Behavioral and eye movement study of attention bias to alcohol-related cues in male alcohol-dependent patients and correlation analysis of psychological factors

Objective·To investigate if male alcohol-dependent patients have attention bias to alcohol-related pictures, show the behavioral and eye movement characteristics of attention bias, and explore the correlation between attention bias and sleep, anxiety, depression, impulsion and other psychological factors.Methods·Twenty-nine subjects in the case group (alcohol-dependent patients who were hospitalized in Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, from August 2021 to February 2022) and 29 healthy subjects in the healthy control group participated in the study. The experimental design was a mixed experimental design of three-factor hybrid. The cue types were alcohol-related and emotion pictures. The probe was on the same side or on the opposite side of the alcohol or emotional picture. The characteristics of subjects' attentional bias to alcohol cues were investigated by using the classical dot detection paradigm and eye movement monitoring technique. Groups were inter-group variables, and clue types and relative locations of probe points were intra-group variables. The behavioral and eye movement data were collected while the study subjects viewed pairs of alcohol-related and neutral pictures, or pairs of emotional and neutral pictures in a dot-probe paradigm. Dependent variables included behavioral indicators and eye movement indicators. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), 7-tiem Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), Patien Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), and Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) scales were used to assess psychosomatic conditions such as sleep, anxiety, depression, and impulsivity, respectively. Behavioral and eye movement characteristics of attention bias in the alcohol-dependent group were analyzed. In addition, the correlation with behavioral and eye movement characteristics of attention bias and scale scores was analyzed.Results·The behavioral results showed that the reaction time of the alcohol-dependent group was significantly longer than that of the healthy control group (P=0.006). The eye movement results showed that when the type of cue was alcohol-related picture, the alcohol-dependent group had slower attention detection (P=0.031) and longer attention maintenance (P=0.005) on alcohol-related cues. Moreover, the pupil size during the viewing of alcohol-related cues (P=0.001) and emotional cues (P=0.008) were significantly smaller than those of the healthy control group. It was also found that, there was a negative correlation between the correct rate of the alcohol-dependent group and the BIS-11 scale score (r=-0.437, P=0.032), and a positive correlation between reaction time and GAD-7 score (r=0.407, P=0.033). The time of the first visual fixation entry was positively correlated with GAD-7 score (r=0.414, P=0.045), and the PSQI score was positively correlated with PHQ-9 score (r=0.422, P=0.041) in the case group.Conclusion·Alcohol-dependent patients have attention bias towards alcohol-related cues according to the behavioral and eye movement result. Compared with the traditional behavioral regression of attention bias based on correct rate and reaction time results, eye movement provides more direct and multi indicator evidence for the evaluation of attention bias in alcohol-dependent patients

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for an arbitrary number of parallel two-stage flow-shops

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. We investigate the approximability of the m parallel two-stage flow-shop (mP2FS) problem, where a set of jobs is scheduled on the multiple identical two-stage flow-shops to minimize the makespan, i.e., the finishing time of the last job. Each job needs to be processed non-preemptively on one flow-shop without switching to the other flow-shops. This problem is a hybrid of the classic parallel machine scheduling and two-stage flow-shop scheduling problems. Its strong NP-hardness follows from the parallel machine scheduling problem when the number of machines is part of the input. Our main contribution is a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the mP2FS problem when the number of shops is part of the input, which improves the previous best approximation algorithm of a ratio (2+ϵ). Owing to the strong NP-hardness, our PTAS achieves the best possible approximation ratio

Knowledge and prevalence of energy drinks consumption in Shanghai, China: a cross-sectional survey of adolescents

Background In recent years, energy drinks (EDs) have been widely used among young people around the world. The extensive use of EDs also affects the sleep and exercise of adolescents.Aims This study aimed to investigate the consumption of EDs, the knowledge, attitude towards EDs and associated factors of EDs consumption among adolescents in Shanghai, China.Methods A total of 4608 adolescents completed a self-administered questionnaire assessing EDs use history, knowledge and attitude towards EDs. Adolescent Self-rating Life Events Checklist (ASLEC) was used to assess their life events. All participants were divided into two groups based on whether they used them or not. t-test and χ2 test were used to compare the differences between the two groups, and binary logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the related factors for EDs consumption.Results 70.5% of the participants reported having ever used EDs. The main avenues to getting information on EDs were from advertisements. 67.56% of them believed that EDs had adverse effects on health. 22.09% of the participants and 31.55% of their parents took a negative attitude towards EDs. Compared with the non-consumption group, participants in the consumption group were likely to be male, with older age, identified EDs more correctly and did not believe EDs had adverse effects, with more positive attitude and higher ASLEC score. Logistic regression results showed that gender, age, attitude of parents and themselves, knowledge of EDs and ASLEC score significantly predicted EDs consumption.Conclusion EDs consumption was popular among adolescents in Shanghai, and the tailored intervention programmes need to be developed based on the characteristics of adolescents

Underwater Holothurian Target-Detection Algorithm Based on Improved CenterNet and Scene Feature Fusion

Aiming at the common problems, such as noise pollution, low contrast, and color distortion in underwater images, and the characteristics of holothurian recognition, such as morphological ambiguity, high similarity with the background, and coexistence of special ecological scenes, this paper proposes an underwater holothurian target-detection algorithm (FA-CenterNet), based on improved CenterNet and scene feature fusion. First, to reduce the model’s occupancy of embedded device resources, we use EfficientNet-B3 as the backbone network to reduce the model’s Params and FLOPs. At the same time, EfficientNet-B3 increases the depth and width of the model, which improves the accuracy of the model. Then, we design an effective FPT (feature pyramid transformer) combination module to fully focus and mine the information on holothurian ecological scenarios of different scales and spaces (e.g., holothurian spines, reefs, and waterweeds are often present in the same scenario as holothurians). The co-existing scene information can be used as auxiliary features to detect holothurians, which can improve the detection ability of fuzzy and small-sized holothurians. Finally, we add the AFF module to realize the deep fusion of the shallow-detail and high-level semantic features of holothurians. The results show that the method presented in this paper yields better results on the 2020 CURPC underwater target-detection image dataset with an AP50 of 83.43%, Params of 15.90 M, and FLOPs of 25.12 G compared to other methods. In the underwater holothurian-detection task, this method improves the accuracy of detecting holothurians with fuzzy features, a small size, and dense scene. It also achieves a good balance between detection accuracy, Params, and FLOPs, and is suitable for underwater holothurian detection in most situations