Depression in the early stages of Pick's disease.

To better understand the nature of the symptoms of depression in the early stages of Pick's disease, we performed a retrospective study of the medical records of eight patients who were originally treated for major depressive disorders before being clinically diagnosed with Pick's disease. Six of the eight manifested psychomotor retardation and social withdrawal, seven of the eight were agitated and five of the eight showed hyperbulia too. However, only two of the eight showed melancholia or physical symptoms such as insomnia or loss of appetite. All patients were treated with antidepressants but these were not effective in relieving the symptoms of depression. The data we gathered in this study will be useful in the future for distinguishing between Pick's disease-related depression (in the early stages of the disease) and major depression.</p

High energy resolution hard X-ray and gamma-ray imagers using CdTe diode devices

We developed CdTe double-sided strip detectors (DSDs or cross strip detectors) and evaluated their spectral and imaging performance for hard X-rays and gamma-rays. Though the double-sided strip configuration is suitable for imagers with a fine position resolution and a large detection area, CdTe diode DSDs with indium (In) anodes have yet to be realized due to the difficulty posed by the segmented In anodes. CdTe diode devices with aluminum (Al) anodes were recently established, followed by a CdTe device in which the Al anodes could be segmented into strips. We developed CdTe double-sided strip devices having Pt cathode strips and Al anode strips, and assembled prototype CdTe DSDs. These prototypes have a strip pitch of 400 micrometer. Signals from the strips are processed with analog ASICs (application specific integrated circuits). We have successfully performed gamma-ray imaging spectroscopy with a position resolution of 400 micrometer. Energy resolution of 1.8 keV (FWHM: full width at half maximum) was obtained at 59.54 keV. Moreover, the possibility of improved spectral performance by utilizing the energy information of both side strips was demonstrated. We designed and fabricated a new analog ASIC, VA32TA6, for the readout of semiconductor detectors, which is also suitable for DSDs. A new feature of the ASIC is its internal ADC function. We confirmed this function and good noise performance that reaches an equivalent noise charge of 110 e- under the condition of 3-4 pF input capacitance.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Scienc

Wandering and fecal smearing in people with dementia

ABSTRACT Background: Wandering and fecal smearing (scatolia) are among the problematic behaviors in dementia, and many caregivers are troubled by these behaviors. The purpose of this study was to clarify the clinical characteristics of patients with these symptoms

Integrating Preprocessing Operations into Deep Learning Model: Case Study of Posttreatment Visual Acuity Prediction

Designing a deep neural network model that integrates clinical images with other electronic medical records entails various preprocessing operations. Preprocessing of clinical images often requires trimming of parts of the lesions shown in the images, whereas preprocessing of other electronic medical records requires vectorization of these records; for example, patient age is often converted into a categorical vector of 10-year intervals. Although these preprocessing operations are critical to the performance of the classification model, there is no guarantee that the preprocessing step chosen is appropriate for model training. The ability to integrate these preprocessing operations into a deep neural network model and to train the model, including the preprocessing operations, can help design a multi-modal medical classification model. This study proposes integration layers of preprocessing, both for clinical images and electronic medical records, in deep neural network models. Preprocessing of clinical images is realized by a vision transformer layer that selectively adopts the parts of the images requiring attention. The preprocessing of other medical electrical records is performed by adopting full-connection layers and normalizing these layers. These proposed preprocessing-integrated layers were verified using a posttreatment visual acuity prediction task in ophthalmology as a case study. This prediction task requires clinical images as well as patient profile data corresponding to each patient's posttreatment logMAR visual acuity. The performance of a heuristically designed prediction model was compared with the performance of the prediction model that includes the proposed preprocessing integration layers. The mean square errors between predicted and correct results were 0.051 for the heuristic model and 0.054 for the proposed model. Experimental results showed that the proposed model utilizing preprocessing integration layers achieved nearly the same performance as the heuristically designed model

In Orbit Timing Calibration of the Hard X-Ray Detector on Board Suzaku

The hard X-ray detector (HXD) on board the X-ray satellite Suzaku is designed to have a good timing capability with a 61 $\mu$s time resolution. In addition to detailed descriptions of the HXD timing system, results of in-orbit timing calibration and performance of the HXD are summarized. The relative accuracy of time measurements of the HXD event was confirmed to have an accuracy of $1.9\times 10^{-9}$ s s$^{-1}$ per day, and the absolute timing was confirmed to be accurate to 360 $\mu$s or better. The results were achieved mainly through observations of the Crab pulsar, including simultaneous ones with RXTE, INTEGRAL, and Swift.Comment: Accepted for publication on PASJ Vol.60, SP-1, 200