that characterizes the disorder. Hum Brain Mapp, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99031/1/22038_ftp.pd

Examining hope as a transdiagnostic mechanism of change across anxiety disorders and CBT treatment protocols.

Hope is a trait that represents the capacity to identify strategies or pathways to achieve goals and the motivation or agency to effectively pursue those pathways. Hope has been demonstrated to be a robust source of resilience to anxiety and stress and there is limited evidence that, as has been suggested for decades, hope may function as a core process or transdiagnostic mechanism of change in psychotherapy. The current study examined the role of hope in predicting recovery in a clinical trial in which 223 individuals with 1 of 4 anxiety disorders were randomized to transdiagnostic cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), disorder-specific CBT, or a waitlist controlled condition. Effect size results indicated moderate to large intraindividual increases in hope, that changes in hope were consistent across the five CBT treatment protocols, that changes in hope were significantly greater in CBT relative to waitlist, and that changes in hope began early in treatment. Results of growth curve analyses indicated that CBT was a robust predictor of trajectories of change in hope compared to waitlist, and that changes in hope predicted changes in both self-reported and clinician-rated anxiety. Finally, a statistically significant indirect effect was found indicating that the effects of treatment on changes in anxiety were mediated by treatment effects on hope. Together, these results suggest that hope may be a promising transdiagnostic mechanism of change that is relevant across anxiety disorders and treatment protocols.R01 MH090053 - NIMH NIH HHSAccepted manuscrip

Fast degradation of dyes in water using manganese-oxide-coated diatomite for environmental remediation

By a simple wet-chemical procedure using a permanganate in the acidic medium, diatomite coated with amorphous manganese oxide nanoparticles was synthesized. The structural, microstructural and morphological characterizations of the as-synthesized catalysts confirmed the nanostructure of MnO2 and its stabilization on the support - diatomite. The highly efficient and rapid degradation of methylene blue and methyl orange over synthesized MnO2 coated Diatomite has been carried out. The results revealed considerably faster degradation of the dyes against the previously reported data. The proposed mechanism of the dye-degradation is considered to be a combinatorial effect of chemical, physicochemical and physical processes. Therefore, the fabricated catalysts have potential application in waste water treatment, and pollution degradation for environmental remediation

Multi-sensor background subtraction by fusing multiple region-based probabilistic classifiers

In the recent years, the computer vision community has shown great interest on depth-based applications thanks to the performance and flexibility of the new generation of RGB-D imagery. In this paper, we present an efficient background subtraction algorithm based on the fusion of multiple region-based classifiers that processes depth and color data provided by RGB-D cameras. Foreground objects are detected by combining a region-based foreground prediction (based on depth data) with different background models (based on a Mixture of Gaussian algorithm) providing color and depth descriptions of the scene at pixel and region level. The information given by these modules is fused in a mixture of experts fashion to improve the foreground detection accuracy. The main contributions of the paper are the region-based models of both background and foreground, built from the depth and color data. The obtained results using different database sequences demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to a higher detection accuracy with respect to existing state-of-the-art techniques