Psy-LLM: Scaling up Global Mental Health Psychological Services with AI-based Large Language Models

The demand for psychological counseling has grown significantly in recent years, particularly with the global outbreak of COVID-19, which has heightened the need for timely and professional mental health support. Online psychological counseling has emerged as the predominant mode of providing services in response to this demand. In this study, we propose the Psy-LLM framework, an AI-based system leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for question-answering in online psychological consultation. Our framework combines pre-trained LLMs with real-world professional Q&A from psychologists and extensively crawled psychological articles. The Psy-LLM framework serves as a front-end tool for healthcare professionals, allowing them to provide immediate responses and mindfulness activities to alleviate patient stress. Additionally, it functions as a screening tool to identify urgent cases requiring further assistance. We evaluated the framework using intrinsic metrics, such as perplexity, and extrinsic evaluation metrics, with human participant assessments of response helpfulness, fluency, relevance, and logic. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Psy-LLM framework in generating coherent and relevant answers to psychological questions. This article concludes by discussing the potential of large language models to enhance mental health support through AI technologies in online psychological consultation

Landscape factors influencing bird nest site selection in urban green spaces

IntroductionUnderstanding the birds’ breeding strategies in urban habitats is vital for ensuring their continued existence. Therefore, more research must be conducted on bird breeding and urban adaptation strategies in urban green spaces. This study aimed to address this gap by investigating the influence of landscape factors on the selection of bird nest sites. MethodsData on the presence and absence of magpie (Pica pica) and gray magpie (Cyanopica cyana) nests were collected through field surveys conducted in the campus of Nanjing Forestry University during the 2023 breeding season. Generalized additive models (GAMs) incorporating landscape variables were employed to assess the effects of these predictors on nest occurrence. The model with the lowest Akaike’s information criterion value was selected among the candidate GAMs.ResultsBelow is a summary of the main results. Nest tree height (TH), distance from the central lawn (D), and tree coverage (TC) within the sampled area were identified as the primary landscape factors influencing nest site choice. Conversely, factors such as the shortest distance to the water source, herb coverage, shrub coverage, percentage of buildings, and percentage of hard pavement did not significantly impact on nest site selection. Furthermore, the nesting potential of magpies and grey magpies initially increased with tree height, reaching a maximum at ca. TH=25 meters after which it began to decline. The nesting occurrence rate showed an initial decrease tendency with increasing distance from the central lawn, reaching a minimum at D=400 meters, and then increased with further distance. Additionally, nesting potential decreased initially with increasing of TC in the range of 0–20%, fluctuated evenly between 20–60% TC, and decreased rapidly when TC exceeded 60%.DiscussionThis study provides valuable insights into the selection of nest sites by birds in urban habitats, specifically with respect to landscape factors. The understanding of the impact of urban green spaces on urban birds and the underlying mechanisms of their behavior contributes to the conservation of wild birds and promotes the harmonious development of urban areas

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Comparing the vascular thromboembolic events following arteriovenous fistula in Chinese population with end-stage renal diseases receiving Clopidogrel versus Beraprost sodium therapy: a retrospective cohort study

Abstract Background To assess the time to first on-study vascular thromboembolic events (VTEs) of clopidogrel (CL) or beraprost sodium (BPS) in Chinese population with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) treated with arteriovenous fistula (AVF) surgery. Methods From Jan 2009 to May 2015, 346 ESRD cases suffering an AVF surgery and undergoing oral administration of 75 mg CL (initial dose of 300 mg), 1 time/day, for 4 weeks or 40 μg BPS, 3 times/day, for 4 weeks were retrospectively assessed. The primary outcome was time to first on-study VTE. Results In total, 222 ESRD cases (CL, n = 112; BPS, n = 110) were assessed, with a median follow-up time of 38.1 months (range, 37–40 months). The mean time to first on-study VTE was 1.2 weeks (0.5–2.3) and 1.8 weeks (1.2–3.8) for CL and BPS, respectively (HR 0.27, 95% CI 0.16–1.45; P = 0.00). An increased incidence of VTEs was found during the 1th-month follow-up, with rates of 14.2 and 5.5% for CL and BPS, respectively (P = 0.03). The difference persisted over time, with rates of 24.1 and 11.8% at final follow-up, respectively (P = 0.02). Conclusion CL with an increased risk of VTEs tended to have a VTE within the 1st month after cessation compared with BPS